Men vs Women in a Breakup: Who Suffers More?

[Music] well steve we wanted to talk today about breakups and well potentially based on an article you read the difference between men and women in breakups and how long they take to recover what was this article yeah so this was an article about menv men versus women after a breakup and it cited an interesting study by university college london and a university called bingham university in new york bingham binghamton and they established that while breakups hit women harder at first men take much longer to heal and move on and this jibes with a meme that goes about on the internet where it shows they the meme is like men immediately after a breakup and it shows the man cheering and celebrating and he's really happy he's like free and a woman's really upset and then it says like six months after the breakup or three months after and the woman's feeling relaxed and happy and free and the man is sad and in pain and lonely and the fact that many people share it as a meme suggests there's something that people intuitively latch onto here and the study also suggests that a lot of men this is a bit dark it says a lot of men never fully recover from heartbreak they simply learn to live with it and get on with life good lord i mean that's pretty uh that's pretty big deal wow how do you i mean we've worked with i wonder because we've worked with a lot of women matt what do you think well i i i'll tell you firstly what our audience thinks because we put out a poll on my instagram that said the matthew hussey is the instagram for anyone who wants to go find that out give us a follow um on instagram we put out a poll that said do you think men or women suffer more during a breakup 22 percent said men suffer more 78 percent said women suffer more so that does not that does not sync up with the study uh we also asked what do who do you think bounces back faster after a breakup and 64 said men now i think that that that is the interpretation in both of the answers to those questions there seems to be this perhaps what people are looking at is the way that men seem to be able to jump right in after a breakup they seem to be in a better place they seem to potentially move on in a colder way than a lot of women do there's this caricatured notion of women who are lamenting and grieving with their friends and discussing why the relationship didn't work and and and the man is out there just doing his thing having fun happy for the freedom feels like he's you know into the next chapter of his life i think that the bias in the poll on instagram from our audience that doesn't accord with the results of that study is because of the interpretation of what men do initially after a breakup which is those things that i just mentioned yeah now there is another way to interpret that behavior you could say that for men there's that instant sense of firstly if if we were to take the kind of stereotype that men aren't so good at processing their feelings or that they've never really been taught maybe they've not been taught to be vulnerable maybe they've not been taught to express their emotions and frankly maybe they don't have the friends that they can go and do that with and maybe they even have the opposite you know they have friends who wouldn't reward that so it gets straight into denial of my emotions denial of how much this has affected me and lots and lots of distraction activity whether it's going out and having fun whether it's spending time with friends whether it's hooking up whatever it is it's distraction from my feelings distraction from my emotions or maybe even the feeling of in order to move on i just have to keep running if i run fast enough i'll just outrun these feelings and and by the way i think fueled in with that is the kind of male culture of oh well you're so good you're free now you can go and do whatever you want you can go and be with whoever you want you can go and enjoy yourself finally you're off the hook you can men's friends can be like that yeah for sure right so that i think feeds into this psychology of oh what a great thing you're free again or whatever whereas women it's a lot less likely that that's the first place that a woman's friends are gonna go i would argue that it's more likely that a girl's friends are gonna go um that's so sad talk to me about that how do you feel what happened you know and there and so that's the man's side the woman's side is that we could say we could interpret what she's going through in this ice cream-eating lamenting with friends watching movies that only seem to upset her more listening to songs that only seem to upset her more we could look at all of that as indulging and being in those feelings and suffering but you could also look at that as processing here's a person who's actually processing their breakup here's a person who's actually processing their breakup who's actually processing their emotions and perhaps if they're lucky as a woman has a group of female friends who are likely to be more of an aide in that processing than a man's friends are and this study does say that women might even feel that pain initially as like physical pain uh even more acutely more acutely than men like actual physical pain and so it and they said maybe there's even like biology in it like women invest more in a relationship and because they typically bear children they may like have more investment in keeping their relationship so so there could be and and like you say yeah just men are taught more like hey what i'm buddy you're out there again you're out it's that austin powers moment i'm single again you know as soon as he found out his wife was a robot my one true love the woman who taught me the beauty of monogamy was a fembot all along that means i'm single again oh behave [Music] [Laughter] so yeah i i do think there's this weird mix of uh culture and biology there and and what's interesting is how then it seems to like hit men harder you know a lot of studies show that divorces hit men much worse over time like men seem to get far worse off by divorce women initiate more divorces maybe uh that's part of it i don't know but it it seems like men have more trouble recovering their life again may i don't know if that's disillusionment like they get out there and think they're gonna be like the player and alfie again and then they're quickly devol dissolved of that of that illusion and then it hits them like oh god i had a really i was really close to that person and it was great so it could be partly that it's interesting because yeah you could get a certain kind of person that that thinks he's going to go out there and suddenly be a total player and have fun and he realizes that's either a not available to him in the way that he thought or b he is reminded that oh yeah this is why i didn't this is why i got married in the first places because this wasn't all it's this is not all it's cracked up to be so it could be that but i almost think that a lot of guys don't think that they're going to go out and be the player after that i think that they just don't necessarily appreciate what that relationship may have been bringing them it's a bit like a kid who's you know like you you think that just christmas just happens you know your mum does all these things behind the scenes that makes christmas happen each year and then if your mum were just to not do any of that you'd go but where's christmas and she'd be like yeah that's all the [ __ ] that i do that i go i decorate the tree i put up all these beautiful decorations i put on the music i bring everyone together i arrange the party i create i made the hors d'oeuvres i did all these things i went shopping for presents i'm the reason christmas happens but you're sitting there not knowing that until it's gone and i think that that's true for a lot of men and i think that when they get out of a relationship it it has to be true on some level that and and i want to throw in a uh a study here that basically said that uh men might be more at risk of suicide after a relationship breakdown and concluded that divorced men were more than eight times more likely to die by suicide than divorced women yeah which is an extraordinary number and some of the factors that were cited were discussion of the changing nature of intimacy men's loss of honor marriage is a more positive experience for men than for women controlling isn't that interesting marriage is a more positive experience for men than for women we're supposed to be good for men's long-term happiness being married interesting controlling relationships the increasing importance of the care of children for men and men's social networks you know the point i was going to mention was about the which is touched on by some of these things is the infrastructure that a lot of men lose when they get out of a relationship a lot of men have not invested in creating community around themselves have not invested in their friendships have not invested in those things that that have those daily routines that make them feel grounded and connected and rely a lot on all of those things being part of their marriage and so i think i do think a lot of women walk out of a marriage into a circle of friends and support that they've been nurturing hobbies and tending to and men leave to this sort of stark barren wasteland that they've not invested in in a long time that's because a lot of men get into a relationship kick back and go ah now i never have to make another friend again uh so yeah that's the reality i've got a little quiz for you matt of three questions uh these these are just from this article but i'm interested what your intuitive responses and i'll give you the real answer so who has more shattered self-esteem after a breakup men or women [Music] men according to this men it says when the relationship ends men tend to view it as an indication of not being desirable any longer that's why their self-esteem takes a severe beating even if it's their partner who caught off the relationship see that makes sense to me oh especially especially if it's their partner who caught off the relationship yeah that makes a lot of sense to me i think that i i can imagine that for a lot of women they will tell themselves if there's a breakup you know they could say it's about me or they could just say oh he didn't want a relationship he wasn't ready and i think the stereotype that a lot of men feel is that well it can't be because she doesn't want a relationship because a lot of women do want a relationship i'm not saying that's true for all women i know that a lot of people can be in a phase of their life where they're not ready either but as far as what stereotypes we're used to we're used to the idea that you know it's men who have a really really hard time committing so i think that when a man gets left by a woman it's harder for him to tell himself culturally societally that she left me because she didn't want a relationship it's much more likely in his mind to be to do with the fact that she just didn't want me that's really interesting i didn't match up to the kind of man that she wanted to be in a relationship with okay was question two question two who do you think wants to get back together more men it is men yeah um that makes sense to me because if men take a longer time to get over something because they realize at some point that they've lost a lot more than they had bargained for and they haven't done any proper processing of that breakup they're going to be the ones who at some point suddenly have this panic of i've got to get it back because i can't process these emotions god you know god forbid i process any emotions and i'm suddenly there's this giant hole in my life i must have her back okay it was question three question three uh well uh now this one's been a bit spoiled but the healing process of moving on right so men men appear to move on quicker but have a hard time moving on in the long term yeah men slow women faster so it's often seen that i think and i've definitely noticed anecdotally i've seen women even when they went through a devastating breakup i mean look over the years i've heard from many women who took a long time to get over a breakup so that that exists as well for sure we we've coached many of those women but sometimes i've seen they will be in a new they might just meet someone new and they're back it like oh i'm actually going to give it a try with this new person and in six months you're like oh they're already in a relationship right like they're they're in and they fallen in love with someone new because i think they did some of the harder work in the beginning than than men did i i think there's an interesting dichotomy not not between men and women here if we take that kind of you know if we take firstly this is possible on either side a man or woman any human is is capable of you know taking a long time to get over someone but there's a right balance between processing and moving on men don't do enough processing if we were to take this kind of archetypal uh this study right you could say that men move on too quickly without processing and my experience of coaching women and yours too i think steve is that too many women spend too long ruminating over a breakup so there's a point at which processing just becomes pointless rumination and we're now no longer actually making progress we're just getting stuck in a loop of emotions i actually you know have coached enough men to know that men do plenty of ruminating of their own and i've spoken to men who years later are still talking about someone that they stopped processing in a productive way a long time ago or maybe they have never processed it in a productive way which is why they're still ruminating but they're ruminating over the long term so this can happen to anybody but i think that the key message from this to me is there is a time for processing that we have to be brave enough to do and then there's a time for moving forward which we have to be brave enough to do which requires no longer sitting and processing that which we have already processed but being willing to now fill that territory with new things in our life there was an interesting study done on 9 11 people who had been through 9 11 and survived whether that's because they were in the building and survived or because they had family members in the building and survived the people that got over it over time effectively were not the people who stayed in therapy talking about it over the long term they were the people that actually decided to move on with their lives and do new things and create more in their lives and move forward in other words whilst processing is a healthy thing post-traumatic stress tended to be higher in people who continued to talk about the event and ruminate in the event for a long time afterwards so i find this to be a very interesting thing and i think it's applicable to breakups there's a time to talk about them and there's a time to stop talking about them and lastly i'll just say for anyone who is struggling from heartbreak or and wants to move on we have a free guide for you at moveonstrong.com if you go over there now you can download the free guide and it can be part of your blueprint for getting a little stronger today in moving past that pain you

Channel: Matthew Hussey

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Keywords: Matthew Hussey, Matt Hussey, Get The Guy, How to Get the Guy, Dating Advice for Women, attract men, keep your man, dating coach, relationship coach, relationship tips, what men want, make him like you, make him love you, how to talk to men, how to attract men, meet men, get the guy, tips for women, flirting tips, texting, calling, love advice, relationships, matt hussey, matthew hussy, mathew hussey, how to flirt

Id: 6ccP60iHOUU

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 08 2021