How to get over your first major breakup as a man? The first big breakup is usually the hardest, and the one where men tend to make the biggest mistakes, so, let’s talk about it.
Hey guys, welcome back to the Breakup Corner, I’m Andi Galster, and here I teach men how to move on from their ex-girlfriend. If this is your first major breakup with a woman, then I hope you haven’t made any mistakes yet that you might be embarrassed by in the future, but whatever happened with you so far, I’ll assume that you probably are going through a lot of unexpected pain and emotions that are hard to control.
And that is perhaps the number one thing that any man needs to learn about breakups. The most important thing to do after a breakup is to control your emotions. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be emotional, sad, anxious, in panic, angry, jealous, feeling betrayed, or whatever you may feel in particular. Of course, when you lose a woman who meant a hell of a lot to you, it’s natural that you feel all kinds of emotions and especially when you’ve never felt certain types of emotions, it’s very difficult to anticipate how you’ll respond to them.
For example, if you’ve never been cheated on, you won’t know how angry or hurt you’ll be. Maybe you’ll say something bad to one of her family members about it. If your girlfriend dumped you unexpectedly, then you might be extremely shocked and feel as if she’s doing something that’s not justified or that’s heartless. If you thought things were getting more serious, but then she broke up with you, you might be going into extreme full-on panic mode.
The first major breakup is usually always the hardest because you have absolutely no reference to anything that you’re about to feel, think, say, or do. And also, we guys tend to be quite stoic most of the time. Of course, we’re not robots, but we usually operate on a very rational mental framework from a day to day basis. So when you have your first major breakup, it’s quite likely that it will be one of the first times in your life that you have to deal with an extreme spectrum of emotions, and also in general, extremely strong emotions.
Actually, this is one of the things that separates men and women biologically in terms of negative emotions. Women are more neurotic than men, meaning, women experience negative emotions more often, and more vividly. So as a man, you are not used to huge emotional fluctuations. Depending on your life’s circumstances, so far you may have never gone through a period of extreme negative emotions, and on top of that, losing those closest to you is also a very unique, and disturbing emotion.
So as a man, dealing with that onslaught of unexpected emotions can be.. Well… Overwhelming might put it mildly. But it’s perhaps not a bad word. Overwhelming… You have no idea how to handle so much bad stuff going on at the same time. When you have to deal with a lot of unusual emotions, you are bound to give the wrong response to them. Strong emotions often make us reactive. So that means: We see, we do.
We don’t calculate how we’ll respond to the emotions, we simply instinctively respond the way it feels right in the moment. Partially it’s because the emotions are stronger than anything we’ve ever known. There are more of them than we’ve ever experienced. They’re all unfamiliar, and it feels as if all of them are overwhelming you far too quickly.
Getting hit in the face with an insane amount of breakup pain is like a fist that’s about to hit your face. You’ll instinctively move your hands up, move backwards, try to flinch out of the trajectory and so on… You won’t even think about doing it. Your body literally will move all on its own. That’s kind of how we often act with our first major breakup. Anything that seems like a threat to our identity, personality, dignity and happiness needs to be countermeasured with what your body believes is the right way to solve the problem.
In the case of a serious breakup, especially if it’s the first one, this often reflects in begging and pleading with an ex-girlfriend to give you another chance. Other ways of how you may be making big mistakes could be stalking your ex-girlfriend, either excessively even in real life, or simply by frequently checking up on her social media profiles. Some guys start immediately opening up dating apps to meet a new woman, whereas other men may spend a lot of money impulsively on travel trips, whereas others may quit their jobs because they think they need a big change in their lives immediately to solve their problems.
What all of these things have in common is that they are often instinctive or near-automatic reactions. Instead of thinking through whether these things are good actions to take or not, they feel like they could solve your problem in the moment, and as a result, you take action without first evaluating the pros and cons of said action. And often you don’t even accurately assess whether it will result in the outcome that you want.
For example, most reasonable men will be able to tell you that dating right after a breakup, or going on dating apps is likely not a great idea. Can it work out? Sure, anything is possible, but it is unlikely. Even a young man with little dating experience would at least have a hunch that it wouldn’t be a smart choice.
As you can see, when you approach breakups from a rational perspective, you are much less likely to not make mistakes that you may regret in the future. Of course, most mistakes aren’t written in stone, nor will you feel bad about every mistake for the rest of your life. To err is human. But the simplest thing that you can do as a man after a breakup is to not give in to your impulses right away and simply sit on any decision that you were about to make for at least a few days.
Yes, of course, it’s possible to still make the wrong call after days of ruminating about a tough call. For example, you may consider whether you should be messaging your ex-girlfriend for days or weeks, and eventually you finally decide to reach out to her and that may still have been a mistake. So, certainly, not every decision that you delay is going to magically become the right decision. But as a general rule of thumb, making sure to take some time to think things through, rather than being reactive to your emotions is going to help you greatly with reducing the amount of mistakes that you are going to make after a breakup.
Half of the battle after a breakup is about not making things worse. Losing the girl that you love is already worse as it is, and by making poor choices, you will only feel worse than before. There are of course other things you still need to consider, such as making sure that you take good care of yourself, have healthy habits, such as hitting the gym, and so on. If you neither act impulsively after your breakup, and instead, spend time redirecting your reactive energy towards being pro-active and taking actions that are beneficial to your mental health, then you will get over your first major breakup in the best way possible.
Well, I won’t lie. Of course, it still won’t be easy. You probably will still do some things that won’t look perfect to you when you look back on all your choices in three years from now, but the harder you practice self control, the better your results will be. Hard battles require resilience. There will be times when you’re going to struggle, and certainly, maintaining emotional resilience and not acting impulsively is extremely hard, but I know you can do it. And the fight will be worth it in the end.
So, my question to you would be: Do you know what impulsive and reactive actions that you feel tempted to do? Actually, one of my book’s worksheets, which you can get for free, is specifically about this exercise. Are you monitoring what your anti-patterns are? Are you aware what the worst actions are that you could be doing after your breakup? Maybe it’s impulsively sending a message to your ex or to one of her friends and family? Or maybe it’s to check out her social media profile? Or are you randomly messaging way too many girls on dating apps? Or maybe it’s something specifically about yourself, like you’re being bummed out and spending too much time eating comfort food and playing video games? You know best what your worst habits are, and you know best what you feel tempted to do, that you already know will only make things worse. So, if you haven’t reflected yet on what kind of actions you most likely shouldn’t be focused on after your breakup, then now would be a great time to think about them, so you can craft a more rational plan on how to get over your breakup.
Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time.
