Caroline O'Donoghue: the six types of crying, ranked best to worst
"Everyone wants to be four years-old, sometimes."
“I’ve seen you cry so many times,” a friend tells me. “And never over anything that matters.”
It’s true. I love to cry. It’s my most expensive habit, given that it makes my contact lenses itch, which usually leads me to taking them out and throwing them away.
Crying, by that metric, costs me about £1 a go. This makes me somewhat of a connoisseur of crying, so please allow me to take you through the main types.
When I was in primary school, my entire year group was obsessed with crying together.
Every year on the last day of the term, we would vote on what film we wanted to watch. The vote, like many forms of democracy, was inherently flawed in that it was a two-party system:
You could vote for A Little Princess, or you could vote for Stepmom. The former is about a little girl who loses her fortune and has to be a slave at her former boarding school; the latter is about Susan Sarandon dying of terminal cancer and leaving her children to be cared for by Julia Roberts. The point of these movies is that we cried at them. We looked forward to the group cry and we would make predictions on who would cry the most.
This, I think, says a lot about very young girls and their penchant for drama, as well as their deep longing for adult feelings and adult consequences.
This strange bi-annual crying ceremony is what laid the ground-work for my most frequent cry: the culture cry. 90% of the time I am crying because I am explaining the plot of a film or repeating a line of dialogue on a TV show. I get overwhelmed by how good something is, and I just can’t help myself.
My eyes start shining and my lip starts to tremble because I truly believe that Homer Simpson is just trying his best. In the middle of writing this column, I stopped to cry at the trailer to the film ‘Herself’, which I recommend you do also, if you like a culture cry.
Last week I fell off my bicycle.
It wasn’t a bad fall, but I did cut my chin and graze my knee. I hobbled home, feeling a bit sore and silly but otherwise fine, and then walked into my flat where my boyfriend was working. “What happened to you?” he exclaimed, jumping up at the sight of blood.
He wrapped his arms around me and I started to cry. “I’ve been so brave!” I suddenly said, between sobs.
This cry actually has little to do with physical pain and more to do with the intense gratification of being briefly treated like a small child.
Everyone wants to be four years-old, sometimes. Life is tough and tiring, and sometimes I feel like I would trade everything I have in the world to have my dad lift me from the car as I sleep, carrying me safely into the warmth of the house while my head bobs on his shoulder.
One of the biggest fights in my household is when Gavin tries to make me go behind the TV.
You know – behind the TV. Sometimes a SCART lead needs changing and I have to tilt the TV and fondle madly at the horrible black abyss of this domestic deadzone, probably plugging out three other vital things in the process.
My face will probably start to itch and the TV will be too heavy to move, and suddenly I will grow incredibly overwhelmed and start yelling at Gavin about this terrible cruelty he has inflicted on me.
“Why do you have to be such an asshole?” I will sob, again. “Why do you have to make me go behind the TV?”
The ‘frustration at physical objects’ cry is what happens when an object is too big and I am too small, yet the object needs moving. This is a bad cry. I don’t enjoy this cry.
This cry is a spiritual extension of ‘why is the TV so big’ cry, except instead of the bigness of the TV, it’s a cry about some external, global problem that is both invisible to you yet ever-present in your imagination.
An old man misplacing a glove! Theatres, everywhere, with no plays in them! The sheer number of elderly dogs in the world, some of whom will be re-homed, but many of whom will just die at the dog pound with no one loving them!!!!!!!
Someone’s dead.
I don’t need to talk you through this one. This is a grim one.
Grief crying is the MSG of crying, in that you think you’ve had enough, but then you somehow need more, and the more you indulge in it, the more hungry you feel.
A bad cry. I hope you don’t have this one too often.
I hate this one most of all. I would get rid of this one forever, if I could.
There’s nothing worse than trying to calmly, reasonably explain to someone why you’re upset with their behaviour, and then you start crying.
It’s hard to overcome the shame of this one, particularly if it’s happening in a work context. The only comfort here is that when men lose the plot at work, they end up screaming and kicking a bin, and everyone thinkS they’re unhinged.
When women lose the plot at work and suddenly start crying, they think we’re unhinged too, but they still invite us on nights out.
