Man Considers Breaking Up With His Fiancée After She Told One Of Her Friends She 'Got The Ick' When He Cried
Was her sharing with her friend understandable or a betrayal?
Just Life | Shutterstock Showing emotional vulnerability is challenging. It's often even more difficult for men, who have been told by society to keep their feelings bottled up and that crying is a sign of weakness.
During an overwhelming period, one man on Reddit let himself cry in front of his fiancée but later came to regret it.
The man is considering breaking up with his fiancée because she told her friends she 'got the ick' about him crying.
“For some backstory, I was going through a stressful time last year with work and I was feeling overwhelmed,” he wrote in his since-deleted Reddit post. “Looking back, I think I was just overreacting, but during that phase, I just don’t know what was happening to me mentally.”
“One night, I just started crying randomly for no reason," he continued. "My fiancée was surprised but she comforted me, and she asked me what it was about, and I told her it was life in general.”
After that, things started to look up — he got a promotion at his job, and everything seemed okay. However, he recently discovered what he considered to be disturbing information about his fiancée.
“I heard something last week which genuinely hurt me,” he stated. “My fiancée’s best friend, Ellie, also got recently engaged. Ellie is also very close friends with my sister, but my sister and my fiancée aren’t really friends or buddies."
"Last week, my sister called me and told me something she’d heard from Ellie, which she wanted to share with me," he continued. “What happened was that Ellie and my fiancée were talking about green flags and what they love about their fiancés and what they could potentially be better at, and my fiancée had joked about my crying last year and that she found that [an] ick."
“Ellie found that very funny and then shared it with my sister,” he added. “My sister told me she didn’t think it was funny at all but just carried on with the conversation and pretended everything was normal, but she wanted to share this with me.”
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Hurt and confused, the man confronted his fiancée, who seemed "a bit nervous" but claimed that it was a joke that she didn't mean.
“I told her I needed some space, and my fiancée started crying and told me she was just joking about it and that she loved that I was comfortable expressing my emotions to her,” he recounted.
Now, the man doesn’t know what to believe and is considering ending the relationship over her callous comments.
While society has come a long way with some gender stereotypes, men are still discouraged from crying and demonstrating vulnerability.
The modernization of society has worked to dispel some gender stereotypes. However, men are still expected and taught to hide their true emotions and act tough.
In reality, according to Psych Central, crying is important and healthy for everyone — men included.
The act of crying releases the “stress hormone,” cortisol, from your body. Additionally, “Crying activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which puts you in a ‘rest and digest’ mode, helping your body relax after a time of stress.”
On the other hand, not crying can turn into a “repressive coping style,” they said, which can lead to serious health conditions.
Crying is important for anyone’s health, regardless of their gender or personal circumstances. The fact that this man felt comfortable doing so in front of his fiancée says a lot about how much he trusted her. It's understandable that he found her comments about his tears to be a betrayal of that trust.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer for YourTango who covers entertainment, news, and human interest topics.