How Does HeartBreak Feel Like For A Man?

How does heartbreak feel like for a man – Broken heart, also popularly characterized by terms such as heartbreak and heartache is a direct comparison for the deep emotional and in few occasions, physical pain or stress one feels when there is a great longing from within.

This feeling dates back to centuries ago and it is often synonymous with the loss of a dear one, either in its literal term or the real sense of it. According to collinsdictionary, in simplified terms, heartbreak is an uneven sadness and emotional turmoil that occurs as a reaction to putting an abrupt end to an existing relationship, especially when it involves romantic partners.

This definition is still valid but kind of outdated as heartbreak is not only attached to losing a loved one, anything you are excessively attached to can cause you a heart break, this ranges from the simplest of things like you misplacing your prized gadgets, to your club losing a match etc. Emotional pain that is severe enough can lead to the bogus medical term referred to as broken heart syndrome which in worst cases can result to physical damage to affected person’s heart. The emotional pain that crawls up on individuals after a big disappointment has been linked to our human survival instinct.

The term “social attachment system” emphasizes how the human body employs pain as a mechanism to encourage humans to foster sour and relationships that have already gone south. Geoff MacDonald (University of Queensland) and Mark Leary (Wake Forest University) elaborates on the similarity that is present in how the body reacts to both emotional and physical pain and they argue that they are way beyond mere coincidence.

The concept is global and every person on the surface of this earth have always described the pain that comes along with being hurt physically in similar context as the pain that is being felt after the loss of a relationship they hold dear.

The main trigger behind how the body reacts to abrupt end to relationships still remains a mystery but, scholars have taken a guess and it involves the brain over stimulating a particular nerve that triggers muscle tightness, nausea and pain in the chest area.

Research carried out by two University of California scholars, Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Lieberman in the year 2018 proved that the way humans handle rejections causes a reaction that in turn triggers one of the processes the body uses in expressing pain. The same set of researchers carried out a study where they discovered social strain has its effects on the heart and that an individual’s personality is a main determinant in how they react to pain, be it physical or emotional.

A research carried out in the year 2011 proved without no iota of doubt that the same sensory nerves that causes intense pain during a painful physical are the same set of nerves that gets activated when rejected by loved ones and every sort of painful loss in general. Ethan Kross, a social psychologist from the University of Michigan who was heavily dedicated to the study said in his words that, the study just redefined and gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “social rejection hurts.

Men are often perceived by the society as the stronger sex and as such, they are expected to be discrete about what their feelings are, but, the truth is men are humans too and their feelings do not differ from the next human. They feel pains too just like the next available person, though, the way people handle pain is different, and no two persons will handle pain the same way.

When it comes to breaking up already established love relationships, the media already filled our heads with images of women crying their eyes out while taking shots of tequila in a remote bar somewhere for a considerably amount of weeks before deciding to go bald then taking a drastic decision of moving out of town to go and live in a faraway place in order to start life all over again.

For the men however, it seems to be a different ball game as they rarely wait out time to get over their relationship that went sour before getting hooked up and humping another lady.

This portrayal of how men handle breakups makes it seem like they handle the situation better than women, how true this is lies in the remnant of this article.

A recent study that came about through the collaboration of researchers from University College London and Binghamton University last summer may have just the answer that perfectly explains why men do not seem disturbed be the idea of breakups.

The researchers surveyed a sizable number of men who are in their mid twenties from twenty six different countries and it turned out that, men experience as much pain as women during a break up, the only difference is, women tend to go out of control emotionally while men just take it like a beast hit with a baton, they may seem unfazed by what just hit them but deep down its eating them up.

Researchers concluded that instead of men to relax, think things through and take a critical look at the part they played in the death of the relationship they just got out of, they instead move on to the next available girl without properly healing up from the previous hurt. This loosely translates to men getting physically involved with another girl days after their break up but they are emotionally absent as their heart and head is not nowhere near the new relationship they just started nurturing.

The study further emphasized how men perceives getting down with as many women as possible as a game of interest and it in course of this, it takes them a great deal of time to realize what they had lost in the earlier relationship they emotionally invested in. Women never approach things casually when it comes to dating, they take their time to carefully analyze competent suitors and then decide who to enter into a relationship with, so, when things go south, the reality of the breakup hits women harder as they never approached the relationship casually in the first place.

Another intriguing find about this study is the fact that lots of women end up being the dumped and as such, the dumpee which refers to men in this context would have been getting ready emotionally till they find the courage and the ground to exit the relationship a common knowledge. This affects the dumped i.e. the women as they were never ready for what hits them and that alone is part of the reasons why moving on after a breakup tends to be more difficult for women.

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