It Isn’t Selfish for a Man to Get Over a Breakup Sooner Than His Ex

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This piece started off as a comment on the following article by JoJo M:

However, when I see a comment is not going to be brief, I prefer to turn it into a separate article. And it became clear to me very early on that this comment wasn’t going to be brief!

Before I proceed any further, I want to give JoJo credit for saying — and I quote — “if you are reading this and you have scrotum containing balls, you can set me straight if I have this wrong.” I appreciate the openness to learning — or rather to unlearning ideas that should be discarded.

I highly recommend you read Jojo’s article for yourself before proceeding. But for the TLDR crowd, one of the anecdotes Jojo draws on from her own friend group is about a couple named Jessica & Charles. They seemed like they were destined for each other, so their break up came as a shock to JoJo and her friend group. Here’s an excerpt:

I phoned Jessica. She burst into tears, sobbed like it was her last day on earth, and lamented their break up. She told me she still loved Charles. And then confused the devil out of me when she said it was she who broke up with him. Charles didn’t dwell on the past in the same way, at least not outwardly. For him, losing Jessica was painful, but he handled it more privately, avoided emotional displays. He never wanted to talk about it and was adept at changing the subject.

Now, what prompted me to reply to JoJo’s piece isn’t the story itself so much as what I found in the comments. One woman wrote:

Men move on quicker as they’re more selfish. We need to be too.

Ouch. So that’s it: men are just selfish bastards. End of story.

In response to that comment, JoJo herself wrote:

Yes, it is like a bereavement for us and more like an inconvenience for men

Wow…nailed it again. For us men, breakups are a mere inconvenience, because it’s not like we have actual feelings for the women we’re involved with.

Or…maybe there’s another explanation.

Starting from when I was little, when I said something that hurt a girl’s feelings, adults (both men and women) would react like I was some kind of monster. Their attitude towards me could be summed up as “How dare you hurt the feelings of this beautiful, fragile little flower?!”

But when a girl said something that hurt my feelings? The attitude I got from those same adults was “Stop being a baby.” As a young boy who was new to the world and trying to figure out where he fits in, what kind of a message do you think that sent me? The message I got was: “As a boy, your hurt feelings don’t matter. No one wants to see or know anything about them.”

In other words, one of my formative lessons was:

As a boy, the people who are supposed to care about my wellbeing will never hold space for me to share my hurt feelings with them.

In my home country (the USA) and many others, most boys learn that lesson very early on in life.

Going back to Jessica and Charles, can you see how Charles’s reluctance to talk about the breakup or display his emotions could be a learned response to life teaching him that he can’t trust those who care about him to actually be prepared to hold space for his hurt feelings?

And many men — myself included — have had that lesson reinforced to us as adults.

I’ll share an instance of from my own life.

It was brought to my attention some time ago that when a woman shares a problem with me, she might not be asking for my help in fixing it; she might instead just want me to hold space for her feelings and validate them. Okay; message received.

But I remember an occasion when I got so frustrated by a situation I was in that I felt I needed to share it with my girlfriend at the time. And this was a woman who definitely wanted me to hold space for and validate her feelings. Yet on this occasion, when I needed the same from her, what she did was to invalidate my feelings.

Yes, she was trying to help me solve the problem, but she was shaming me for feeling the way I did. So, once again…no safe space for me.

And here’s the thing: overall, I still think of this woman as a great person. But that just goes to show you how a man can love a woman and think very highly of her but still not see her as a (fully) safe place for him.

What about men like Charles moving on more quickly than their exes?

To the degree that that’s actually true, I would submit this: We men in the USA and other anglophone countries know that our chances of getting into a relationship with a woman are slim to none unless we’re willing to make the first approach.

(And even then, it might still be slim to none, but I’m not going off on that tangent here. For more on that, click the link immediately below.)

We also know that if we’re going to play the game, we have to accept that rejection is part of it. And some of us (I honestly wish it was all of us) understand that we need to accept rejection gracefully; becoming verbally abusive — let alone violent — is utterly unacceptable.

But let’s not kid ourselves: accepting rejection gracefully — knowing that you can’t avoid the pain if you ever want a shot at love — takes considerable emotional labor. Especially when the rejections start piling up, because then you’re not just dealing with the sting of each individual rejection; you’re dealing with a mounting dread that you have nothing but rejection in store for you.

To make that emotional labor manageable, a number of us men have found that when a woman rejects us, we need to accept it gracefully and then move on. Whatever emotional investment we’ve made in that woman, we need to divest it quickly. In the parlance of stock and options trading (a world I lived in for a few years), we need to “cut our losses so that we live to fight another day”.

Does this mean we lack persistence?

Hardly. It’s a matter of choosing whether to persist in trying to open a door that’s been slammed shut in your face, or to persist in continuing the search for the right door.

I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to absorb the gut punch of rejection over and over again and do so with grace unless I give myself permission to be ruthless about moving on. (And I say that as a man who’s actually taken that gut punch over and over again.)

The way I see it, if the woman wanted to say yes to me but (for whatever reason) was playing hard to get, then the ball is now in her court. Likewise if she says no to me now but later changes her mind — unless she gives me a soft no that leaves the door open for me to ask again at some point down the road. (For example: “I’m not ready for a relationship right now”.)

What does this have to do with getting over a breakup?
Picture a man who’s developed the kind of emotional nimbleness I’ve just described. Picture him in a relationship with a woman. If that relationship comes to an end, is it such a stretch to imagine that his old nimbleness reflex might kick in?

After all, the man knows that if he wants to experience love again, he can’t expect any woman to approach him; he’ll have to do the approaching. He thus needs to divest himself emotionally from the expired relationship sooner rather than later.

This doesn’t mean he sees the breakup as an “inconvenience”. He might be devastated, and he might indeed need time to grieve — though he won’t let you in on his grief if he doesn’t trust you as a safe person to do that with. But without that warrior spirit that previously helped him manage the pain of rejection, he won’t “live to fight another day”.

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And that, dear friends, is why it’s wrong to assume that a man who moves on from a breakup more quickly than his ex is selfish or was never emotionally invested in the relationship. If anything, it’s the men (and women) who get back into dating without first emotionally divesting from their ex who are being selfish.

Something to think about,

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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