My wife is one of those, “Men should only cry when their mother dies” types. Her words, not mine. Luckily for her, she married a man who could count on one hand the number of times he cried in his life prior to marriage.
Recently, my wife had an emotional episode [I’ll stop short of calling it crying] in front of me, and was embarrassed the following day. In the 9 years we’ve been married, I’ve only witnessed tears escape her eyes on a few occasions.
I’ve tried to explain to her that every person, no matter how tough on the exterior, has a little Drake waiting inside ready to sing a song. Yeah, she didn’t want hear that. So, I decided to share with her and whomever this reaches, the last three times I can remember allowing my emotional soul to glow. We all do it, and the sooner we can admit it, the sooner we can deal directly with the issues we try to diligently to keep hidden.
When I didn’t know what do about my failing business
I quit my job, put our financial savings on the line, and opened a business. As any entrepreneur’s story goes – it didn’t go as planned. At the time, I was the sole provider of the house, and I knew business ownership wasn’t a sure thing, but I had to give it a shot. We only succeed through our failures, and I had to give myself a chance to fail – so that I may find success one day. I highly underestimated what that failure would actually feel like.
One night while at home alone playing with my 1 year old son in the living room, his smiles and laughs weren’t even good enough to keep my mind off my increasingly dire financial situation. Watching my son innocently laugh at my funny faces and tickling touches, I was overcome with his obliviousness. Based on my choices, his world would be drastically changed in the coming months; and as I was waiting on word of a pending contract, the severity of it all rushed over me. Thankful my wife was out with friends that night, I sobbed so suddenly at the responsibility of holding other’s lives in my choices, that my son stopped smiling immediately. He looked upon me in bewilderment. He couldn’t make sense of these faces and sounds. But he watched. And as I gained composure over myself, he smiled again. I followed suit, and told him everything would be okay, because I was his father – and I would figure it out.
Listening to Kanye West’s “Lost in the World”
You either mess with Kanye, or you don’t. There’s no half-stepping your opinions with him. I’m still a fan of his work today, and he’s one of the few artists out who I get excited to watch and anticipate what he will do next. Hate him or love him, he’s consistently Kanye. And with that comes all the vulnerabilities of labeling oneself as a cultural icon. As self-assured as he is in interviews, he’s equally open and exposed in his music.
For me, honestly digesting his music is like eating raw broccoli – I might not like it going down, but once it’s fully in my system, I feel much better about myself for going through the experience. “Lost in the World” from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy embodies Kanye’s awareness of fault in himself, and simultaneously soars above it. In this track, he doesn’t soar because he’s Kanye, he soars in spite of being Kanye. And let’s be honest, there’s a lot of fault there to get over.
I feel I spend most of my life trying to soar in spite of myself. His music is hauntingly human. The triumph of the song is over it’s own ambitiousness. He’s lost like millions of us. But still willing to boldly step into a night of unknown. It’s a beautiful story, and taking in his position, while comparing my own feeling of inadequacy and hunger to simply face myself drove me to tears one traffic-filled morning commute. What can I say, music moves me.
When I thought our marriage was over
Another car ride. Another emotional outpouring. We were already experiencing more friction than usual in our marriage and had recently put some large life decisions on the table for us. I was under the impression we were on the same page about how the next year would play out in our lives, although it was going to take some serious sacrifice on both our ends to change what we felt was broken in our lives and in our relationship.
When the week finally came that we were going to pull the trigger on our decision, she backed out. Her reasons, while solid, were not good enough for me at the time. I felt it was my biggest fear come to life – backing out of commitments we made as a couple for what I perceived as selfish reasons.
I felt as though I couldn’t trust any future decisions we could make together, and if I couldn’t trust us to execute on our commitments, then how could we ever get from point A to point B as a couple? In that moment, facing the uncertainty of our future, and void of any logical path I could think of to get us back on the right track, to a place of hope for a better tomorrow, I thought we were certainly doomed. Again, driving into the office, I wept for the death of our marriage. That was over 4 years ago. I’m glad I was wrong.
To cry is to be human. I have no shame in sharing my stories of growth. It’s usually through our most emotional and vulnerable moments do we truly learn the limits of our own psyche. I’ve learned a lot about myself through the years, and I hope my wife and I both learn to lean into one another during our most exposed and raw times. Because that’s marriage, and there’s no shame in that.
BMWK, do you allow yourself to cry in front of your spouse?
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