I feel very similarly, honestly.  I thought for years that this was a sexual fetish for me, but as it turns out, I am actually asexual, and the intense feelings of pleasure I get from watching attractive people cry does not constitute sexual attraction.  I, too, will watch crying scenes over and over until I can memorize the lines in the scenes, or the timestamps in longer movies or videos when my favorite parts (usually tissue/nose blowing-related) take place.  It does leave me with intense physical arousal, often with the desire to masturbate to return my body to equilibrium, but nothing brings me to want to have sexual encounters with the people I'm observing.  That's the furthest thing from my mind at the time (and pretty much all the time!)  Long story short, I can relate, and non-sexual fetishes are totally a thing, even if they aren't super common.

Dacrypticphile wrote:

I feel very similarly, honestly.  I thought for years that this was a sexual fetish for me, but as it turns out, I am actually asexual, and the intense feelings of pleasure I get from watching attractive people cry does not constitute sexual attraction.  I, too, will watch crying scenes over and over until I can memorize the lines in the scenes, or the timestamps in longer movies or videos when my favorite parts (usually tissue/nose blowing-related) take place.  It does leave me with intense physical arousal, often with the desire to masturbate to return my body to equilibrium, but nothing brings me to want to have sexual encounters with the people I'm observing.  That's the furthest thing from my mind at the time (and pretty much all the time!)  Long story short, I can relate, and non-sexual fetishes are totally a thing, even if they aren't super common.

Find this really interesting - you watch people cry which develops into a desire to masterbate - which I'm guessing triggers a sexual arousal within you but you don't have a desire to have sexual encounters with the person. So there is sexual arousal but completely within your own body and self and not shared with others. Sounds very controlled - it's not a critism in anyway - find it interesting.
 

For me, crying itself is what I'd call an emotional fetish. I get extreme "warm fuzzies" from the idea of comforting someone attractive while they cry or seeing a cute comfort scene between two guys. (Yaoi fangirl here, not even gonna lie.)

However, crying can often get a bit, ahem... snotty. And that's when the genuine physical arousal kicks in. So it can be a slippery slope. But in the absence of that... yeah, just heart-bursty feelings.

Also, Dacrypticphile: Hey, I love nose stuff as well! Nice to see someone else.

I finally created an account for this website I've lurked on for a couple years just so that I could reply to this thread and tell you how much I relate to your post. 

I always knew crying and comforting wasn't a sexual thing for me, but I do have a sneeze fetish so maybe that's why it was so obviously non-sexual in comparison to me. I too re-watch comforting scenes over and over until I have them memorized. That's pretty much the only thing I cared about when reading fanfiction of my favorite books and movies. Always selecting hurt/comfort as the genre... skimming through to see if there were crying scenes... anyone who knew would think I was crazy.

But for me it's not really about the tears specifically, it's about the comforting. It's very rare for me to get a lot of pleasure (emotional pleasure that is) from a scene where someone is crying alone, unless it is a specifically male character that you haven't seen that side of before. I much prefer scenes where someone is crying and another person is there comforting them with words and hugs. It drives me mad to have scenes where a character is watching this person cry and provides no physical contact as comfort. I know some people don't like it and I'm not saying that people should always touch to comfort, it's just my preference in viewing and reading.

Anyway to sum up, this is completely relatable to me. It's such an obsession and yearning for me to comfort that it has become a key part of who I am.