: Re: Is a male character crying realistic or excessive? I would like feedback on if this portrayal of male emotion is unrealistic. I have been told (beta readers) that men don't cry in real life

@Gail2416123

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I was going to add this as a comment, as it involves responding to another comment you have made on the answer of @Snarkeet , but it ended up being quite long, so I'll try to flesh it out into a proper answer.

You should not be surprised that your female beta reader understands less how a male character would act when they're alone. You can't expect a female to be more empathetic to a man crying because she is a female, that's again reinforcing stereotypes, which may come out in your writing to make your character unrealistic.

Sure, you may feel that your male beta reader would be less prone to crying himself, but that doesn't mean he doesn't understand why someone else might. If you write a relatable character that has thoughts and feelings and performs actions that others might, then unless the reader is a robot or a psychopath then they will be able to empathize with them at least a little. Whilst they may not cry in that situation themselves, they will not be surprised that the character did.

You may not have written the stereotypical macho man trope character, but you have written the stereotypical sensitive guy trope character. Whilst less common, it is still a complete exaggeration of what a man actually is, which is probably the reason he is unrealistic.

From what I've read briefly about this character, I don't think he would cry in this situation either. I think he would be petty and jealous, and get angry and blame the woman he coveted for breaking his heart, ending up getting angry because of his frustration. And he would be determined to eventually win her heart, because he has already invested so many feelings into this relationship.

I wrote this answer about invoking sadness in the reader, but the tl;dr is that sadness is made from other emotions, nobody goes directly to sadness. You need to create a situation in which there is a happy ending possible, but because of mistakes made or external factors, that happy ending does not materialize. Sadness does not come from a situation that is doomed from the start.

If your character has confessed his love for this woman and proposed marriage at the same time, at no point can I see any other scenario than her rejecting him. Kindness and friendship does not equal love. She may love him in her own way, but why would she have romantic feelings for him if he has never told her how he feels?

Think about some things that make you sad, really sad, and in that moment try to analyze why you feel that way. If you cannot access your own emotions and understand the reasons that feel them, you cannot understand how to access them in others.

Since the above is quite general, I'll try to be a little more specific here. You can make this situation work with some slight changes.

You can always have your character act angrily because of his rejection, and then through his anger he drives her away, as she is seeing a new person materialize who she doesn't recognize. Then when he later realizes that he has made a mistake by acting angrily he realizes that he has now lost his best friend.

Or give him a win condition. Maybe make it so that she has told him she loves him first, and because of things that happened in his previous marriage, his lack of confidence and/or his shyness, he does not respond despite the fact he feels the same way. Then when he later moves past the things that were stopping him being with this woman that he loves, when he goes to tell her then she has already moved on, or moved away.

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