Co-authored by Galit Romanelli

I only remember it once.

I was in middle school in Skokie, Illinois. My dad was talking about his work. He was talking about the immigration of the Ethiopian Jews to Israel, something he was so passionate about that, mid-sentence, he started crying. I remember being so embarrassed. I didn’t know what to do with it. That was the only time I remember seeing my father cry.

Years later, I asked him about it. He told me there was another time, when I was a kid, that I had come into the kitchen and seen him crying. He was thinking about his mother. I had asked him what was happening. I don’t remember that moment at all. I guess I didn’t recognize what that moment actually was.

He told me he had never really seen his own father cry, my grandfather. He thinks he heard him once, from another room, after his grandmother died.

Three generations of men. Almost no tears.

In the clinic, one of the questions I ask every man is the same question.

Did you ever see your father cry?

I ask it because most men were socialized not to cry. Crying is weak, or “for girls.” Instead we are commended when we are strong and brave. This is what Terry Real called the psychological patriarchy. And the tax we pay for that socialization is that we never see a model. We grow up watching a man feel a narrow band of life and call it normal.

Imagine emotions on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being despair and 10 being ecstasy. Most men live as 4 to 6’ers. Quick to anger. Slow to joy. Almost never vulnerable. We don’t see our fathers feel the full range, so we don’t feel the full range. We replicate what we saw.

Out of all the men I ask, maybe 10 percent say they saw their father cry. And the ones who did can count the times on one hand.

Then I ask the second question:

Have your children ever seen you cry?

Again, rarely. Maybe 20 percent.

So I ask the men sitting in front of me: How do you expect your kids to feel the full range if they’ve never seen you do it?

This is not just about your father. It’s not even just about you. It’s about the script you’re passing down. Your kids are watching. They’re learning what a man is allowed to feel. Whatever you don’t show them, they will learn not to feel.

A lot of what we see in men, the violence, the cynicism, the numbness, the slow drift of covert male depression, comes from a single root. We are not feeling the full range. The truth is that we are feeling creatures that think. When the feeling shuts down, only the thinking is left, and the thinking on its own goes cold.

A wide emotional range is my definition of being alive. It is emotional health.

Crying is not weakness. Crying is a release. It is E-motion: energy in motion. Block it, and it doesn’t disappear. It leaks. It comes out as aggression, control, addiction, or the slow shutdown of different motions. Either you act it out, or you numb it down. Those are the two exits from a man who can’t cry. Neither is living.

So here is the third question:

Do you want to feel more?

Because that’s the real choice. If you want to feel more joy, you will have to feel more pain. That’s the deal. There are no gains without losses. You don’t get to pick the happy half of the emotional range and skip the rest. You either widen the whole thing or you don’t widen any of it.

I cry a lot now. I let myself. The truth is, when I let myself feel the full range, I am often alone in it. My son sometimes looks at me like I am being ridiculous, or not manly. I take the hit on my ego. I take the hit on his respect for me in the moment. Because I know that in the long run, this is what will give him permission to feel more. This is my relational inheritance to him. So he can have a wider emotional range. So he can feel free, together.

When I cry in front of my kids, I make a point of telling them what kind of tears these are. Tears of joy. Tears of sadness. Tears of frustration. I want them to have emotional literacy. I want them to know that crying is not bad, that there are different kinds, that the body has its own language. When I see my son let himself cry, I cherish it. I know what it cost three generations of men in my family to get him there.

Three generations of men in my family, and almost no tears. I’m trying to break that chain.

My dream is that men would talk about this more. Not in the clinic. With each other.

So your turn. The next time you sit with your father, your friend, your brother, your son, ask them. Did you ever see your father cry? See what opens up. See what comes out from the rooms we have all been listening from.

That is how a chain breaks.

Galit Romanelli is a relationship coach, Ph.D. candidate in gender studies, and co-director of The Potential State.