I. "Il pleure dans mon coeur"
"Il pleure dans mon coeur comme il pleut sur la ville." — Paul Verlaine
My mom recited this poem to me in the car on rainy days as we drove to or from school, and it comes to mind when I think of tears. The line means "it cries in my heart as it rains on the town" and plays on the way that 'it's raining' ( il pleut) and 'he/it cries' (il pleure) sound almost alike in French. You wouldn't really say "it cries in my heart," but I translate it that way because in French, the raining and crying are analogous, sound-wise. But the analogy of raindrops to melancholy weather within also works in terms of meaning: rainy days do make us gloomy. It's crying in my heart. "Stormy weather."
Tears and raindrops: compare and contrast. Both are watery. Both fall. Both come and go. Both are associated with sadness (as this opening sequence from one of my favorite movies, Les Parapluies [umbrellas] de Cherbourg (1964), makes so painfully clear). But we also need rain, and when the sun emerges, the outdoors feels miraculous and new. Is there an analogous silver lining to tears?
I think it's a coincidence that "it's raining" and "he or she cries" sound alike in French. There's no obvious etymological connection. Pleuvoir is derived from Latin pluo, pluere: to wash. Rain showers. Pleurer, to cry, is derived from the Latin ploro, plorare: to cry, cry out. Explore also comes from this root, as in "to search out." I imagine someone "calling out" a name, searching for someone. I am searching, too, searching for meaning in tears.
II. Embarrassing, inevitable, and ambiguous
Maybe you have a friend with eyes like a touchy sprinkler who cried during the algebra test every Friday of 8th grade, and during her first lesson with a new violin teacher; who cried when she lied and felt guilty, and when you backed out on plans, and when she felt excluded from the freshman-dorm birthday parties, and when she broke your new A string; who cried at the Japanese restaurant, when jets of flame whooshed up before her like a reverse waterfall, loud and sudden, and your marked distress and, yes, embarrassment at her response to the restaurant's supposed highlight just made it worse.
If yes, then you've known someone like me. I say that I have a low threshold for tears. Sometimes I cry because I am ashamed to be crying.
Tears are embarrassing and, for me, seemingly inevitable. I used to dread the first time a new friend or teacher saw me cry— would they see a flaw in me?— and I had to explain myself. It is possible, the first time, to act as if your tears are a surprise to yourself. "Honey, it's okay," people will say. "We all cry sometimes." But I know that I cry more than sometimes. Plus, once I've cried in front of someone, the dam has broken, and I can be almost sure that it will happen again, so instead of feigning surprise, I tell people: "It's not as bad as it looks. I'm not really that upset. I just cry easily."
As a kid, I used to say that I didn't know why I was crying. Maybe there were times when I really had no idea, but there were others when I just meant that I didn't feel as sad as my tears suggested. I didn't know why a given situation was making me cry, but I did know what the small upset was—the algebra test, the wrong note, the canceled plans, the words "I love you." Sometimes I didn't want to admit the pettiness of the apparent trigger.
On one hand, I feared that my tears lied by exaggerating the gravity of situations. But "I don't know why I'm crying" and "I just cry really easily" weren't quite true either.
I think tears are interesting because they are an arguably involuntary yet also ambiguous form of communication. We cry from grief, joy, shock, embarrassment, jealousy, guilt, disappointment, and onions. As Thomas Dixon wrote in his essay, "The Waterworks," for Aeon, "A tear is a universal sign not in the sense that it has the same meaning in all times and all places. It is a universal sign because it can signify just about anything." Despite their ambiguity, tears are powerful signals. Whether or not you acknowledge another's tears, you can't ignore them.
I imagine that my tears signal that I am upset or worried or sad or in pain. I wonder how people interpret them and worry that they misinterpret. But more than that, I wonder what my tears mean to me, how I should read them. And why in the world does chopping an onion produce a similar signal to emotional distress or pain?
III. Why humans weep
To understand what tears mean, it might be useful to know what they are made of and what biological functions they serve. To investigate these questions, I turned to Why Only Humans Weep (Oxford University Press, 2013), a review of the scientific literature on emotional tears by psychologist and tear researcher Ad Vingerhoets of the Netherlands' Tilburg University.
There are three types of tears, distinguished by the circumstances that produce them and, one researcher has suggested, by their biochemical composition. The lacrimal glands, at the eyes' top outside corners, constantly produce what are called basal tears, which spread across our eyes like windshield-wiper fluid when we blink and then drain into mucous membranes of the nose and throat via channels at the eyes' inside corners. Basal tears moisten the eyes and also contain an antibacterial substance, lysozyme, that wards off infection. We don't notice these tears because they drain off. But when something like dust or onion fumes irritates the eye, the lacrimal glands produce more tears, so many that they flood the drainage routes and spill down the cheeks. These are called reflex tears or irritant-induced tears. A similar overflow occurs in response to strong emotions.
Another way of asking what function tears serve is to ask how they evolved. Humans are the only animals that shed emotional tears. Sure, other animals produce basal and reflex tears, but we are the only creatures that cry from feeling. Charles Darwin concluded that tears were useless, an exception to his idea that traits that weren't adaptive would disappear. Today nobody really knows if and how tears benefit humans, but there are many theories.
Crying aloud is the first thing a baby does upon entering the world. An infant's cries (along with laughter, perhaps) are his or her only way to communicate vocally until language develops. Evolutionary biologists suggest that the baby's cry is analogous to the separation calls of other animals, calls a young one makes specifically when the mother leaves that are designed to bring her—and her protection and, with mammals, her milk—back. Compared with newborns of other species, human infants are particularly vulnerable, so they especially need such an alarm. Infants' cries also stimulate the mother to produce milk—the so-called "milk-letdown reflex." So is that why we cry even as adults—because as babies, we wailed for our mothers?
It's certainly not the whole story. As we all know, crying has at least two aspects—tears and vocalizations (moaning, heavy breathing, wailing), and although these two facets of crying usually happen together, they actually emerge at different times during development and may serve different functions. Babies don't start producing emotional tears until they are a few weeks old, whereas they scream from the beginning. If the tears themselves are supposed to protect the vulnerable baby, say as part of the separation call, it would make sense for them to kick in right away. Tears themselves wouldn't work as a separation response, anyway, since the mother wouldn't be able to see them unless she were already nearby. Finally, if crying exists to make sure babies get necessary care, why do we cry as adults?
Vingerhoets has a good way of explaining the different functions of tears and vocal crying as children develop. Infants, who can't move around on their own, need to be able to scream for their parents so that the parents can physically go to them. But vocal crying also risks attracting predators. Once children learn to walk, they can run to their parents, rather than calling for them, a safer move. It's during this period—post-mobility, pre-independence—that tears might come in particularly handy, Vingerhoets told me. "As soon as you're motorically developed, then it makes more sense to replace that vocal crying by a visual signal, which has the major advantage that it does not alert possible predators and others and you can direct it, so to say, to the one that you approach." This theory could also explain why humans weep while other species, which have relatively shorter childhoods, do not, Vingerhoets said.
At first I was skeptical of tears as a visual cue; I didn't see tears—a watery substance running down the face—as a big deal. But research suggests that tears are a key part of the emotional expression of a crying person. In one experiment, researchers took photos of people crying and digitally removed the tears, then asked study participants to identify the emotions expressed in both sets of photos. While people could instantly tell that the crying subjects were sad, they identified the tearless faces as being in awe or confused.
I was also doubtful about the idea that people need tears to communicate, given that we have language. Yet I often cry about things I don't want to talk about—embarrassment, shame, frustration, uncertainty about how others feel toward me. Tears are a way of expressing negative feelings without articulating them.
Why not articulate such feelings? Perhaps to avoid provoking confrontation? Crying in the bathroom could be an alternative to making a public fuss about something that you aren't sure deserves it.
Perhaps tears could also soften a conflict when it happens. One idea about the function of tears, which Vingerhoets attributes to Israeli evolutionary biologist Oren Hasson, is that by rendering the crier vulnerable, they serve as a kind of white flag and reduce aggression in potential predators or foes. When I was a kid, I could not apologize for or confess anything to an adult without crying, and I wonder if the tears were part of an instinct to forestall negative reactions from the parent or teacher to whom I was admitting that I had touched the baby birds in the nest or had not brought my math homework. It's also hard for me to admit being upset with someone without crying; again, the kind of admission that could lead to conflict. I like to think of those tears as stemming from guilt or strong emotion, but maybe they are also manipulative.
Crying can be a social behavior, a way of communicating something—though exactly what varies widely. But people also cry alone, where this communicative function would be lost.
Read more here.
Tears could also be a way of removing noxious substances from our bodies, when our emotional life creates them to excess, and we need to overspill. Most people experience relief after shedding tears. Those that cannot cry tend to build up toxicity in their bodies and even become seriously ill.
I think Charles Darwin might have had something to say on this subject (in his notes).