The latest fashion in make-up is the Sad Look. It is achieved with red shader round the eyes and under the nose, glistening mascara and little bits of glitter to represent tears. The aim is to look as if you have been crying, or are about to cry, your eyes out. In other words, you are emotional: the seemingly obligatory present-day state of mind.
I have just been listening to a light-hearted Saturday morning radio show, where a singer talked about a helpful teacher she once had. Later in the programme, the presenter said the teacher had phoned in to say how proud she was of the singer. There was a pause and the girl said “that made me cry”—a just about acceptable, if slightly odd, reaction to a compliment—but the presenter then said “it made us all cry”. I bet the producer was thrilled to have a studio full of emotional sobbing. Tears in an interview are deemed a huge success.
I am going to suggest something that will drive you insane. Take a note of how many times a day you hear the word “emotional”, in the media and real life.
I started counting when the Queen died. I myself did pipe a tear, for I was fond of Her Majesty. I was grateful that she clung to life just long enough to make absolutely sure, as her final official duty, that Boris Johnson was seen off. But she was nearly 100 years old, and ailing, so it was not a tragedy when she passed away.
Then it started.
Earnest TV reporter: “Did you feel emotional when you heard the news?”
Another: “The crowds are very emotional”—cut to sobbing woman furtively checking through her tears if the camera was on her.
“You must’ve felt emotional when you queued for five hours to see the coffin”. “Well, actually the queue was quite fun”—shocked look from interviewer—“until we got to the coffin, and then we were all in floods of tears”.
How has being emotional become obligatory? Since when was it a badge of honour to cry? When I was young, being brave meant hiding your tears. Through bombing, separation, threat of invasion, hunger and death, the ethos of the “stiff upper lip” and “grin and bear it” prevailed. I only saw my mother cry once, when Chamberlain declared on the radio that we were at war: it was the second in her lifetime, so the tears were understandable.
When did public displays of grief become the norm? Many people suggest the death of Diana was a trigger for us as a nation to howl with grief. We were angry with the Queen for staying in Balmoral to look after the bereaved young princes and not joining in the hysteria. When she and I were young, mourning was greeted solemnly as part of life. We wore black armbands or sewed patches on our coats and closed the curtains to show we were grieving and if a funeral passed by, we stopped and bowed our heads.
Some people cheered and whooped when the Queen’s cortège passed. They wanted everyone to see and hear how they felt; that seems the modern way. We see a similar phenomenon at pop concerts, where hearing the music is less important to the audience than showing their loud approval.
People have different ways of feeling and expressing bereavement. In a recent radio interview about the Manchester bombing inquiry, Figen Murray, whose son Martyn was killed, abruptly contradicted an interviewer who suggested that she must be angry and emotional. She said she couldn’t be bothered with pointing fingers, or with rage, because she was too busy looking for solutions to the mistakes that had caused his death and turning a tragedy into something constructive.
It is good that we are less inhibited in our expression of mental pain when it occurs, but we are in danger of demanding behaviour that conforms to some conventional pattern. We need to find a balance, and not be carried by fashion into something demanded of us that is hollow and meaningless.
