Why do we sometimes cry after orgasm? A question from Sonia, 35, who has an easy post-climax tear. Our expert and journalist Caroline Michel answers him.
I love this question. Because tears after orgasm are much more common than you might imagine. The study that supports my point lacks freshness since it dates from 2015, but still: 46% of women will cry at least once in their life after sex. It’s not nothing, friends. This phenomenon is even called post-coital dysphoria. If some women seem to accept it and easily decipher the reason for this tear torrent, others are still beating around the bush: but why am I crying when I’m fine?
Lots of answers, finally theories. Very simply, to start, I would like to remind you that sex offers self-surrender, and that the body reaches a peak of pleasure during orgasm, until it relaxes. Thus, at the time of orgasm, the relaxation of body and mind is at its peak, so that tears can occur. It’s a bit as if they took advantage of this total decompression to infiltrate: it’s an opportunity to get everything out, to empty everything, to expel worries, annoyances, tensions.
Crying after orgasm is a sign of communion
I would also like to point out that post-report tears are also tears of joy, in some cases, even though we have difficulty perceiving them as such. The relaxation theory is often the most appreciated, because the most understood. But you can really cry for joy because orgasm makes you happy. We feel good, so we shed a little tear of happiness.
But beyond this happiness “for oneself” and “in oneself”, there is also the happiness of being with the other. The tears bear witness to a rather powerful awareness, that of loving, of commune with each other, to have spent a great moment to be one. It’s a bit like realizing that we were lucky, and that all this love that unites us deserves to be looked at from time to time, made aware. Orgasm offers us the perspective necessary to think that “still, it’s beautiful”. There you go, it’s beautiful.
Orgasm pushes to total relaxation
And then, of course, there are tears that are a little sadder, those that I would like to call “tears that were held back too much”. If for several days we have been sad for one reason or another, the relaxation of orgasm, as we said, triggers the tears that need to come out, but they also come out through encounter with pleasure. Let me explain: we were sad, and there, we have just experienced something great, so we cry to realize that we are sad but that we can experience great things. It’s moving. It’s like a little light of happiness in the night.
In the same vein, some held back tears have been dragging on for a long time. It happens that the women who have experienced sexual violence cry with relief during pleasurable sex, a way to greet the reunion with a battered body, to feel that life is passing and that the old emotional wounds, although still present, leave us free to love and enjoy. Finally, I cannot exclude the tears of fed up, of disappointment linked to the relationship, to the couple. We cry because hope is gone, and even this report has not been able to revive it. Something like that.
Analyze the origin of his tears during love
These are assumptions. It is up to each woman to make a choice: to analyze, not to analyze. Always being that if the tears are frequent and question us, it remains interesting to dig and understand. We will find his answer: too much joy, too much weariness, too much daily stress, too many sexual disappointments? Perhaps we will conclude that our tears tell of love, only love, or that they are hiding a little something from us that deserves our attention. L’opportunity to get to know each other betterbecause after all, our emotions always guide us.
Caroline Michel is a journalist in psycho sexo and author. Passionate, she enjoys dissecting everyday life and looking for the right words (which she hopes to find often). She is the author of…