This Rule is the inverse of the last one, and just as Rule 18 is perhaps more common in men than women, you may encounter this more often in women.

Lots of people cry because they’re sad, as you’d expect, but for some people that’s not the only reason. Crying is a kind of all-purpose expression of emotion anyway – after all, we even do it when we’re relieved or overjoyed or laughing or full of love. Of course, you can generally tell when someone’s crying is an expression of negative emotion. Just not necessarily sadness.

One of the most common instances of this is women who have been brought up to feel that anger somehow isn’t ladylike (no, I don’t get it either). But if you’ve had this drummed into you from early childhood, it’s not surprising if you’ve learnt to cry when you feel angry (because girls are ‘allowed’ to do that).

No wonder this response will generally accompany you into adulthood. So you can see that if you encounter someone sobbing and looking sad – while unbeknownst to you actually feeling angry – they may not appreciate you saying ‘Aaah … there, there’, and making sympathetic sadness noises. No one wants to hear that when they’re feeling furious. If you get a response that doesn’t stack up when you show sympathy with someone’s sadness, consider whether maybe you’re sympathising with the wrong emotion.

Crying and anger aren’t the only emotions that can mask others. To be honest, it is pretty confusing trying to read other people’s emotions, especially if you don’t know them particularly well. It can be pretty straightforward, but we all bowl emotional googlies at times, and they can be hard to read and respond to.

Another example that stands out is people who use humour to cover up fear or embarrassment. Sometimes they’re best left alone – clearly they want to hide their feelings, so why add to their embarrassment by drawing attention to it? But other times they might really want help, if they’re trying to conceal a real and significant fear, for example.

So the moral is, don’t assume the emotion you can see is the real one. Probably it is, but if other things don’t add up, consider whether something more subtle is going on. If you want to help, and good for you, you need to get to the bottom of the real problem and it’s probably simplest to ask what’s going on.