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Relationships

12th Nov 2021

Men suffer more emotional pain after a break up than women – apparently

Ellen Fitzpatrick

This changes everything.

There are so many stereotypes out there when it comes to women dealing with a break up, from belting out Taylor Swift to crying into a tub of ice cream, we’ve all done one of them.

With women being portrayed as the heartbroken mourners at the end of every relationship, but apparently, men are a lot more emotional when it comes to the end of a relationship.

According to the University Of Lancaster, this might be a thing and it was definitely the last thing we expected.

Psychologists there decided to carry out a study of unknown people who post about their relationship issues online.

Looking at genders who feel “the most” pain after a breakup, they also looked into the main causes of relationship breakdowns.

With communication coming in first place, one in five people said that this was their biggest problem and found it hard to discuss relationship issues with their partner.

One in eight people claimed that trust issues were another big problem.

The team at the university also found out that men talked more openly about their feelings after a break up than women did and tend to like talking about their break up.

Male users spoke mostly about “regret, crying and heartache” and psychologists say that the idea of men being less emotionally invested might not be true.

They added that men are “at least as emotionally affected by relationship problems than women”.

Dr Ryan Boyd, a psychologist who worked on this study, said that “women are more likely to identify relationship problems, consider therapy and seek therapy than men”.

“When you remove the traditional social stigmas against men for seeking help and sharing their emotions, however, they seem just as invested in working through rough patches in their relationships as women,” he explained.