It’s often when you least expect it that your feelings catch up with you. Scrolling Facebook, I was suddenly haunted by my mother’s smile beaming out at me. Stood next to her was a young boy with blonde curls and blue eyes, uncanny resemblance to the boy I once was. Seeing my sister with my nephew brought back all that I’d lost and everything that had once been. I unravelled. I wept.

Over the next few years it would always surprise me how many tears I still had left for my mother. Grief and sorrow are perhaps the most acceptable circumstances under which a man is allowed to cry. Preferably a single tear down a stoic face. This was anything but. A monsoon of snot and tears and puffy eyes, ugly but impressive in its ferociousness. It wouldn’t be the last time, nor would my mother be the only cause.

I was dismantling the mechanisms used to stifle emotion and discovering an intensity there all along. And so I came to understand the many varied ways a man can cry. To learn what it means to be moved to tears. To recognise beauty so profound it fills all of you until it overflows and must come out. Tears of joy. Tears of compassion. The weight of sadness you’ve been denied this sensation for so long and the joy of feeling it for the first time knowing it will be forever more with you.

I still feel shame crying in front of other people, society’s script often manifest as: “but will she still respect me?” A treacherous association worth understanding. To survive the playground was to reject tenderness, caring, intimacy, the gentle touch — forever more banished to the realm of sex. As a young man this teaches you sexual gratification is the only way to meet your emotional needs, and sex becomes as much a validation of your humanity as it is about orgasm.

And when we mistakenly learn sex is a prize, one the weak will never win, and feeling pain makes us feel weak, a perfect storm of cognitive dissonance brews. Sex is a deeply personal and intimate experience. There are a multitude of valid reasons a person may choose to decline a suitor, but often a tortured man will hear instead “you think I don’t deserve my humanity”. In this light, it’s easy to view the person on the other side, most often a woman, as callous, mean, indifferent or uncaring.

This is how an unanswered “hey sexy” moments later turns into “what a bitch”. And in extreme cases, through pain and societies constant message that successful men don’t feel pain, it breeds the toxic entitlement that allows some men to seek sex by force. For if he truly believes all women are cruel, why should they deserve to have their humanity respected when they won’t respect his? He blames others, and sadly society is often eager to agree.

Of course this isn’t really about crying at all. It’s about men learning to be vulnerable, to articulate and shine light on the pain we carry, to integrate and become whole again. To take responsibility and ownership of our own emotional welfare. How much violence and harm could have been spared for ourselves and those around us if only we had the vocabulary to say “I feel scared, small, inadequate, ashamed, alone and unloved”.

It may seem strange to begin tale of personal loss that ends with sexuality at large, but like a butterfly flap and the hurricane they are intertwined. For many years I would have laughed at the suggestion this could apply to me, and indeed you may be laughing at me now. But the dull ache was always there, and it’s words were always the same: “you are not enough, and sex is the answer”.

As I found my own answers, of which my grief is only small example, unexpected gifts began to arrive in my life. By taking ownership of my feelings I found the space to be emotionally present, and my relationships with women, especially friends, blossomed. I can’t imagine life without the added richness and depth it brought. But if all this sounds lame to you, rest assured, the sex got much better too.

My own journey is neither complete nor a manual for how other men should approach theirs. As such I have no idea how we climb this mountain, but it is all ours to climb together. Perhaps the first step we can it take is to ask ourselves: “Does a real man have the courage to know himself, inside and out?”