The Crying Game

I never cry. Or, perhaps I should say, I never cried.

For years, the only things that would prompt tears were sentimental movies and sports injuries, like the time I endo-ed off my mountain bike and tumbled down the side of a pretty steep hill with my feet still locked in the pedals. I didn't break anything, but I turned a spectacular shade of black and blue. The guys I was riding with that day said it looked like something off the ESPN highlight reel. Other than that, I cried at my grandmother's funeral and on the day Congress voted to invade Iraq.

After my bad break up, I never let anyone close enough to make me cry. There were plenty of men who tried, but either they'd lose interest because I wouldn't budge, or I'd cut it off before things got messy. In any case, I never had to worry about my mascara. One of my best friends accused me of being hard, and worried that I'd never "settle down." She probably had a point, but like porcupines with their quills and blowfish with their poison, every vulnerable species -- i.e., the thirty-something urban single female -- needs a defense mechanism. Mine was THE WALL. My favorite Paul Simon song hits it square on the head:

They've got a wall in China, it's a thousand miles long,
To keep out the foreigners, they made it strong.
And I've got a wall around me that you can't even see....

When I met my husband, however, all bets were off. The day I let him in was the day I turned the waterworks on. It took a couple months before the tears started, but once they came, it was hard to turn them off. The first time I cried in front of him, we were talking about our pasts. I was in the middle of one of the many stories I'd collected over the years, when suddenly I felt a lump in my throat and tears welling up in my eyes. These were stories that I'd told a hundred times before; that I used to reel off, Carrie Bradshaw-like, for the amusement of my friends. But telling them to him that Sunday morning, they made me feel very hollow. Because here I was with a man who completed me, and everything that I'd done up to that point had been a very shallow dress rehearsal.

Little did I know that fighting off tears would become a way of life. When he accused me of still having feelings for exes, of not being as committed to our relationship as him, of wanting to hang on to the artifacts of my "old life," of wanting a wedding more than a life, of not adjusting fast enough to life in the small town.... I cried. And I cried. And when I was finished, I cried some more.

And I hated myself for it, because I'd always thought of tears as manipulative. But dammit, this relationship WAS the most important thing in my life. And for the first time in almost a decade, if I lost this man, I would really be losing something. All of the sudden, the tough girl was vulnerable, in a position where she swore she'd never be again, at a place where a man could destroy her. Every tear I cried was an admission of defeat. I did everything I could to harden myself to him, but to no effect. Because at the end of the day, I loved him. And it was that love that made me vulnerable.

Amazingly, after I found out the extent of his lies, I didn't stop loving him. But I did start putting back up a wall. I can count the number of times since that day in August that I've cried -- one. At the funeral of a friend. Maybe the tough girl is back?

The Wife Who Knows