Men Vs. Women: Who Gets Over Breakups Faster? (+ The New Metaverse of Dating!)

Welcome to another Love Life podcast with myself, Matthew Hussey and my brother, Stephen Hussey. Hello, Steve.

Hello, brother. Hello, Jameson and friends.

We should actually probably start introducing Jameson as well because he's always here in the studio with us. You know what? I was literally just gonna ask you and we ran out of time. I was like, Matt, should we make these purchases for the podcast like before the year end or before next year? When should we do these things? But yeah, I need a camera too. There's no camera on me. We should have a camera on Jameson. Let's talk about that because I think people people would like to see you in the room, too, not just intermittently hear you. It's lovely to be here, everyone. We've got a lot of cool stuff coming up today. We're going to be talking about the. The metaverse, the dating metaverse.

Oh, boy.

Well, at least Steve's gonna attempt to explain to me what that means. And we're also going to be talking about heartbreak, how long it takes to get over someone. Are there differences between the genders? in how long they take to get over someone who suffers heartbreak worse. Is it men or women? We're going to be talking about that. Before we get into anything, Steve, did you know that we have a brand new spanking virtual retreat coming up in March of 2022?

I did, Matt, and I can't wait to hear all about it. So please let us know.

Well, I said spanking. There won't be any spanking. I meant to say brand spanking new, not brand new spanking.

Forget it then.

That was your one stipulation. Well, there won't be spanking, but there will be a lot of really wonderful things on this retreat. It's a virtual retreat for those of you that don't know, and you could do it from anywhere in the world. It's three days of immersive coaching. with myself, my brother Stephen, Jameson's with us, my family are with us, my team are with us, and we have over a thousand people who join from all over the world to really discover how wonderful their life can be if they have the right tools. And it's a place that people come to reframe and adapt to what's happened in the past because we carry so much of the past with us and it stops us from enjoying the present. It's a place people come to get a plan for their future, to design their goals, to make key decisions that maybe they've been putting off for some time, that their life can't really move forward in the direction they want to go unless they start making those decisions. It shows people how to create an undisturbed center so that they can enjoy the present. And what I mean by that is so many things go wrong in the present. There's always going to be something that comes along to disturb our peace. But if we have a core of our being that is undisturbed even in the difficult times in life, then we'll learn to find our peace and our joy and our happiness in all sorts of different circumstances. The key is not stopping everything from changing. The key is being confident through change. We're going to create a daily practice that you can follow every single day to have extraordinary days. And this is different from the things that you do to achieve your goals. This is just a daily practice that makes every day great, independent of how much progress you're making towards your goals. We're going to give you a blueprint for having a different kind of relationship with yourself so that you can be confident on a level you've never been before. And I'm going to give you a plan for changing the dynamics that you're experiencing with the people in your life, whether it's a relationship or someone you're dating and you want to change the boundaries of what's acceptable, you want more from that situation and that person, you want to redefine the boundaries, or whether it's with your mother or your brother or your father or your best friend, anyone in your life who right now is causing you some kind of pain or suffering. Our relationships have this incredible ability to make us very unhappy if the dynamics are something that is toxic or not meeting our needs. I'm going to show you how to change the dynamics in those relationships. All of this is happening over three immense days in March of 2022 from the 18th to the 20th. And for this month only, that is the month of November. So it's almost over. There is an early bird offer for the virtual retreat, which means this is the cheapest tickets are going to be between now and the event. So if you know you want to come to this, do not delay. They're only going to get more expensive. This is the best deal that you're going to get. And it's only available between now and the end of the month, this month, November, go to mhvirtualretreat.com to get your early bird special ticket while they're still available. And now on to the episode. Well, Steve, here we are. We have some really great stuff to cover today. We had actually a voice note that was sent in. to the podcast@matthewhussie.com email address. This is of course the email address that you can send in your questions, your stories. You can either type them or you can send us a little voice note as this person has. So Steve, who do we have a voice note from?

Hello Matthew and Stephen. This is Anna. I'm sending this from Mexico City. I'm a recent fan. I really enjoy the podcasts and the videos on YouTube and things that I've read. I think the podcasts like yours, they just, there's like this daily pill that I can take every day just to.

Remember.

That I deserve to be treated better, that I deserve to treat myself better, and that other options are possible and that I just have to keep at it and not lose sight of the right direction. So thank you very much. I think you are both very different, but in your own unique way, you are both very kind and compassionate and funny and smart. And I really love the way that you speak, that you talk to each other, like really this very playful way, but that can get serious. And you can address very important issues. So thank you very much.

Well, I think that's a lovely voice note, and I really, really appreciate that, Anna. And I'm glad we've been able to keep you company and help you through things. And Matt, she reflects something I've heard from someone else who said that they went, you and your brother are quite different, but I like you together.

What do you think they mean when they say that we're quite different?

I think they see me as a ponderer, a thinker, some kind of lone wolf intellectual maverick, and they see you as a kind of flashy, rakish sort of swaggering like Rick Mayle with a cape and go, here I am, baby. You're the kind of swagger, you know, so I.

Sorry, I just love that your idea of swagger is Rick Mail in a cape.

I was thinking of Rick Mail in black ador and he swaggered in with his cape. Is he Captain Flashheart or something? I just think you're like, yeah, hey, I'm here.

I just love that. I love that it's not like some sort of cool person who's on the scene right now. Like, it's not, you know, what's he called from, you know, the French, French guy who's in everything now, in every movie.

He was in Call Me By... TimothY Shalome.

TimothY Shalome. Yeah, he's not like, it's not like TimothY Shalome walking in and he's just got a bit of a cool, sexy thing going on. It's, no, it's Rick Mail from Drop.

Dead Fred in a cape. Big British personality.

Classic. Half the world's not even gonna know.

Who you're talking about. I am not making that reference for.

Half the world, Matt. Right. Well, it's nice to know. It's nice to know that you've given yourself all of the very grounded and intellectual aspects of this podcast. And I'm the hard on that just sort of walks into the room.

Big brush figure. Oh, we need, you need both.

So should we change the podcast to Steve and the Walking Boner?

You need Lennon and McCartney. You can't do the Beatles without either one.

Again, another very grandiose reference. that includes you this time. Well, that is a lovely message. And I love, there's a couple of things that you said, Anna, that I loved. You said the desire, the knowledge that you deserve to be treated better, the daily reminder that you need to be treated better and deserve to be treated better, I should say, and that you deserve to treat yourself better, which is of course where it all starts, isn't it? it's very hard to convince somebody else to treat us better when they see us treating ourselves poorly. We have to lead by example. And you also said something interesting when you said other options are available. That just the date, the reminder that other options are available if I just stay the course. And that's a, that's a difficult thing, isn't it? To, we have to have faith that something better is coming for us.

Yeah.

That if we don't accept something that's wrong for us, if we don't accept the wrong treatment in our relationships, not just romantic but otherwise, that something better is on the way. Of course, that's something you can experience also in leaving a job, you know, leaving a situation, any situation in life where you feel like it's not nourishing you, it's not meeting your needs. There's a certain degree of faith that something better is coming. I've often felt that, Steve, at times in my career where I've said no to things that felt like an opportunity, but they didn't feel right in my gut. They didn't feel like they were something good. They felt something a bit cheap about it. It felt like there was something off brand about it, something that wasn't quite me about it. And there was a temptation to say yes to it because I thought, God, what if nothing else good ever comes to me outside of this thing? Maybe I should say yes to it. And I wrote a note to myself this morning that just said, this is literally this morning I wrote this while I was in the gym. I said, if I just work hard, the offers I want will call.

Wow.

You know, they'll. They'll call whoever it is, whoever it is I'm thinking about. Sooner or later, they'll call, because it's. It's about not just taking the easy wins in front of you, but continuing to do great work and continuing to be a great person with the trust and the faith that something good is coming for you. If you continue to do those things.

So true. Warren Buffett says you're standing there with a baseball bat and everyone's saying swing your bum, but sometimes it's about waiting for the right pitch to come. That's really good that you're gonna swing it.

Well, send. Send in your emails to podcast@matthewhussy.com. we would love to read them, whether they're a written note or a voice note.

Speaking of Timothee Chalamet, as you were before, Matt. Yeah. I've been looking to the future lately. I went and saw June with our brother Harry, which is set about 7,000 years in the future.

Which he stars in, of course.

Which he stars in, and you know, it's a sexy future if Timothee Chalamet is involved, because he's a... You know, I like Timothee Chalamet, but I think June made me really get Timothee Chalamet.

Yeah, he's really got that sort of Rick Male quality about him, hasn't he?

Very opposite characters, but yeah, full of charisma, Shalome. He's a very handsome young man, but he's also just very charismatic and a very good actor. So fair play.

Once again, I'll remind you this wasn't who you compared me to.

Right, right. Fair enough.

So it is just sort of getting worse.

So speaking of the future, I want to talk about the future of dating, possibly the next decade of dating. And this is, of course, the advent of the metaverse of dating. Matthew now, the metaverse is a big term that's been thrown around a lot lately. Some people won't have heard it. Some people are going bloody sick of hearing about the bloody metaverse. I want to escape the bloody universe to get rid of it already. But there's talk that this is where dating is going.

So, let's just rewind. What is the metaverse?

The metaverse, you know, if something is meta, it's above or outside of, you know, that's why you got metaphysics, which is like what the nature of things of themselves, you know, but the metaverse is essentially an alternate universe above or outside of our own universe. It's seen as this is where the internet is going. This is the next stage. Now, sometimes these things go on endless hype cycles and never live up to it. But sometimes it really is where things are going. We may be in the early stages, we don't know. But the idea is you have virtual reality. You have full Online spaces, you have worlds you can actually immerse yourself in completely where there might be the office, shopping, hanging out with people, going to bars, conferencing, and all this stuff we're doing now sat in front of our screens, we might do in a Ready Player One type scenario.

Which is also sort of what the I suppose the show upload was based on the idea of a metaverse after you die, that you can pay to upload your mind, your memories, your personality, your consciousness into this afterlife metaverse so that you can continue living, which of course there are theories out there that one day we will be able to do that and that may be our best shot at immortality.

Gotta give it a go.

So, okay, how does the metaverse relate to dating, Steve? Well, this has been a sort of Topic that's suddenly come to light. Yeah.

So obviously online dating, it, you know, it's been around a long time now, but it like obviously exploded over the last decade with Tinder and the apps and it really came into its own. And that's something that was always there, but then really tipped over into mainstream. And I suppose this could go the same way. I suspect it will just live alongside the current internet. I don't know if it will replace it entirely, but the idea is that you know, everyone knows Match is the biggest dating company. They own Tinder and a bunch of the big dating apps. And I think they see it as there's this company called Hyper Connect in Korea, and they kind of have this vision for using real time virtual spaces like a bar where you'll have live conversations. They've talked about a place called Single Town where users will interact in real time or they can connect privately and go and talk private. And so I guess it's like, well, you find online dating a bit, you know, a little bit of a remove now. Well, maybe this is a more immersive version where you get to go on a date with the actual person in the metaverse. You can actually sit across from them virtually. Maybe their avatar has a way of linking to your verify, you know, it has to be verifiable. So maybe your avatar has to look like you or something, but. you know, you can actually get a better sense of dating them without leaving your living room.

Do you do you sort of feel like in some sense we haven't come that far from like AOL instant chat from back in the day like this this I, you know, when was it what was AOL chat called?

It was just just AOL chat.

AOL chat. It was like one of the OG ones that I just remember using and thinking, this is unbelievable. I'm talking to someone in real time somewhere else in the world, and it still had this incredible novelty about it.

And.

And somewhere along the way, I don't know, it feels like we sort of departed from that a little bit in the sense that it. It's become commenting on posts, commenting. on videos. But I just remember that real-time chat was something that had this appeal at the beginning of what most of us experienced as the internet. The metaverse of dating is this environment that puts an actual avatar to that and a physical space, I suppose. or a metaphysical space that we can exist in and talk to someone. I'm fascinated to think about what does this do, what does this allow people to do that they might not do in real life? You know, like, what does it give people that they don't get in real life? What do you think, Steve?

You could just see it as a convenience thing where you can do the things you would do in real life much faster together You could go to a live concert together in the metaverse. You could go to the shops. You could hang at a bar. And people might just be like, I bloody hate having to get into the car, dress up on the date, and go to the bar. Now I can find out if we have chemistry in the virtual bar and...

But are... Move on. Are we saying that your face, your actual face, that you take a picture and it sort of wraps your face around this avatar's head? Or are we saying that you choose a face for your avatar?

Well, this is the interesting part, isn't it? I think if it is just the real you, then it is an extension of the online app dating experience. The virtual you then just adds all.

These possib- yeah, but is it gonna actually get people's accurate, are people gonna lie about their body shapes? Are you gonna get, is there gonna be an unnatural number of six foot two men in there?

That's the tricky bit.

Where you go, they can't, they can't, is it, are we gonna have to actually take pictures and verify the body shapes and the ratios that we put on there so that what we actually look like is what we look like?

We might, right? We might have to do body scan or something for it. If it's the avatar version, like it adds this weird possibility, right? Which I'm sure will definitely happen where some people will have an entirely virtual relationship and never meet. and they will only date in the metaverse and meet up. Could be someone across the world, right? And you just put on your headset and go on these dates. It's a little limited on the old physical side.

Unless you know, once they start involving haptic suits.

Right.

And now you can get it on via the haptic suits. That's game over, mate.

Right. I mean, you've looked into haptic suits more than I have, it seems. But. that's beyond my pay grade.

Well, no, no, they've. Steve, I'll have you know, and I'm not. Before you make your little joke, I haven't been to one of them, but I've walked past those places in Tokyo where you. This VR porn, you can go into a place and there's VR porn, but you're actually wearing a haptic suit as you're watching VR porn.

You said you were going to hike Mount Fuji that day.

That's what some people like to call it. No, yeah, hiking Mount Fuji does sound like a euphemism from the beginning. I find this pretty fascinating because if you can suddenly just be what you think is a better looking you, or a different person altogether and exist in this world where you could potentially be better looking, build up social capital that you don't have in the real world and essentially be a rock star in the metaverse that you don't feel like you are in your real life. That then gets a little scary, doesn't it?

There may just be all the same status games anyway. If there's like, because they're talking about these things, well, there's these things are now Tinder coins, but they talk about extending those and Then it's just like, who buys more flashy stuff in the metaverse and has the flashy car or the flashy thing they show off? Or let me show what I can afford for my avatar.

Right, right. Yeah, there'll be some the equivalent of a blue tick next to your head in the metaverse that shows that you're someone of status or who has a lot of followers in the metaverse. Yeah, it's very interesting.

Yeah, it could. I, that's one of my, I'm not pessimistic the way some people are on, like, the future of dating. I think there are problems and concerns I have, but I, you know, there's things that might be better, right? We might just get more, better at matching people or online dating just does allow you to meet people you wouldn't have otherwise found in your city. And there's, there's certain matching potential in online dating that doesn't exist normally. But I think if you end up with, like, even more strattered stuff where, like, there's closed off influencer corner of dating and everything just gets even more stratified, doesn't it? And there's. There's this kind of weird, weird dystopian, like, stratified Society. So, yeah, I I don't know. I'm not. I think we have to be careful of status quo bias here where people. are just scared of everything new. But it'll probably be like, like online dating. It'll probably be a mixed old bag.

There is something interesting. The most of everything that's been mentioned, the most practical application I can, I, i've seen from, or I can imagine from this, is that idea of being able to go on a date with someone who's not in your immediate area. you know, I don't think that it would be a shame if the metaverse stopped you going to a movie with someone who you could easily go to a movie with in your actual town. That would be a sorry state of affairs. But if it can get you on an actual date with someone who is a little further out or can't be in the same place as you right now, that's sort of interesting. A lot of potential for long distance relationships, if nothing else.

One thing I will say, Matt, is it could make dates a lot cheaper.

That's a very good point.

A lot of time, a lot of money on dates. If you go on a lot of them.

And that is a big complaint of a lot of men.

So maybe this is the savior we all needed.

I think you're just talking about yourself here, Steve. I think you're projecting.

I do spend money. I do spend money on dates for the record. I'm not going to have it said that I don't.

All right. Wow, you're a real chivalrous man.

Thank you, Matt.

What do you think of the metaverse out there? Leave us a send us an email. Let us know what you have. Is there some big pro or big con about this that we haven't considered? Email podcast@matthewhussie.com let us know your thoughts on the dating metaverse. God help us. Well, Steve, we wanted to talk today about breakups and, or 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 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 they 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 the 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 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, I, 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 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 the man is out there just doing his thing, having fun, happy for the freedom. feels like he's 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 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, well, 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. Men's friends can be like that.

Yeah, for sure.

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 gonna 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 they're. 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 so it could be and like you say, yeah, just men are taught more like, hey, what on, 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 and, yeah. So, 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 gonna be like the player and Alfie again, and then they're quickly dissolved 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.

I think it's not, It's interesting because yeah, you could get a certain kind of person 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 gonna 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 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 shit 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 hors d'oeuvres. 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. Control in 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 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 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 kickback and go, ah, 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 called off the relationship.

Yeah, I, that makes a lot of sense to me. I think that I, 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. It's 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 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 forbid I process any emotions. And 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, it's been a bit spoiled, but the healing process and 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, 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've fallen in love with someone new.

Because I think they did some of the harder work in the beginning than, than men did. I, 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'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 9 11, people who had been through 9 11 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 there's a time to stop talking about them. Now, Steve, before we end this, we've got a quick review I want to read from Payal. Dear Matthew and Stephen, I'm going through a breakup and while I dated the guy for only six weeks, his gaslighting and attacks on my personality was enough to have eroded my self-worth and self-esteem. Since then, I've had high anxiety, and one of the only things that grounds me every day are your podcasts. I've listened and re-listened to several of them and continue to do so every day since the breakup. Your nuanced perspective on relationships, your thoughts on vulnerability as a strength, your words on self-love and choosing oneself each time, along with, of course, all the brotherly banter have allowed me to survive this harrowing time. Your words give me the courage to continue to love. So one day I will meet the man who truly deserves me. Thank you for creating the work you do. It sure saves lives. It has saved mine. Love, Payel. Thank you, Payel, for that beautiful letter. And for anyone who wants to tell us what you think of this podcast, we always appreciate a review on iTunes. If you go to our podcast, Love Life, on iTunes and leave us a review that really means the world to us and we do read 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 at 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. Stephen, thank you so much.

Thank you brother and all our support to anyone out there going through a breakup right now. Yeah, I hope you download that guide and it helps you along the way.

We'll see you in the next episode guys. Love to you all.