Why men suffer more after a breakup

Men get a bad rap in the romance department. Society has painted them as the unfeeling and detached sex — which is why lots of ears perked up when a study about men and breakups emerged from Binghamton University and University College London.

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Researchers surveyed 5,707 men and women, with an average age of just under 27 years old, from 96 different countries. The findings: women experience more emotional anguish in the aftermath of a breakup, but it takes men longer to recover.

In fact, the researchers note, men never fully get over their breakups. Instead, they tend to eventually just “move on” to the next partner without resolving the issue of what went wrong in the previous relationship.

Since the study explained the results from an evolutionary perspective, the researchers guessed it was because women tend to invest more in their relationships than men — because each relationship a woman enters could lead to a nine-month pregnancy and many more years raising a child. In this line of thinking, since women are wired to be choosier, the loss is more profound with the departure of a high-quality match.

On the other hand, since men historically have had to compete for the attention of women, it may take them longer to realise what they’ve lost, that they aren’t finding a woman who compares to their ex, and that she’s perhaps irreplaceable.

That’s one theory, anyway. But there’s definitely more to breakups than the ancestral explanation, according to research and experts in the field. And while today’s man is still biologically wired to be the hunter-provider type, the male sex has adapted to take on a more complex role, says psychologist Karla Ivankovich, an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois, Springfield.

“In the past, emotion did not serve a purpose in providing for the family,” she tells Yahoo Health. “It was not beneficial to getting things done. But today, men are likely to be involved in all facets of a family, engaged in their relationships, nurturing, and rearing.”

How do we recover from breakups?
A lot of factors that generally influence the impact of a breakup of heterosexual couples (on which we have the most research) are not sex-specific. There is no cookie-cutter approach for how men and women each handle breakups, says Art Markman, professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. “Many factors have less to do with gender than with other behavioural tendencies that are correlated with gender,” he tells Yahoo Health.

Take rebounding as a coping mechanism after a breakup. The success of rebounding has to do with resources and options available, says biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, the chief scientific officer at Match. “A man who is young, incredibly good-looking, with money, is going to have a lot of options and will probably recover a lot quicker than someone who doesn’t,” she tells Yahoo Health. The same concept applies to women.

Also factors: How invested you were in the relationship and how important that relationship was to other aspects of your life (say, if you really wanted children and you were hoping for that partner to be the mother or father of your child). “If a person knows they were just in it for the short term, the breakup will not be as difficult,“ notes Marisa T. Cohen, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at St. Francis College and co-founder of the Self-Awareness and Bonding Lab.

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So there’s no question about it — there are many variables at play for how someone will take a breakup, regardless of gender.