Crying Fetish

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

History & origins

The behaviour is presumably ancient, but its name is recent and its documentation remarkably thin. As a topic, dacryphilia sat for most of the twentieth century 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, two men, three also involved in BDSM), the Nottingham Trent University researchers identified three themes: compassion (arousal from comforting a crier), dominance/submission (tears intensifying a power exchange), and the visual cue of curled lips.
• 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 a dacryphile frames their interest against questions of pathology.

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, how the interest is typically expressed

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. It overlaps far more with interests in vulnerability, caretaking, and emotional intensity (and with attraction to expressive facial features, as seen in interests like the beard fetish) than with physical pain.

Psychology

Proposed explanatory 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 and no specific cause is established.

Prevalence & culture

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 maintains 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.