Speed Dating Events

Oh, so now they’re ready to talk. And talk and talk. It took shilly-shallying around before our guys were primed enough to stop and look carefully at what had happened to them. If you’ve ever had a close, platonic male friend, you know that this stage of heartbreak recovery can be the most annoying—for you, that is. You could deal with Mr. Everything’s Fine, and you had ample sympathy for Mr. Morose, although you secretly feared that he might have to change his name to Mr. Jack Daniels. You may have even helped Mr. Furtive make a crank phone call or two. But now you’re faced with Mr. All My Feelings Are Public Domain, and suddenly your female friends (even the really bitchy one who can’t stop telling you about how cute your ex has become) are looking awful good.

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.

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