Crying Fetish

Dacryphilia (also spelled dacrylagnia), commonly called a crying or tear fetish, is a non-normative sexual interest in tears and weeping. The focus may rest on the physical tears themselves, on the facial expressions and sounds of crying, or, most commonly, on the heightened emotional vulnerability and tenderness that weeping signals between people who trust one another. This article traces how the term entered the clinical literature, what the single dedicated study says about how the interest is actually experienced, and why it is best understood as a benign variation rather than a recognised disorder.

Examples

What the term covers. Arousal or tenderness at the sight of a partner's tears; a fantasy of meeting someone who has been through hardship and offering comfort; tears arriving as a release inside a negotiated power-exchange scene, where weeping reads as surrender; and, for a smaller group, the specific visual detail of a crying face rather than the feeling behind it. Those three clusters are what the only dedicated study of the interest found when it interviewed self-identified dacryphiles, and they map the range of the term almost exactly.

What the term does not cover. Dacryphilia is not a taste for causing suffering. Sadism is arousal from another person's pain; here the tears are far more often an occasion for care than for harm. It is not humiliation play or degradation, where a deliberate loss of status is the point and crying is at most a side effect. It is not aftercare, the settling period after intense play, though the two frequently sit next to each other. And it is not a general attraction to submission or dominance: a power-exchange dynamic need involve no tears at all.

How the word is used. Dacryphilia, with its variant dacrylagnia, is a formal-sounding coinage that lives almost entirely in reference compendia, A-to-Z kink glossaries and online communities; "crying fetish" and "tear fetish" are what people actually say. Neither form appears in DSM-5-TR or ICD-11, and neither appeared in the founding sexological catalogues either, which is why the interest carries a name far older-sounding than its documentation.

History & origins

The behaviour is presumably ancient, but its name is recent and its documentation remarkably thin. For most of the twentieth century dacryphilia sat inside encyclopaedic catalogues of unusual practices rather than in primary research.

Clinical lineage

The term dacryphilia is built from the Greek dákry ("tear") plus the -philia ("love of") suffix that nineteenth- and twentieth-century sexology used to label specific erotic interests; the variant dacrylagnia substitutes the Greek lagneía ("lust"). The word does not appear in the foundational case literature of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) or Havelock Ellis's Studies in the Psychology of Sex, and the precise coinage is not well documented. For decades it surfaced mainly in reference compendia such as Ronald M. Holmes's Sex Crimes: Patterns and Behavior (2001) and Anil Aggrawal's Forensic and Medico-Legal Aspects of Sexual Crimes and Unusual Sexual Practices (2009), which list it descriptively rather than studying it.

• 1886: Krafft-Ebing's landmark catalogue of erotic interests omits any tear-specific category, illustrating how late the concept was formalised.
• 2001 / 2009: Holmes and later Aggrawal record "dacryphilia" in glossary form, cementing it as a named-but-unstudied label.
• 2015: The first systematic empirical investigation appears: Greenhill & Griffiths (2015), "Compassion, Dominance/Submission, and Curled Lips: A Thematic Analysis of Dacryphilic Experience," in the International Journal of Sexual Health. Using asynchronous online interviews with eight self-identified dacryphiles (six women and two men, drawn from four countries, several also involved in BDSM), the Nottingham Trent University researchers (full text via NTU's repository) identified three themes.
• 2016: The same authors published a follow-up case study, Greenhill & Griffiths (2016), "Sexual interest as performance, intellect and pathological dilemma," in Psychology & Sexuality, examining how one dacryphile frames the interest against questions of pathology.

The three themes the 2015 study drew from its interviews map the range of the interest:

Cultural & subcultural evolution

Because no landmark clinical study popularised the word, dacryphilia entered wider awareness largely through late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century lay and online catalogues of paraphilias: the kind of A-to-Z listings that circulate in popular kink coverage. It remains a niche label, more often discussed in the vocabulary of emotional intensity, comfort, and care than in diagnostic terms.

In practice

Expression varies widely and is usually mild. Consistent with the Greenhill & Griffiths themes, for many, notably the women in their sample, it centres on the compassionate side: comforting a tearful partner, or a fantasy of meeting someone who has endured hardship and offering them tenderness. For others it connects to consensual power-exchange dynamics, where an emotional release is framed as cathartic. Tears may also be appreciated simply as a sign of genuine feeling during moments of love and closeness. Throughout, the interest overlaps far more with vulnerability, caretaking, and emotional intensity than with physical pain, which is the most common misreading of it.

Psychology

What causes a crying fetish?

No specific cause is established. Proposed frameworks emphasise the strong link between crying and intimacy: tears are a potent, honest signal of trust and need, and some people eroticise the closeness and protectiveness those signals evoke, a reading the "compassion" theme in the only dedicated study supports. The dominance/submission strand instead frames tears as a vivid marker of surrender within negotiated play, overlapping conceptually with submission and dominance. Early associative learning and a general heightened sensitivity to emotional cues are also commonly cited. With a single small qualitative study to draw on, the evidence base is genuinely thin.

Prevalence & culture

How common is a crying fetish?

Nobody knows with any precision. The interest has little mainstream visibility and almost no quantitative literature (one qualitative study of eight people, plus scattered glossary mentions), so any prevalence figure is a rough estimate rather than a measured rate. Large fantasy surveys such as Lehmiller's Tell Me What You Want (2018) do not break out a discrete "crying" fantasy, underscoring how marginal it is in formal data. It keeps a modest presence in online kink communities, where it is usually discussed through the language of comfort, vulnerability, and care.

Safety, consent & law

Dacryphilia is regarded as a benign variation when it involves consenting adults and genuine care, and it is not a recognised disorder. Because crying can also signal real distress, ethical practice depends on clear, ongoing consent and attentive emotional aftercare so that an aroused response never overrides a partner's actual need. The interest would warrant clinical attention only if it caused the person distress or impairment, or if it involved a non-consenting person.