© 2014 Trinette Reed Photography
We’ve all seen it happen: A couple breaks up and the woman still isn’t ready to even look at another guy for months. Meanwhile, her ex has a new girlfriend a few weeks later.
There’s a reason for this, according to new data from Match’s Singles in America survey: Guys just get over breakups faster. Match surveyed more than 5,000 men and women and found that half of dudes are over a rejection in a month, while the average woman takes four months to get over it. Yup, that sounds about right.
Licensed clinical psychologist Ramani Durvasula, Ph.D., author of Should I Stay or Should I Go?, isn’t shocked by the findings either. “There are likely several reasons for this,” she says. “Men are not reinforced or socialized for emotional communication the same way as women, relationships may often have a different functionality for men, and men at a certain younger age may not feel the same pressure about family planning and marriage.”
Men who move on faster may also be good at compartmentalizing, meaning they can just put their old relationship in the past and look at a new dating experiences for what they are—something new and different. And, she says, men may also be better about making sex just be about sex, rather than something emotional.
But while licensed marriage and family therapist David Klow, owner of Skylight Counseling Center in Chicago, isn’t surprised that men say they move on from breakups faster than women, he points out that “what they report and what is actually happening may not be the same thing.”
Klow says men aren’t necessarily better at moving on from rejection than women, noting “what might seem like quickly moving on could be someone masking the symptoms of grief.” He also points out that, when it comes to breakups, moving on faster isn’t necessarily better. “For most of us, taking our time and processing through a loss or rejection is in fact healthier than quickly moving forward,” he says.
