Back in May, the Mitsui Garden Hotel Yotsuya in Tokyo began offering a new type of service just for women: crying rooms. For 10,000 Japanese yen per person, guests can schedule a deluxe weepy vacation in a room designed for emotional release. Amenities include tearjerker movies, emotional manga, and luxury tissues to sop up every tear in high style. Mitsui Garden even provides warm eye masks to reduce puffiness after particularly enthusiastic sob-fests.
Though a sabbatical devoted to tears may sound a little silly, the science behind crying’s health benefits is quite serious—and it turns out Mitsui Garden might want to start welcoming men, too. In the Journal of Research in Personality, Dr. Lauren Bylsma revealed that men only cry 1.3 times per month, compared to 5.3 times for women. Yet nearly as many men (73 percent) feel happier and calmer after a good cry as women (85 percent).
So why does weeping feel so darn good? Dr. William H. Frey II, one of the world’s foremost tear researchers, has spent 15 years trying to answer that question. In his book Crying: The Mystery of Tears, Frey demonstrated that manganese—a mineral element that is both nutritionally necessary and potentially toxic in high doses—has a lot to do with it. Too much of this mood-altering mineral leads to behavioral changes and other strange nervous system effects, including slowed hand movements and a disorder called manganisma, but a good crying spell expels excess levels of it from the body.
In addition to providing emotional detox, crying can lead to increased levels of compassion and even strengthened friendships (which might help to alleviate any loneliness that led to those tears in the first place). A study from biologist Oren Hasson published in Evolutionary Psychology examined the effects of tears in different social situations; in the presence of close friends, crying elicits an evolutionary response of support, likely because such a private moment shared among confidants bolsters relationship bonds. So if you’re due for a little crying time, it might be best to forget about hiding out in a Tokyo hotel, and start weeping in front of your BFF instead. In another of Bylsma’s studies, subjects who cried in social circumstances felt better than those who did so alone.
Still, a crying jag isn’t a perfect emotional elixir. When it comes to romance, crying is a total mood-killer— especially for men. Two studies, one published in Science in 2011 and another more recently published in Public Library of Science, found that the smell of women's tears had a sharp and negative impact on men. The study participants not only reported lower testosterone levels, but also a decreased appetite. Which might be enough to induce tears in anyone.
Illustration by Brian Hurst
Ladder leads out of darkness.Photo credit 
Woman's reflection in shadow.Photo credit 
Young woman frazzled.Photo credit 
Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.