Dear Carolyn: My husband’s lifelong best friend died two weeks ago. My husband has been acting like everything is okay, and at the funeral he was the one comforting everyone else, but I could tell he was hurting and encouraged him to talk to me or look into grief counseling. He assured me he’s fine.
Well, yesterday I came home and found him sobbing uncontrollably. I held him until he stopped crying, but as soon as he stopped, he again insisted he’s okay and doesn’t need to talk to anyone.
I know he was raised not to show emotions — I have actually heard my father-in-law say the words “Real men don’t cry” — but I don’t think it’s healthy for him to just bottle things up. What do you think I can do for my husband?
— Hurting
Hurting: How terribly sad, I’m sorry.
Keep doing what you’re doing: Be watchful, and hold him when he cries. His doing that obviously is the opposite of bottling things up. It’s okay not to press the counseling issue.
Also, teaching kids to be ashamed of their feelings is hideous — real men don’t teach boys that real men don’t cry — but that doesn’t automatically mean it’s bad not to show emotion. The ideal isn’t for all of us to experience love and loss the same way — it’s to be given room to experience them in our own ways. I imagine it helped him a lot to be the one consoling others.
So, again, keep a close eye for signs of danger or distress, but otherwise give him room to sort this out the way he feels is right.
Many thoughts on this from readers:
•My husband actually thought I’d never cried when my father died. I just hadn’t cried in front of him. I prefer to bawl my eyes out privately. This husband may be the same.
•I am the one who comforts everyone else publicly and then mourns privately. It doesn’t mean I don’t deal with my own grief, I just prefer to control my emotions until I get to a place where I can actually grieve the way that I want. The worst thing you could do is try to get me to grieve the way that you want.
•Mourning can be a very long and nonlinear path. I’m in a grief support group, and the shortest gap between a loss and joining the group is six months. It may be months before your husband is receptive to any sort of therapy.
•Growing up, my father and sister took joy in making me cry on command. That’s how I learned to keep feelings inside. (I’m a woman.) My husband hates that I don’t openly cry or show emotion or talk about my feelings. I deal with grief in my own way, and I hate being dictated to about how I “should” be acting. The irony in opposing “real men don’t cry” is that not crying is never acceptable.
•Like it or not, Hurting, you are “managing” him and inserting yourself into his grief, because YOU decided how he ought to be handling it. Leave him be.
Thanks, everybody.
Write to Carolyn Hax at tellme@washpost.com. Get her column delivered to your inbox each morning at wapo.st/haxpost.
