When it comes to guys‘ dating success stories, almost all the answers were only slight variations on a common theme. Our guys thought it would be a great night if they felt comfortable, enjoyed the conversation, felt attracted to the girl in question, felt as though they had connected with her in some way, and wanted to see her again.

“I know it’s been a success if I get a nice, long good-night kiss at the end of the evening,” said one respondent. The guys would consider the night a flop, however, if they were bored, impatient for the date to end, and unmoved by their companion intellectually, sexually, or emotionally.

What can you do to keep the ball rolling? In a word, participate. “Things go much more smoothly if the girl gives you some input— if she has opinions and contributes to the evening’s activities.” Hear, hear. When it comes to the early stages of romance, good things hardly ever come to those who sit on their lazy behinds and wait.

6. What will he say at the end of the date if he’s going to call again? What if he’s not?

We suspected it all along: Whether a guy means it or not, he’ll say those three little words: I’ll call you. At least that’s what 25 percent of the guys we polled said. The rest of them were more honest. “If I really want to see her again, I’ll say something specific, like what are you doing next weekend, or I’ll call you on Tuesday and we can make plans,” said one respondent. “If I’m not interested, I try to keep it vague—thanks, I had a nice time, I’ll talk to you sometime.” And then there was the small percentage of men (5 percent) who would refuse to say they’d call, even if they planned to. Why? Who knows? Why the hell do they do anything anyway?

7. If he planned to call, how long would he wait? Would he be turned off if I called first?

Our basic rule of thumb: If he hasn’t called in a week, you can pretty much write him off. Forty percent of our guys said they’d call in three days, about 35 percent said two days, and an ardently infatuated 23 percent said they’d call the next day. Only 2 percent said they’d wait longer than a week.

A whopping 90 percent said that they wouldn’t be offended at all if the woman called first; on the contrary, most said that they’d be flattered. “I’d love it,” said one guy. “She‘d be at my mercy.” Great, another Cro-Mag on the loose.

8. Are guys wary of women on the rebound?

From everyone, the response was a resounding yup. “There are certain symptoms germane to heartbroken women that you look out for,” said one guy. Like what? we asked. “Bruises,” one droll fellow replied. “Scars,” said another. Besides those two funny, funny comics, though, there were some specific warning signs that seemed legit. About 25 percent of these guys listed skittishness and unpredictability at the top of their lists. “A woman on the rebound carries all kinds of emotional baggage, and she‘ll fly from one mood to the next,” said one respondent. “Regular women are moody enough for me.” Another popular beef among 40 percent of our men was the idea that they were merely filling a void. “She’s got a boyfriend slot and she wants to drop me in it,” said one man. Said another, “You end up cleaning up after her ex-boyfriend, fixing everything he broke on the way out.” According to one guy, “You can end up talking to her for hours on end about her old relationship—it’s too ego-shaking to hear about how great some other guy is.” Others feared that the woman in question would be too distant, or too clingy, and a small fraction (5 percent) were afraid of being used. “I’m not saying that all women are manipulative,” said one of the men we polled, “but say, for example, she’s only dating me to make her old boyfriend jealous. I refuse to be some woman’s pawn.”

9. So do men avoid dating women on the rebound? Or do they ever actually seek them out?

Although no man openly admitted to seeking out vulnerable, rebounding women, about 50 percent confessed that they might take advantage of one if a fortuitous situation presented itself. “If some woman comes up to me in a bar and announces she’s just broken up with some guy and she wants to sleep around for a while, you’d have to be a jerk to turn her down,” said one. The other half, though, claimed you’d have to be a jerk to take the plunge. “It’s a fool’s game,” said one of our abstainers. “She’s not in a stable point of her life; if you cavalierly sleep with a heartbroken woman, you’re just looking for trouble.” One lone optimist said, “At least if she just broke up with someone, you know that she’s had a boyfriend before, that she’s capable of sustaining an intimate relationship with someone.” No one else echoed his sentiment, however. Our advice: You don’t have to announce on your first date that you’ve just (been) jounced. Men like mystery—this is one thing you can keep to yourself.

10. Does he want or expect sex on the first date? How many dates will he wait? Is sex different with a woman who’s just out of a long relationship? Will he think differently about me if I sleep with him on the first date?

“Do I want sex?” asked one respondent. “Of course I want it, but I don’t expect to get it.” That sentiment was echoed by just about every guy we polled. And whereas 20 percent of the guys said they’d wait as long as they had to for sex (some qualified that by saying they would wait indefinitely only if they were getting sex elsewhere during that time), most of them said they’d throw in the towel after three to five dates.

As for whether or not sex is weird with a heartbroken woman, that, of course, depends on the woman. Those of you who enjoy weird sex will, no doubt, continue the practice. From a guy’s point of view, when it comes to the recently jilted, it isn’t the sex, it’s the stuff that happens around it that can get weird. “I started dating a woman four days out of a three-year relationship and the sex was amazing,” said one. “Physically, we never had any problems—but emotionally, it was a minefield. In the first month, we talked about major commitment, moving in together, marriage—it was intense. Six weeks later she went back to her old boyfriend. No warning, no nothing — boom, she was gone.” Another guy told us that his rebound woman was “incredibly shy. She must have been afraid of me. She wouldn’t let me kiss her for two weeks. And then it took another two weeks just to get her bra off. It was over fifteen dates before I actually saw her naked.” Give this guy points for being such a brave little trooper.

Finally, on the subject of having sex on the first date, there was no clear consensus. Thirty-five percent of our respondents said that they would think differently about a woman who did—and not in a favorable way. “A woman who jumped into the sack with me on Thursday might be doing it on Friday and Saturday with two other guys, for all I know,” said one man. “That makes me wonder what kind of person she is.” Fifty-five percent claimed it wouldn’t change their opinion of the woman at all— but added that having sex early on would set a more casual tone to the relationship. And 5 percent said it depended on the sex—great sex would pique their interest, bad sex would turn them away. In other words, when it comes to sex and dating—and life, for that matter—your best tactic is just to go ahead and do what you want. Isn’t that what you were going to do anyway?

1. I met a guy at a party and the two of us hit it off. How long will it take him to ask me out? Will he make the call himself or ask someone to arrange it for him?

Apparently, most men have the nerve—they just need a little time to get it up. Fifty-one percent of our respondents said they would call within the next two to four days. The next biggest group-25 percent—claimed they would pop the question by the end of the evening; one (over)eager suitor said he “could barely wait until the end of the conversation.” And the remaining 24 percent said they would hold off for an entire week, the objective of one of them being “to make the girl squirm.” How sweet.

As for arranging the rendezvous, only two of the guys surveyed said they would allow an outside party to broker the date. The rest were all but horrified at the notion of being set up. Said one shocked respondent, “If you have to ask someone to do it for you, you don’t deserve to go out with her in the first place.” He’s got a point there.

2. What does he consider to be a good first date? Does he feel pressured to make the plans?

Sharpen your forks, girls. Eighty-five percent of these guys want to take you to dinner—so even if the evening is a bust, you’ll get a meal out of it. Half of that 85 percent said they’d make the invitation for drinks and, as one of them said, “If it went well, I’d casually suggest that we get something to eat.” Talk about fear of commitment. A few romantic (read: cheap) sorts would prefer to cook the dinner themselves. Twenty percent said they’d throw in a movie (although many respondents thought that movies were a better choice for the second date), and the rest said they’d follow up with drinks, a ball game, a round of pool, dancing, you name it.

On the pressure front, 55 percent of our men said they’d feel no pressure to make the plans and that, in fact, they’d actually enjoy arranging the outing. Ten percent said they thought it would be their responsibility to make the plans for the night but wouldn’t feel unduly stressed out about it. Meanwhile, back at the neurosis ranch, 35 percent said they’d agonize over and feel “burdened by the obligation” of trying to make your evening together a pleasure cruise.

3. Will he pick up the tab for the whole night? Should I offer money?

Here’s where we separate the artistes from the M.B.A.s. Eighty percent assured us that they’d be happy to shell out the bucks—at least for the first date; the remaining 20 percent would choose to go Dutch. As for whether or not you should whip out your wallet, 70 percent of the guys said that “it would be a nice gesture” but “it wasn’t really necessary” —and they’d refuse it anyway. The other 30 percent clearly stated that they would be annoyed if the girl didn’t at least offer to pay her part—if not on the first date, then unquestionably on the second. Some, in fact, would be downright pissed if, in this enlightened day and age, the woman didn’t front her share. As one indignant respondent fumed, “What, does she expect me to pay for the simple pleasure of her company?” In other words, if you want to make a good impression, don’t forget the money, honey.

4. What makes him most anxious before the date?

We girls aren’t the only ones with jangled nerves before a big night out—in our survey, guy anxiety raged. A charming 40 percent of our men fretted about whether “she’ll like me as much as I like her.” Isn’t that special? Other worries included: the evening’s plans, the possibility of boredom, the conversation, his looks, her looks, and expenses (”What if my Visa card gets denied?”). On the more bizarre end, some of our guys said they’d be stressed out over catching a sexually transmitted disease, getting into a car accident, or running into an ex-girlfriend.

to be continued

And then there are the women who can pinpoint exactly how their second wave of depression passed. “For a long time, when I got in bed, I used to imagine that I could turn back time and go back to the way it used to be, when my ex and I were living together,” remembers a twenty-seven-year-old newspaper reporter. “You know that movie, Somewhere in Time, where Christopher Reeve goes back to get Jane Seymour? That’s what I used to think about. One night, I had a dream that I actually did it. There was my old boyfriend in our old apartment, telling me he loved me, asking me to take him back. And instead of feeling ecstatic, I was horrified. I realized, ‘I don’t love him anymore. I thought I wanted this, but I don’t. I’ve made a terrible mistake.’ I prayed that I could change things back again. When I woke up, I was so happy. Not long after that, I started dating again and met the person I’m with today.”

Another woman recalls how she reached her letting-go point when “I saw an announcement in the paper that my ex had gotten married. It was as if a door finally swung shut in my brain. I thought, ‘That’s it, there’s no going back now, even if you want to. Pining over him would be a waste of time—and haven’t I wasted enough time already?’ It was such a practical end to such an emotional time—but I guess I was finally ready to let go. The wedding announcement just gave me the final nudge in the right direction.”

Finally, there’s the large contingent who say that they could get past Indian heartbreak only when they met another man. Maybe, maybe not. “You might think you’ve finally recovered because you met a great guy and are starting up a new relationship,” says Dr. Eaker-Weil, “but you have to remember that the reason you met him was because you were ready to. A man can’t magically chase the blues away. You have to do that first. When you do, then you’re equipped to share yourself with someone with whom you can build something good and lasting.”

We agree completely. You can’t hail a cab unless you’re strong enough to lift your arm first (or you can do that thing where you stick two fingers in your mouth and make one of those really loud, piercing whistles). And if you’ve made it this far, odds are you’ll be strong enough to hail a whole fleet of cabs, if you’re so inclined. Maybe even strong enough to hear the harebrained thing we’re going to say next without falling down, beating your fists on the floor, and screaming, “Lies, all lies!”

So here goes. After all these kvetching about the guys in our lives, after all the ruckus about those crazy, mixed- up men, after the reams and reams of we’re so super/they’re so stupid, we’ve got to say this one thing: Men, by and large, are a pretty terrific invention. Come on. Admit it. Even the women we spoke to who were in the throes of heartbreak despair could drag up at least one or two good things about the male of the species. And we’re not only referring to men as boyfriends or dates or sex toys (although they, too, have a definite draw)—we’re talking in broader terms. We’re talking about the guy on the airplane who helps you stuff your suitcase in the overhead luggage compartment, or the man in the deli who always saves you the last onion bagel, or your doorman who gives you a big welcome-home smile after you come back from vacation. So we thought it was only fair to offer up at least .. .

Mais oui.

Once considered the pink, frilly domain of girly-girls, crank calls to an ex-loved one seem to be enjoying increasing popularity among the male of the species. Surprised? We sure were. But facts is facts: Over one-third of the men we surveyed confessed to letting their fingers do the stalking. Their reasons were many: “I accidentally dialed her number” (we’re so sure), “I wanted to make sure she was okay, that she wasn’t too destroyed” (ego, much?), and “I was bored” (ever hear of MTV?) numbered among them. Some less lame explanations included “I wanted to talk to her, but then I lost my nerve,” “I wanted to see if she was out having a good time without me,” and “I wanted to hear her voice.” Okay, we’ll allow those—no stone-throwers, we.

Some of our men took that extra step and coerced friends or relatives into doing the dirty deed for them. “I used to ask my sister to call my ex at home on weekend nights, ask for a fake name, and then apologize and say she had dialed the wrong number,” said one thirty-year-old. “I would listen on another extension. After a couple of these, I got nervous that my sister’s voice would be recognized, so I made her wrap a dish towel around the receiver to distort the sound. It was a miserable, complicated little business.”

Others were not quite satisfied with the next best thing to being there. “I occasionally hung out at my old girlfriend’s house late at night,” said a thirty-one-year-old journalist. “I wanted to see if she was coming home with anyone. She had cheated on me with a friend of mine and I wanted to see if she was with him.” One enterprising fellow even followed his ex on a date. “They were going to a concert_; I put on a trench coat and sunglasses and walked behind them about half a block, ducking behind parked cars and trees. I don’t know what I was looking for. I guess I was kind of crazed.”

Somewhat less surreptitious were the guys who chose to do their haunting via FTD. “I left her a single red rose every day for a month,” said an ad salesman, thirty. “I thought it would charm her into loving me again, but now I see that it just made me look like a spineless ass.” A financial consultant admitted to writing shameless love letters, making gooey love-song tapes and leaving them with his ex’s doorman every week. A marketing exec who traveled frequently sent postcards from every city he went to. And a musician composed Desperately Seeking Susan-esque personals and had them printed in his local paper’s classified section.

Fortunately, these haunting expeditions rarely lasted too long. Even the most lovelorn guy eventually sees the absurdity in moonlighting as Inspector Clouseau or serenading a twelfth-story window. “I had to make one last-ditch effort to win her back,” said one of our surveyed men. “It was more something I had to do for myself than for her. I didn’t want to feel like I hadn’t given it my best shot. Once I had, I could move on.”

And so shall we move on, to the last leg of our little journey . . .

Well, stick around. It’s a long, hard road to emotional awareness, especially for a guy. “It takes a long time for a man to allow himself to admit that he’s depressed,” says Dr. Eaker-Weil. “He doesn’t want to accept the fact that he might have been dependent on someone else, particularly a woman. In a way, he’s still fighting against the old dependency-on-mother thing. High emotion is more familiar to women; men repress anger and loneliness and sadness. It takes a while for them to truly grieve.”

For most of our guys, arriving at this point was more of a quiet realization than a blinding-flash-of-light, huge-puff-ofsmoke kind of thing. “Gradually, I just found that I didn’t need to avoid my feelings anymore,” said a twenty-seven-year-old grad student. “I eased up on the drinking, I stopped killing myself with work. The pace somehow slowed itself down. I thought about how it ended and tried to figure out my position. It was a quiet time for me—I didn’t want to be with friends; I spent most nights alone, trying to rediscover my equilibrium.”

Not all men evolve with quite this much ease, though. “After a couple of months,” said a twenty-eight-year-old talent agent, “I got sick of going out all the time—going around with a bunch of guys to stupid bars, getting drunk, trying to talk to girls. It was pathetic. I hated it. It just made me more depressed. I started spending more and more time alone, taking walks by myself, wandering around like a tired traveler. Actually thinking. I was still obsessed with my ex-girlfriend, but over time—with the help of therapy—I was able to see that I wasn’t a failure, that we had loved each other and now it was time to let it go. I didn’t love the process, but I got something out of it.”

Often men reach this point because there’s nowhere else to go. “I was exhausted, physically and mentally,” said a thirtytwo-year-old graphic artist. “I couldn’t punish myself anymore—I just couldn’t take it. Fifty nights of getting blind drunk was about forty-eight nights too many. I was running myself into the ground and I needed a breather. It wasn’t until I stopped my frenetic scramble that I found a way to face myself and her, and cope with the whole mess.”

About one-third of the guys we surveyed said that this was the time that they first seriously considered therapy. And some even went into it. “At first I was reluctant,” said one thirty-six-year-old television writer, “but I was at the end of my rope. It really turned my head around. Being in therapy forced me to examine not just what was wrong with the relationship, but what was wrong in my life. It shook me out of denial. I saw that I was acting out familial relationships with my ex-girlfriend, that I was ignoring my inner child, that I had been misunderstood and the breakup was a function of deep childhood traumas that I had repressed when I. . . .”

Okay, okay, okay. Give it a rest, Sigmund. Our point is that men, in their own agonizing way, certainly feel the aftershocks of love lost, just as achingly as women do. And although far be it from us to take pleasure in their pain, doesn’t it make you feel a little better to know that you’re not the only one crying in your soup? Sure it does. But enough about them. Back to the far more fascinating world of Us. Now that we’re assured of the fact that they’re just as wrecked as we are, it’s time to check out some postbreakup mechanics, starting with A Guide to the Whole Ex-Mess.

But has his fling at the poor wedded pair.

As there is nothing in the world as common as marriage, and as it is something over which men commonly make fools of themselves, it is hardly surprising that it should form the subject matter of most comedies.

Marriage … notwithstanding all the loose talk of the Town, the Satires of antient, or modern Pretenders to Wit, will never lose its just Esteem from the Wise and Good.

Venus, a beautiful good-natured lady, was the goddess of love; Juno, a terrible shrew, the goddess of marriage; and they were always mortal enemies.

‘Tis melancholy, and a fearful sign Of human frailty, folly, also crime,

That love and marriage rarely can combine, Although they both are born in the same clime.

How oft, when press’d to marriage, have I said, Curse on all laws but those which Love has made! Love, free as air, at sight of human ties,

Spreads his light wings, and in a moment flies.

Question: ‘Is it possible for true love to exist in marriage?’

Judgment of the Countess of Champagne: ‘Our ruling is hereby that love cannot extend its dominion over a married couple. For lovers indeed grant each other everything in all freedom, without the constraint of any obligation, whereas husband and wife are bound by duty not to refuse each other anything.

The Lion is the King of Beasts, but he is scarcely suitable for a domestic pet. In the same way, I suspect love is rather too violent a passion to make a good domestic sentiment.

There can be only one end to marriage without love, and that is love without marriage.

I don’t think matrimony consistent with the liberty of the subject.

Sir, it is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilized society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.

There was already at that time debate about the rights of women, and about the relations between married couples, their rights and freedom … But Natasha took no interest in such issues, and did not even understand them. Then, as now, those questions existed only for people who see nothing in marriage beyond the pleasure which husband and wife may derive from one another, and fail to see its whole significance which lies in the family.

Man and wife, a king and queen with one or two subjects, and a few square yards of territory of their own: this, really, is marriage. It is true freedom because it is a true fulfilment, for man, woman, and children.

`One does have the feeling that marriage is a pis alter,’ he admitted.

`Then don’t do it,’ said Birkin, ‘I tell you,’ he went on, `the same as I’ve said before, marriage in the old sense seems to me repulsive. Egoïsme a deux is nothing to it. It’s a sort of tacit hunting in couples: the world all in couples, each couple in its own little house, watching its own little interests, and stewing in its own little privacy — it’s the most repulsive thing on earth.’

We are just in the throes of a great revolt against marriage, a passionate revolt against its ties and restrictions. In fact, at least three-quarters of the unhappiness of modem life could be laid at the door of marriage … And everybody, pretty well, takes it for granted that as soon as we can find a possible way out of it, marriage will be abolished.

And when will there be an end of marrying? I suppose, when there is an end of living!

I think a man and a woman should choose each other for life, for the simple reason that a long life with all its accidents is barely enough for a man and a woman to understand each other; and in this case to understand is to love.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them, so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other … I will not attempt to describe.

In most good marriages, the woman is her husband’s closest friend and adviser.

I’ll suffer no daughter of mine to play the fool with her heart, indeed! She shall marry for the purpose for which matrimony was ordained amongst people of birth — that is, for the aggrandisement of her family, the extending of their political influence — for becoming, in short, the depository of their mutual interest. These are the only purposes for which persons of rank ever think of marriage.

She herself had sought dignity and she thinks that everyone should follow her example. The boys will marry eventually but their brides must be carefully chosen; they will have to be of a suitable pattern to conform with the family destiny.

For what is wedlock forced but a hell, An age of discord and continual strife? Whereas the contrary bringeth bliss, And is a pattern of celestial peace.

Hell we are Well-married, a man is winged: ill-matched, he is shackled.

Marriage is neither heaven nor hell, it is simply purgatory.

Manages (as they say) are made in heauen, though consumated in yearth.

What is there in the vale of life

Half so delightful as a wife,

When friendship, love, and peace combine

To stamp the marriage bond divine?

Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord.

Marriage is not a good, but it is a good in comparison with fornication.

On what pretence can man have interdicted marriage, which is a law of nature? It is as though we were forbidden to eat, to drink, to sleep.

Marriage itself among all races is for the one purpose of procreating children …; marriage was instituted for this purpose, so that children might be born properly and decently.

But hound, and ye shall end up with . . . jack. If you autocratically require your sweetie to do anything, odds are he’ll demur. Again, the principle of reverse desire (what you want, you can’t have) applies, but this time, with a twist: What you demand him to do, he won’t. With a vengeance. With piddling day-to-day conflicts, this dilemma can be resolved by . . . giving up. As someone once said (we think it was Krishnamurti, but maybe it was Bonnie Raitt): Release the desire and it will be yours. If you suck it up (nudge, nudge), bite the bullet (wink, wink), and give him a break, he’ll probably give you one, too.

But suppose your piddling demands become, well, un-piddling. Suppose they escalate way up, from one dinner out a week to, say, marriage. (At this point, we feel obliged to remind you that when it comes to hijackers and terrorists, the greater and more urgent their demands become, the more evident it is to the authorities that they’re completely crackers. If you catch our drift.) You’ve got a bee in your bonnet, and it’s buzzing commitment. You’re obsessed with pinning him down; it’s the fulcrum on which your entire life balances. Danger, danger: Any situation that requires the use of the phrase “your entire life” can often mean big trouble.

Such a fate befell Vicki, and her boyfriend Tim. They’d been going out for three and a half years when they decided to move in together.

“Tim’s lease was up and it seemed like a good idea. For some reason, though, I didn‘t want to live together until we were engaged. I don’t know why I felt that way_; now it seems unnecessary. But I was insecure in the relationship —I was always jealous, asking him a million questions, wanting to know what he did every second of the day. I was convinced that marriage would make me feel more secure. It seemed to me that we had been going out for so long, the next logical thing for us to do was get engaged and then live together. In that order. And I let him know it, again and again.

“He finally proposed when we were on a vacation in Hawaii. Now I realize that being engaged didn‘t mean the same thing to him that it did to me. For me, it was the first step toward the ultimate goal. For him, it was just a ticket to living with me in my apartment. He moved in and everything was fine.

“But then I wanted more. I needed to plan the wedding. My brain was practically chanting, ‘Set a date, set a date.’ It didn‘t help that my mother was calling every day, nagging me to reserve a wedding location. Tim had wanted to keep the whole thing really low-key; he didn‘t want to tell people right away. He kept assuring me that we would one day get married, but he didn‘t want to make a big deal of the engagement. I did. ‘One day’ wasn‘t specific enough for me. I persisted, and finally he relented. We reserved a night at our country club. And I was happy.

“He wasn‘t, though. He wouldn’t help me register or look at furniture. He hated everything I picked. He couldn’t seem to get around to picking ushers. I had always had this picture in my head of what an engagement was supposed to be—and he wasn‘t delivering. I kept at him to participate in my plans. He grew more and more disagreeable. I asked him a thousand times a day what was wrong; he kept insisting that everything was fine.

“Obviously, it wasn‘t. Things started falling apart. We began to make social plans with other people—it was too depressing to be alone together. One weekend, three months before the wedding, I went to visit friends in the Hamptons. When I got back, he told me how much he had missed me. Instead of telling him I’d missed him too, I demanded to know what he had done all weekend, who he’d seen, who he’d talked to. The same old stuff. He started crying and told me that he just couldn’t go on this way. He said he needed to be able to make his own decisions, live his own life. He moved out.”

You can lead a boy to the altar, but you can’t make him say, “I do.” For Vicki, that was a tough lesson to learn. And while she thirsted for marriage, Mary, thirty-three, would have settled for monogamy. She met Rob when she was working as a producer for a local New York television talk show. He was an expert guest. He was cute, witty, and had a big . . . intellect. She thought they were perfect for each other. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

“I didn‘t know he was seeing someone else until I had already slept with him. He told me that he and Peggy had been together three years—and my heart fell to my knees— but then he said it was almost over. Of course I believed him. He asked if I wanted him to break it off immediately with her for me, and I said no. My first mistake.

“A month later, he still hadn’t ended it. He also hadn’t invited me out to meet his friends or his family, although he kept promising he would. We had a bedroom relationship—not that it was all sex, but that’s just where we spent all our time. I stayed with it because I was still impressed by his credentials, his grasp (literally and figuratively) of the issues, his experience.

“Two months went by, and I assumed that he had finally ended it with Peggy. I asked him how it went, how did she take it. He said he hadn’t broken it off yet. I was shocked. I started feeling like the other woman. I didn‘t like the feeling of being taken advantage of. Our relationship became half passion, half disillusionment. It was so strange, not a normal boyfriend-girlfriend thing, more like some amorphic beast. Still, I was crazy in love with him.

“I focused all my anger on this phantom Peggy. I fixated on her even though I had never met her. She was always there with us, in bed, in my mind. All our problems were about her and his inability to break up with her. I threw tantrums. I cried. I complained. All about her. This made it easier to refuse to commit to me—who wants to pledge devotion to psycho-woman? I grilled him for information about her. I said things like, ‘Why don’t you want me? I’m young and exciting. What’s she got that I don’t have?” He wouldn’t say anything, and that made me angrier. I pressured him constantly. Eventually, it felt like I was just pressuring him to hurt me.”

Love is not a democracy. No matter how hard you campaign, you can’t make him love you, marry you, or commit to you if he doesn’t want to. “Basically,” says Dr. Sills, “if you want to move forward but your partner wants to stay in the same place, you’ve got an irreconcilable conflict of interest. Someone’s got to give in—or it ends.” Your best bet, she says, is to back off for as long as you can and see how the situation develops. But eventually, if he can’t meet your needs, you’ll have to find someone who can. In short:

COMMITMENT LUST

How it works: You demand marriage, monogamy, regular sex, you name it, from a man who cannot, by nature, take orders from anyone and like it. He reacts by . . . not reacting. How it makes you feel: Like you’re beating your head against a brick wall. Your words and sentences start to sound the same. In fact, they are the same. You’ve become a single-track person in a multitrack world. You’re even boring yourself. Overriding emotion: Frustration. No one seems to understand how important this is! Why doesn’t anyone see how important this is? This is important! How you should react: Back off. Remember when the neighborhood kids tried to feed you dirt and you said, “You can’t make me.” The same goes for him. How you do react: You insist on trying to feed him dirt, ten, twenty times a day. Why won’t he eat dirt? Will he ever eat dirt? If so, when? The upside: You learn the difference between “Will you, please?” and “Do it—or else.” You opt for the former. This makes you a more pleasant person. The kind of person that people want to do things for. The kind of person that someone might want to be with . . . for his entire life, even. It’s worth considering.

“Men have trouble with empathy and compassion,” says Dr. Eaker-Weil. “They would rather do than feel. Often, instead of being sad, they get angry. They sublimate their feelings into work and sports. They don’t talk, they just get busy. This is the best way they know to be brave and masculine, which is how they think they’re expected to act.”

So if women have to be persuaded to stop obsessing, and need to be pushed to go do something to distract themselves, men are quite the opposite. “When my fiancee and I called off our wedding,” said one thirty-year-old attorney, “I turned into a compulsive. I had gained weight over the course of our five-year relationship, and I became obsessed with losing it. Every day—and I’m not kidding —I did six hundred stomach crunches and four hundred push-ups, half in the morning, half at night. Even if I came home drunk at three in the morning, even if a girl was there, I’d do them. I started riding my bike, maybe a hundred miles a week. I got a trainer. I lost thirty-five pounds. When I wasn’t working out, I filled my time with working, dating, partying, going out with clients. I took a summer share. I did everything to stay out of the apartment_; it reminded me too much of her.”

Exercise, in fact, seemed to be the most popular diversion for the men we spoke to. “When she walked out the door,” said one twenty-nine-year-old banker, “the first thing I did was hit the Soloflex.” Several of our guys said they joined health clubs soon after their breakups. “I never was much for working out,” said one, “but now I wanted an outlet for my aggressions, my hurt feelings. I wanted to create something to do and someplace to go. Signing up with a gym seemed to be the easiest refuge for me at the time.”

Other men chose less extreme, and considerably less strenuous, measures. Many of our guys chose to leave the country — on vacation, that is. “Right before my girlfriend and I broke up, I took a job in another city,” said one respondent, twenty-nine. “I had a couple of months in between jobs, so I took a trek to Nepal for a month. After that, I was completely preoccupied with packing, finding an apartment, moving. It wasn’t until I settled down in my new home that I had time to think about how much I missed her.” Another one of our interviewees, twenty-seven, took a two-week trip to the Caribbean. “I wanted a change of setting, new faces to look at,” he said. “I needed to distract myself, but in the end, it turned out that I had a lot of time to think about what had happened. I frantically traveled from island to island, but she kept haunting me. I realized that there was no running away—wherever I was, she was.”

For those guys who couldn’t afford the high cost of air travel, going out was a popular alternative. “I went out almost every night with a bunch of guys I worked with,” said a paralegal, twenty-six. “We went from bar to bar, flirting with women, getting drunk. For the first week, everyone bought me drinks. I guess that was their way of showing me that they were concerned. I concentrated on keeping moving—that way, I wouldn’t have time to think about what had happened.”

“Men are much more interested in interaction than introspection when they’re together,” says Dr. Eaker-Weil. “They rarely share and confide in each other—in a way, it’s out of respect for privacy and space. Instead of talking about things, they like to go out and pretend nothing is wrong. Their way of showing sympathy is to keep the guy who’s upset busy. Because of this, men don’t validate each other’s feelings. When they do talk, they try to offer solutions as opposed to just plain empathy.”

Finally, many of our escape artists drowned their sorrows in pleasures of the flesh. Some of them turned to old girlfriends, what one guy sentimentally called “known entities.” According to Dr. Eaker-Weil, “Often, men are prone to return to old flames because they seek a familiar woman, someone who will validate their emotions, who will comfort them and not judge them. They’re looking for compassion.”

Other guys went the complete-stranger route, trying to heal their sprained self-esteem with the balm of fleeting intimacy. “The week after she left, I slept with about a dozen women,” said a political consultant, twenty-seven. “I wanted to prove to myself that I was attractive to other women, that she wasn’t the only woman in the world.” Dr. Eaker-Weil calls this “a power thing. A man may feel compelled to try to control new women, to exploit them, in order to feel more in control of himself. He might be angry and in some way, he’s trying to make other women pay for what he’s gone through.”

But don’t freak out—even if your ex is on a rampage, he’s not likely to find love or happiness or really anything except his own sorry petard between the sheets. None of the men we talked to felt particularly moved by their bedroom rebounds_;for them it was sex as sport rather than pleasure. “Yeah, I slept with a bunch of girls in the first few weeks of being single,” said a musician, twenty-six. “It didn’t help me feel better or make me feel worse, though. I think that for a long time, I just didn’t feel anything.”

I just didn’t feel anything. It’s a familiar refrain when it comes to men and heartbreak.

Nightmare #2: You’re standing in your kitchen, burning votive candles, eating Chunky Monkey (His favorite), singing sad songs, and the phone rings. It’s your best friend, letting you know that she saw your ex at a restaurant, snuggled up in a banquette with some blonde, acting all cozy and goofy with love, and by the way, she just has to say (with best friends like her, who needs syphilis) that this new girlfriend of his really is a knockout.

UberNightmare: You’ve actually managed to get out of the house long enough to run to the corner drugstore: You’ve had the flu for a week, your hair looks like the Exxon Valdez oil spill, and there’s a rather remarkable cold sore blossoming on your lip. You’re browsing through the votive candle aisle when you bump into your former flame, arm-in-arm with his new gymnast/model/Nobel Prize—winning girlfriend, at whom you can barely aim to spit since the light reflecting off of that big fucking diamond on her finger is practically blinding you.

Then you wake up.

Time out for a few seconds of deep breathing. Turn over, try to relax—it was only a hideous dream. At low points like these, when Satan possesses the imagination sector of your brain, it’s easy to convince yourself that you’re the only one who’s hurting. That your ex has somehow emerged from this whole thing better, stronger, more desirable, and is having the time of his life. Well, the truth is—and we’ll couch this as delicately as we can—you’re dead wrong. Guess what? Men actually do have emotions, and they experience just as much pain and suffering as we do. Maybe even more. No, really, because they’ve got to factor in the added onus of appearing strong and silent when they’re really crying on the inside. “Society frowns on men suffering,” says Dr. Bonnie EakerWeil, author of Adultery: The Forgivable Sin. “Men are pressured to know how to fix things_; if they can’t, they feel like they’re failures. They’re not comfortable with being out of control and helpless. When they think they’re losing their grip, they get angry with themselves. And so they don’t allow themselves to grieve.”

The poor dears. How ever do they manage to muddle through life crises with such squashed, underdeveloped emotions? We’re glad you asked. We talked to about a million men (okay, fifty) and asked them how they said good-bye to love. We requested them to describe in graphic, excruciating detail how they coped—or didn’t cope—with heartbreak. As we suspected, each one of our respondents reported significant post-breakup angst. Each admitted that, after She left, his life was undeniably altered in some way. “Men and women suffer in pretty much the same way,” said one guy. “The only difference is, women cry. Men get drunk first, then cry, then hunt her down.” Which is not as far from the truth as you might think. After poring over the findings of our informal survey, we’ve surmised that guys make five major pit stops en route to heartbreak. Sure, some guys might forgo a stop or two. Some guys might get lost along the way and—perish the thought of asking for directions— wander around for a while before they get back on the right track.