Speed Dating Events

Nightmare #1: You’re sitting in your living room, burning votive candles, poring over photos of Him, and the phone rings. It’s your best friend, telling you that she saw the ex-love of your life at a party, drinking, laughing —laughing!— flirting, high-fiving all over the place, celebrating his newfound freedom . . . oh, and one more thing, she hates to say it (sure she does), but boy, does he ever look great.

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.

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