While we lay in bed with a pack of handkerchiefs and weep uncontrollably, analyze his behavior again and again with our best friends and watch one sad film after the next, he and his friends roam the bars. But why that's not good at all and why men suffer differently, explains expert Michèle Loetzner.
How many schnapps did he drink? – Why men deal differently with lovesickness than women
At first glance, lovesickness doesn't seem to have anything to do with equality. After all, one is a feeling, the other a social demand. Why this requirement is so important, however, can also be seen very clearly from the different ways men and women deal with lovesickness. Let's try a cliché: women reflect after a breakup, analyze their own mistakes that they have made in the relationship, look for the reason for the failure in themselves. Women get quiet. Men get loud. They get drunk with their buddies, go around the houses and tear up the next with great fanfare and witnesses. After a breakup, men seem like they don't mind the whole thing. So much for the cliché. Science confirms that: A study from Binghamton University, New York, looked at the response of men and women to a breakup. The researchers interviewed 5,705 participants from 96 countries. The result: women suffer less, but more intensely. Men suffer longer because at first they mainly suppress and compensate. They refuse to let the pain in, which in the long run creates much worse problems like depression and inability to relate. And that is certainly also a structural problem. Which brings us to equality.
"… boys who cry are crybugs."
It wasn't that long ago that boys who cry would be crybugs for granted. And even today you can still hear from mothers and fathers in many a playground: "Now stop crying, you are not a girl." Crying still seems to be something women are allowed to do and even expected of them is, and some men are still banned. That children copy everything that is shown to them is no longer groundbreaking scientific knowledge. So when fathers weren't taught to cry. When fathers don't pretend to their sons that it is okay to cry, suffer, and be desperate. And even mothers with such stupid statements want to distance boys from their emotions. How the hell should a man in our decade, after a breakup, deal with this condition differently than to mark the strong type and display traditionally typically masculine behavior (on the level of a Golf GTI meeting at the Wörthersee)? The anthropologist Craig Eric Morris, one of the three researchers in the aforementioned study, named this behavior in an interview with the online magazine Splinter News very beautiful "the excessive tinder stage". That is formulated so aptly, everyone can imagine something under it.
Unfortunately, going to the bar doesn't help in the long term
Back to men and their toxic behavior with lovesickness. Of course, he may not mind your breakup. But that is unlikely. It's not a piece of wood. Even if he's no longer in love with you, he'll mind that he hurt you. It is more likely that he doesn't know what to do with his pain except at the nearest counter. This is not meant to be an excuse for his behavior, just an explanation. And above all an indication that feminism has nothing to do with holding doors or being helped into one's coat, but with it. Holding doors has something to do with friendliness, as the author Margarete Stokowski rightly says. And nothing else. If only female role models are allowed to allow sadness, anger and suffering because feelings are still counted as purely female traits, then that's stupid. And bitter. For women as well as for men. And it sure only helps in the very short term if we behave like guys like that. Sure, you can go to the nearest bar now and pick up any man. But please don't expect it to make you feel better in the long run. It's okay for a short distraction, but if you wake up with a fat head tomorrow morning, the heartache will surely still be there. Plus: You run the risk that the hangover-related drop in serotonin will make everything look radically shitty than it already is.
Michèle Loetzner was born in Heidelberg in 1982 and studied literature, English and linguistics at the LMU Munich and the University of Helsinki. She works as a freelance journalist, copywriter and concept designer a. a. for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Plan W, Die Welt, Die Zeit and women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Freund or Glamor. Michèle Loetzner lives in Munich. "Overcoming lovesickness in 99 days" is her first book and was published by Dumont Verlag.