Real Talk 14th December 2016 by Victoria Stokes

SOB! Believe It Or Not, Men Have A Much Harder Time Getting Over Breakups Than Women

Research says it hits them harder in the long term.

Breakup

Male or female, breakups suck for everyone, but contrary to popular belief, it seems that they suck just that little bit harder for guys.

While girls typically open up to their gal pals and soothe the fresh pain with a glass of vino, men are more likely to bottle things up and pretend that everything’s okay.

Unfortunately, that kind of attitude seems to see them suffer from a split for longer, something that’s just been confirmed in a new study.

The research studied 2,000 divorced men and women and later revisited these same men and women between six and nine years later.

The results were clear: the women in the study were noticeably more extravert in the years following their divorces, while the men had in fact done the opposite; becoming more emotionally unstable since the split.

What the researchers found was that while women tended to be hit harder by the breakup in the initial stages, men suffered more in the long term, sometimes still reeling from the split years later.

Messy Breakup? Here’s Why You Need To Stop Trying To Get Closure

Another study had similar findings. Carried out in Binghamton University, it assessed 5,705 participants in the aftermath of a split, and found that, for men, the impact of the loss took a much longer time to “sink in.”

“The man will likely feel the loss deeply and for a very long period of time as it sinks in that he must start competing all over again to replace what he has lost – or worse still, come to the realisation that the loss is irreplaceable,” confirms research associate Craig Morris.

So what can you take from all this if you’re going through a fresh split? Well, there may be some comfort in knowing that even if he’s acting like he doesn’t care, and posting pics of himself having a great time, your breakup has likely hit him harder than he’s letting on.

Or at the very least, the loss of not having you in his life anymore just hasn’t hit him yet.

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