Speed Dating Events

Stop number one for most men: In this stage, a man will deal with his problems by simply . . . not dealing. He’ll do just about anything to distract himself from the sad topic at hand—e.g., if he thought that walking over hot coals might help him get his mind off things, he’d happily march right over them. “There’s nothing like a good bungee jump to put things in perspective,” said one thirty-four-year-old respondent. Whatever you say, Geronimo.

“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.

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