In this conversational episode, Steven Bartlett and Matthew AI discuss a recent article that cites a University College London study (and a Binghamton University study) comparing how men and women experience breakups. The research suggests women feel the pain more acutely at first, often experiencing it as physical discomfort, while men tend to take much longer to fully recover, sometimes never fully healing but learning to live with the loss. The hosts contrast these findings with a social‑media poll they ran on Instagram, where 78% of respondents believed women suffer more and 64% thought men bounce back faster, highlighting a gap between public perception and academic data. They explore cultural stereotypes—men portrayed as immediately “free” and women as grieving with friends—and discuss how gendered socialization influences coping: men may distract themselves, avoid emotional processing, and lack supportive friend networks, whereas women often receive empathetic support that aids processing. Biological theories (e.g., women’s greater reproductive investment) are mentioned alongside evidence that divorced men face higher long‑term risks, including an eight‑fold increase in suicide rates. The conversation also covers men’s loss of social infrastructure after a breakup, the differing desires to reconcile (men reportedly want to get back together more), and the paradox that men may appear to move on quickly but struggle with long‑term healing. A quiz segment reinforces key study findings about shattered self‑esteem, reconciliation desire, and healing trajectories. Finally, they draw parallels to trauma recovery research, emphasizing a balance between processing emotions and moving forward, and they promote a free guide for those seeking to heal.
Questions this video answers
December 8, 2021
University College London and Binghamton University (referred to as 'Bingham' in transcript)
22% said men suffer more, 78% said women suffer more.
64% said men bounce back faster.
The hosts cite a study concluding divorced men were more than eight times more likely to die by suicide than divorced women.
Chapters
Foreign.
We wanted to talk today about breakups and, well, potentially based on an article you read, the difference between men and women in breakups and how long they take to recover. What was this article?
Yeah, so this was an article about men, men versus women after a breakup. And it cited an interesting study by University College London and a university called Bingham University in New York. Bingham. Binghamton. And they established that while breakups hit women harder at first, men take much longer to heal and move on. And this jibes with a meme that goes about on the Internet where it shows the meme is like men immediately after a breakup. And it shows the man cheering and celebrating, and he's really happy. He's, like, free. And a woman's really upset. And then it says, like, six months after the breakup or three months after, and the woman's feeling relaxed and happy and free, and the man is sad and in pain and lonely. And the fact that many people share it as a meme suggests there's something that people intuitively latch onto here. And the study also suggests that a lot of men. This is. This is a bit dark. It says a lot of men never fully recover from heartbreak. They simply learn to live with it and get on with life.
Good Lord.
I mean, that's pretty. That's pretty big deal.
Wow.
How do you. I mean, we've worked with. I wonder, because we've worked with a lot of women. Matt, what do you think?
Well, I'll tell you firstly what our audience thinks, because we put out a poll on my Instagram that said the. Matthew Hussey is the Instagram. For anyone who wants to go find that out, give us a follow on Instagram. We put out a poll that said, do you think men or women suffer more during a breakup? 22% said men suffer more, 78% said women suffer more. So that does not. That does not sync up with the study. We also asked, who do you think bounces back faster after a breakup? And 64% said men. Now, I think that that is the interpretation in both of the answers to those questions. There seems to be this. Perhaps what people are looking at is the way that men seem to be able to jump right in after a breakup. They seem to be in a better place. They seem to potentially move on in a colder way than a lot of women do. There's this caricatured notion of women who are lamenting and grieving with their friends and discussing why the relationship didn't work. And. And. And the man is out there just doing his thing. Having fun, happy for the freedom feel. Feels like he's, you know, into the next chapter of his life. I think that the bias in the poll on Instagram from our audience that doesn't accord with the results of that study is because of the interpretation of what men do initially after a breakup, which is those things that I just mentioned.
Yeah.
Now, there is another way to interpret that behavior. You could say that for men, there's that instant sense of, firstly, if. If we were to take the kind of stereotype that men aren't so good at processing their feelings or that they've never really been taught, maybe they've not been taught to be vulnerable, maybe they've not been taught to express their emotions. And frankly, maybe they don't have the friends that they can go and do that with. And maybe they even have the opposite. You know, they have friends who wouldn't reward that. So it gets straight into denial of my emotions, denial of how much this has affected me, and lots and lots of distraction activity, whether it's going out and having fun, whether it's spending time with friends, whether it's hooking up, whatever it is, it's distraction from my feelings, distraction from my emotions, or maybe even the feeling of in order to move on, I just have to keep running. If I run fast enough, I'll just outrun these feelings. And. And by the way, I think fueled in with that is the kind of male culture of, oh, wow, you're so good, you're free now. You can go and do whatever you want. You can go and be with whoever you want. You can go and enjoy yourself. Finally, you're off the hook. You could. Men's friends can be like that.
Yeah, for sure.
Right. So that, I think, feeds into this psychology of, oh, what a great thing, you're free again, or whatever. Whereas women, it's a lot less likely that that's the first place that a woman's friends are going to go. I would argue that it's more likely that a girl's friends are going to go, that's so sad. Talk to me about that. How do you feel? What happened? You know, and there. And so that's the man's side. The woman's side is that we could say, we could interpret what she's going through in this. Ice cream eating, lamenting with friends, watching movies that only seem to upset her more, listening to songs that only seem to upset her more. We could look at all of that as indulging and being in those feelings and suffering. But you could also look at that as processing. Here's a person who's actually processing their breakup. Here's a person who's actually processing their breakup, who's actually processing their emotions. And perhaps, if they're lucky, as a woman, has a group of female friends who are likely to be more of an aid in that processing than a man's friends are.
And this study does say that women might even feel that pain initially as, like, physical pain, even more acutely. More acutely than men like actual physical pain. And so it. And they said maybe there's even, like, biology in it. Like, women invest more in a relationship, and because they typically bear children, they may, like, have more investment in keeping their relationship. So there could be. And like you say, yeah, just men are taught more like, hey, what I'm. Buddy, you're out there again. You're out. It's that Austin Powers moment. I'm single again. You know, as soon as he found out his wife was a robot, my.
One true love, the woman who taught me the beauty of monogamy, was a fembot all along. With a tick, that means I'm single again.
Oh, behave. Yeah, so, yeah, I. I do think there's this weird mix of culture and biology there. And. And what's interesting is how then it seems to, like, hit men harder. You know, a lot of studies show that divorces hit men much worse over time. Like, men seem to get far worse off by divorce. Women initiate more divorces. Maybe that's part of it, I don't know. But it. It seems like men have more trouble recovering their life again. I don't know if that's disillusionment. Like, they get out there and think they're going to be like, the player and Alfie again, and then they're quickly devolved, dissolved of that. Of that illusion. And then it hits them like, oh, God, I had a really. I was really close to that person, and it was great. So it could be partly that it's.
Interesting because, yeah, you could get a certain kind of person that. That thinks he's going to go out there and suddenly be a total player and have fun, and he realizes that's either, A, not available to him in the way that he thought, or B, he is reminded that, oh, yeah, this is why I didn't. This is why I got married in the first place, is because this wasn't all. It's. This is not all it's cracked up to be. So it could be that. But I almost think that a lot of guys don't think that they're going to go out and be the player after that. I think that they just don't necessarily appreciate what that relationship may have been bringing them. It's a bit like a kid who's, you know, like you. You think that just Christmas just happens. You know, your mum does all these things behind the scenes that makes Christmas happen each year. And then if your mum were just to not do any of that, you'd go, but where's Christmas? And she'd be like, yeah, that's all the, that I do that I go, I decorate the tree, I put up all these beautiful decorations, I put on the music, I bring everyone together, I arrange the party, I create, I made the order, I did all these things, I went shopping for presents. I'm the reason Christmas happens. But you're sitting there not knowing that until it's gone. And I think that that's true for a lot of men. And I think that when they get out of a relationship it has to be true on some level. That, and I want to throw in a study here that basically said that men might be more at risk of suicide after a relationship breakdown and concluded that divorced men were more than eight times more likely to die by suicide than divorced women.
Yeah.
Which is an extraordinary number. And some of the factors that were cited were discussion of the changing nature of intimacy, men's loss of honor. Marriage is a more positive experience for men than for women. Controlling. Isn't that interesting? Marriage is a more positive experience for men than for women.
We're supposed to be good for men's long term happiness, being married.
Interesting control in relationships, the increasing importance of the care of children for men and men's social networks. You know, the point I was going to mention was about the. Which is touched on by some of these things, is the infrastructure that a lot of men lose when they get out of a relationship. A lot of men have not invested in creating community around themselves, have not invested in their friendships, have not invested in those things that, that have those daily routines that make them feel grounded and connected and rely a lot on all of those things being part of their marriage. And so I think, I do think a lot of women walk out of a marriage into a circle of friends and, and support that they've been nurturing, hobbies and tending to. And men leave to this sort of stark, barren wasteland that they've not invested in in a long time.
That's because a lot of men get into a relationship, kick back and go, oh, now I never have to make another friend again. So yeah, that's the reality. I've got a little quiz for you, Matt, of three questions. These, these are just from this article, but I'm interested what your intuitive response is and I'll give you the real answer. So who has more shattered self esteem after a breakup, men or women?
Men.
According to this. Men. It says when the relationship ends, men tend to view it as an indication of not being desirable any longer. That's why their self esteem takes a severe beating. Even if it's their partner who called off the relationship.
See, that makes sense to me.
Oh, especially, especially if it's their partner who caught off the relationship.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I think that, I can imagine that for a lot of women, they will tell themselves if there's a breakup, you know, they could say it's about me or they could just say, oh, he didn't want a relationship, he wasn't ready. And I think the stereotype that a lot of men feel is that, well, it can't be because she doesn't want a relationship, because a lot of women do want a relationship. I'm not saying that's true for all women. I know that a lot of people can be in a phase of their life where they're not ready either. But as far as what stereotypes we're used to, we're used to the idea that, you know, it's men who have a really, really hard time committing. So I think that when a man gets left by a woman, it's harder for him to tell himself, culturally, societally. That she left me because she didn't want a relationship is much more likely in his mind to be to do with the fact that she just didn't want me.
That's really interesting.
I didn't match up to the kind of man that she wanted to be in a relationship with. Okay, what's question two?
Question two. Who do you think wants to get back together more?
Men.
It is men.
Yeah, that makes sense to me because if, if men take a longer time to get over something because they realize at some point that they've lost a lot more than they had bargained for and they haven't done any proper processing of that breakup, they're going to be the ones who at some point suddenly have this panic of I've got to get it back because I can't process these emotions. God, you know, God forbid I process any emotions. And I'm suddenly, there's this giant hole in my life, I must have her back okay, what's question three?
Question three? Well, now, now this one's been a bit spoiled, but the healing process of moving on.
Right. So men, men appear to move on quicker, but have a hard time moving on in the long term.
Yeah, Men slow women faster. So it's often seen that. And I've definitely noticed anecdotally, I've seen women even when they went through a devastating breakup. Well, I mean, look, over the years, I've heard from many women who took a long time to get over a breakup. So that. That exists as well. For sure, we've coached many of those women, but sometimes I've seen they will be in a new. They might just meet someone new and they're back it like, oh, I'm actually going to give it a try with this new person. And in six months, you're like, oh, they're already in a relationship.
Right.
Like they're. They're in. And they fall in love with someone new.
Because I think they did some of the harder work in the beginning than, than men did. I think there's an interesting dichotomy not, not between men and women here. If we take that kind of, you know, if we take. Firstly, this is possible on either side, man or woman. Any human is, is capable of, you know, taking a long time to get over someone. But there's a right balance between processing and moving on. Men don't do enough processing. If we were to take this kind of archetypal, this study, right. You could say that men move on too quickly without processing. And my experience of coaching women, and yours too, I think, Steve, is that too many women spend too long ruminating over a breakup. So there's a point at which processing just becomes pointless rumination. And we're now no longer actually making progress. We're just getting stuck in a loop of emotions. I actually, you know, have coached enough men to know that men do plenty of ruminating of their own. And I've spoken to men who years later are still talking about someone that they stopped processing in a productive way a long time ago, or maybe they have never processed it in a productive way, which is why they're still ruminating. But they. They're ruminating over the long term. So this can happen to anybody. But I think that the key message from this to me is there is a time for processing that we have to be brave enough to do, and then there's a time for moving forward, which we have to be brave enough to do, which requires no longer sitting and processing that which we have already processed, but being willing to now fill that territory with new things in our life. There was an interesting study done on 911 people who had been through 911 and survived. Whether that's because they were in the building and survived or because they had family members in the building and survived, the people that got over it over time effectively were not the people who stayed in therapy talking about it over the long term. They were the people that actually decided to move on with their lives and do new things and create more in their lives and move forward. In other words, whilst processing is a healthy thing, post traumatic stress tended to be higher in people who continued to talk about the event and ruminate in the event for a long time afterwards. So I find this to be a very interesting thing and I think it's applicable to breakups. There's a time to talk about them and and there's a time to stop talking about them. And lastly, I'll just say, for anyone who is struggling from heartbreak or and wants to move on, we have a free guide for you@moveonstrong.com if you go over there now, you can download the free guide and it can be part of your blueprint for getting a little stronger today. In moving past that pain.
