How to get over a breakup for teenage guys? Your first few breakups as a young man, or perhaps still teenager, especially below the age of let’s say 18 years old, are quite different from breakups at an older age. But they are a great opportunity to set the groundwork for a lot of personal growth and learning how to work through breakups, so let’s talk about it. Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster. Here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriends. 

So, the key idea of this post, is to encourage young men to find wisdom and support from men who are more experienced, so if any of you who are watching already went through a bunch of painful breakups and learned your important life lessons from them, I’d love to see what advice you can give for the younger generation in the comments section.

In case you guys don’t know it, I actually have a second YouTube channel that is called “Masculine Retrospective”, which relates a lot to breakups and mistakes with women. When you’re a young man, you tend to have absolutely no idea about dating and relationships, especially because as a young man, you are not always attractive to the girls. The 14-year old will date an 18 year-old, the 20-year old will date a 26-year old, and the 25-year old could even date the 38-year old guy. So of course, because of this, the younger you are, the less you will date around, because your time has not yet come, so to speak. 

As a result, a woman will generally be more “developed” or experienced about breakups. It’s more normal for a woman to gain a lot of attention from guys, and it’s more normal for her to go from one guy to another. So, as a guy, you are at quite the disadvantage at a young age. Not only are you less experienced, men are also less cognitively advanced at a young age. You’re about 2 years behind girls, and just in general, once you grow a little older, you will realize that when you thought you were smart and intelligent, the way you constructed thoughts and ideas was actually very simple. And as a result, when your first breakups hit you, you will have extremely irrational feelings about yourself and your ex, and some of your actions after a breakup might be extremely embarrassing or funny to you when you look back at them 10 years from now.

And this is not meant to shame you, ridicule you, or make you feel bad about yourself. Honestly, to a large degree, you probably won’t even realize that you did silly things after the breakup. In fact, I think you should mess up a little bit, or do weird stuff, like being too obsessed with your ex-girlfriend, stalking her social media accounts for hours, and so on. Not that I think these are good things to do, but you’re only young once. We do dumb stuff when we’re young, and that is Okay, and it’s part of growing up and learning to not repeat those mistakes.

But, here’s one thing that you can do if you have a breakup as a young guy, especially if that breakup was a bit more serious. What I mean by more serious is that if you really can’t eat, sleep, need to think about your ex girlfriend all the time, and just generally, the entire situation is making your entire life more difficult, such as, for example you are neglecting your school work, then it’s perhaps a good idea to do two things:

One, go and start hitting the gym. And if you cannot afford the gym, find ways how you can do calisthenics outdoors and find some friends to work out together. But, you can probably find student discounts and other workarounds to get affordable access to a gym. So don’t give up on that idea too soon if you think it’s impossible.

Second, and I wish this is the thing I would have done a lot when I was younger… Find yourself a mentor. It could be a general mentor, but a gym mentor would probably be the best idea. This idea may sound crazy or intimidating to you, but you would be surprised how kind, knowledgeable, and helpful older men will be if they know they can help out a younger guy become more confident, work on his body, resilience, strength, and so on. I think most men know that feeling of being insecure at the gym and feeling like an outsider, as if you don’t belong. This feeling applies to everything in life. 

Being insecure at the gym, being insecure in social settings, being insecure with women, and being insecure with starting a business. All of these fears are things that every man has to deal with at some point in his life. And if he wants to gain better results in life, he has to overcome those fears. So I guarantee you, if you are 20 years old, almost every guy who’s 30 years old would gladly help you, mentor you, spend a little bit of his time to help you grow into a more confident man. There’s no time to feel more confused and more insecure than right after a breakup as a young man. You will make stupid mistakes, and yes, that is part of life. 

But if you just had a breakup, then this is the best time to learn how to prevent making many of these mistakes in the first place. The sooner you learn to not lose your composure after a breakup, the quicker your recovery periods will be, and the stronger you come out from them as a man. Growth tends to compound. Imagine if you learn a lot of breakup lessons already at the age of 20, versus only learning some harsh lessons at 28. The degree to which you will have personally grown, is in direct correlation with the right advice and insights from someone who’s already gone through many of these problems. The more you learn early on, the easier it will be for you to get to the next level and stage in life.

Watching this channel, of course, is a great way to feel connected, feel less heartbroken, to feel like somebody understands you, and to learn from my advice what you should do next. But in the end, nothing could ever beat a mentor that you see once a week, whether that’s for a formal sitdown at the coffee shop, or simply to help you kick ass at the gym and to maximize your gains and to feel confident about yourself again.

The biggest struggle after breakups is the constant rumination about your ex-girlfriend, and how your feelings relate to her. What tends to happen after breakups, especially our first few breakups, is that our thoughts kind of go nowhere. They go in circles, round and round, and we don’t really use the heartbreak productively to direct all the negative energy to turn it into something positive. And a part of that is probably because at a young age, you simply cannot put all the pieces together. Everything is new to you. Heartbreak is new to you. How to feel about an ex girlfriend leaving you and being quite cold about a breakup can be extremely confusing. Perhaps it shatters some of your idealistic ideas about love and you don’t know how to cope with the fact that everything you believed up until that point wasn’t an accurate picture of how love works.

When you have a mentor who has gone through all these struggles, and has come out for the better from all of these difficulties to find a happy relationship, then you can learn a lot from his perspective. He’ll be able to answer questions in simple terms, that otherwise would drive you insane and even after countless hours of ruminating over them, you wouldn’t have come to any useful conclusion by yourself.

Now, of course, finding a mentor sounds like an intimidating proposition. After all, how the heck can you find a mentor? Just walk up to the person? Especially if we’re talking about a “breakup mentor”, it’ll probably come as a shock even to a guy if you tell him, “Hey, I just had a breakup and I am looking for a mentor to learn from”…

So, what I suggest to you is frame it differently. The best way to come out stronger after a breakup as a man is to hit the gym. Especially as a young man. Most younger guys feel insecure at the gym, and have never bulked up or gotten a lean and athletic muscular build. But when you transform yourself into a more attractive version of yourself after a breakup, it does wonders to boost your confidence.

So, I suggest you find a gym mentor, and you can be honest with such a mentor, that you just had a breakup, and you want to work on yourself, change yourself for the better, and become disciplined and overcome your heartbreak with discipline. You will surely get some free breakup advice along the way without ever asking for it, for example, if you meet the guy once week at the gym, he will surely eventually be OK to sit down with you for a post-workout meal, and that’s where I am sure you will be talking about life, women, relationships, and even if the conversation isn’t directly about your breakup and your ex-girlfriend, you will learn a lot about how to put the breakup into perspective in the grander scheme of things.

I will never forget when I was about 25, quite shy and I was sitting down with a 32-year-old Spanish guy in Metro Manila. He just casually talked about refusing some women who wanted to hit the beach and have a threesome with him. We were worlds apart in our confidence with women. I couldn’t possibly believe how a man could be so confident, but in that single conversation with him, I learned a lot about his philosophy around confidence, dating, and not taking yourself too seriously when talking to women.

Of course, it took many more years for me to finally become confident and attractive enough to the point that I could easily find a girlfriend, but the point is that you want to gather these insights sooner rather than later. If you just went through a breakup and you are going through a phase of re-evaluating your life, your personality, your approach with women, and so on, then this is the best time to have these kinds of conversations, and to be learning from other men.

There are, of course, also other ways how you can learn from men, such as attending a men’s circle. Men’s circle, or often also just called a men’s group, are rarer and not every city has them, and depending on the culture in your country, they may not be a thing at all. But if someone in your city organizes a men’s group, then it’s the easiest way to meet men and learn from other men because the expectation of the group is already to get together in order to learn from each other by sharing our individual experiences in life.

The moral of the story is that every man in the world knows what it’s like to be a young man with insecurities, fears, doubts, and of course, heartbreak. And most good-hearted men will be happy to give the next generation a helping hand. So if you just had a breakup, try to find ways how you can meet someone who can act as a mentor, or at least, as someone from whom you can learn from.

For example, if you are planning to hit the gym, which I highly recommend to you after a breakup, simply go to the reception of the gym and ask the male owner or some of the male gym teachers about your idea of looking for a gym mentor, and even if they themselves won’t have time for it, they may actually be able to help you out. The main idea is to stay connected. Don’t just ruminate in your own thoughts. 

As a young man, it’s just far too easy to get lost in them. It’s much better for you to find a valve which helps you to direct and process all your thoughts about yourself and your ex-girlfriend. And even if the entire idea of finding a mentor sounds too intimidating to you, at the very least, try to find some kind of outlet for all of it.

Hit the gym. Starting preparing for a marathon or a triathlon. Start bouldering and challenge yourself to one day be able to climb the hardest level at the boulder gym. Join a startup competition and try making a simple business idea work. In the end, breakup pain and heartbreak is just energy, and it’s up to you how you choose to convert that energy into the next-best thing. So, good luck. Stay active. Stay positive. Find something or someone who inspires you to grow, and convert any negative energy within you into a boatload of positive energy.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.