How to respond to getting dumped as a man? This is probably the most pressing question for most guys with their first breakup, or perhaps, their first major breakup. Getting dumped by a woman effectively feels like a loss of control, and so after a breakup, a lot of guys try to gain control back, either in their lives, or worse, in the wrong way, with their ex-girlfriend. So when it’s time to move on and get your life back in order, how do you regain that control without making mistakes?

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. So what are you supposed to do when a woman dumps you? Whether that’s a casual date who’s not yet an exclusive girlfriend but you’re slowly getting there, or she’s your long-term girlfriend. Either way, in the moment that she breaks up with you, and of course, also a long time after, you feel out of control.

I’m sure a lot of you are spinning out of control right now and this is messing with your life, your happiness, and it’s giving you a lot of anxiety. Humans don’t cope well when they aren’t in control. Or rather, we don’t like it when we KNOW that we are not in control. For example, you could be in a terrible relationship with massive amounts of problems and realistically, nothing is working out the way you’d want it to, but you’re not addressing the problems either. But despite that, you still want to be with your girlfriend. But then, the moment when she breaks up with you because she has had enough of it, you finally can no longer ignore that you’re no longer in control, and now, all of a sudden, you are willing to take control to make things work with her.

So the moment when we realize that we’re not in control, we counteract. We try to get that control back. It’s like a rubber band that’s been extended for too long. Eventually, the band will want to come back to a state of normalcy, or otherwise, it’ll break. And that’s a good metaphor for post-breakup stress, anxiety, missing your ex girlfriend, and so on. You’re the rubber band that’s currently being stretched too far. Every day that you miss your ex-girlfriend, or every day that you struggle with not understanding how things ended up like this and why she left you, you begin to feel worse. All the stress adds onto your body. You’re being stretched too far. And you can only take this so far without going almost crazy. Breakups are cruel. Especially when this has never happened to you before. 

So I want to help you avoid some of that cruelty. I don’t want you to get to a place where you feel as if you’re about to break. I don’t want you to suffer endlessly and spend weeks or months weeping, sulking, being alone in your room, struggling to concentrate at work, or maybe even messing up with your job, and so on. And to do that, I think the best thing I can advise you, is to not try to act like a rubber band that snaps back forcefully. When your life is spinning out of control because of a breakup, you can’t just snap back instantly to where life was before.

For example, some guys try to beg and plead with their ex-girlfriend. And of course, that rarely works, especially in the beginning of a breakup. Whereas it might be possible to rekindle a relationship later on, once you both got space from the relationship. Not that I would suggest to you to do that. It’s just a metaphor.

So the way that most guys respond to getting dumped is that they think they have to take immediate action to spring back to a place without tension in order to become that relaxed rubber band again. But that’s simply not possible. You can’t overcome all your heartbreak overnight. Truthfully, even if you would be doing everything perfectly with working on yourself, working out, meeting new people, and so on, you would still be hurting for quite some time. You would probably move on faster than someone who constantly tries to do one thing after another obsessively to feel better, but you wouldn’t magically heal from the breakup overnight.

And so, trying to rush or accelerate how fast you can gain back control is counterproductive. Yes, obviously, you need to gain control back. You need to take action to be in the driver’s seat again, such as going to the gym once or twice a week to establish a new routine. Plus, going to the gym helps in general with pain relief. But that’s not to say that hitting the gym 7 days a week would help.

Likewise, just because you would be obsessively planning some travel trips to go out every weekend, you probably wouldn’t feel better just because you’re doing new things. Everything needs to be done in moderation and with the realistic expectation that your return to normalcy takes time. You can’t let go of an ex-girlfriend the same way that you can just let go of a rubber band and it’s fully back to normal without zero tension. The moment you choose to let go, she isn’t completely gone. Out of sight, out of mind just isn’t 100% true. It’s good to practice an out-of-sight, out-of-mind mentality, but don’t expect that more action to move automatically means, faster moving on speed, or stronger effectiveness for moving on. At least not in a highly exponential way.

And what I’m talking about here is a really difficult balance to grasp. Because obviously, if you do nothing at all, nothing’s going to change. If you change everything in your life to extreme degrees, it’ll backfire just as much, because of course, with so much confusion and lack of control going on in your life, when you force the control into your life with excessive action, you won’t even properly digest whether what you’re doing is improving anything at all, or whether you’re just running around in circles.

And so what’s reasonable for a guy after a breakup to do, is, simplified speaking… To do nothing. With just a little bit of change here and there. Don’t force yourself to move on. Don’t force yourself to overcome the pain. Just do enough to the degree that you feel like you’re moving forward in a new direction. Whether that direction works out for you, you won’t know right now and that’s okay.

Do something new with your life, maybe one or two, maybe even 3 new things. But you have to stick to them and establish these new goals as long-term ideals for how you want to live your life. Some of these may not be what you want, and that’s OK. Whatever doesn’t work for you is simply going to fade away over time. You’ll lose interest and it doesn’t matter, because there will be something else that you probably found more interest in.

And so, the recipe for a man to move on properly after a breakup is to remain stoic, calm, definitely not reactive, and instead of jumping between as many things as possible that you may think will give you tension relief as soon as possible, commit to two or three new things that you think would be good for your life, and then stick to them. See for a few weeks or months whether the stress is slowly fading. In the first weeks to maybe 2-4 months, that’s when you have the most tension, and that’s when you want to desperately snap back into control. 

And this is the time after a breakup, where most guys waste a lot of time by jumping from one thing, to another, to find the one thing that will relieve their anxiety, heartbreak, desperation, etc. as quickly as possible. But there simply is no “as quickly as possible” solution. There is “as efficient as possible”, perhaps, but that still doesn’t guarantee magic results.

And to move on efficiently, you need to remain calm, so desperately hoping for the quickest improvement possible will make things worse, not better. You have to remain calm if you want to deal with your breakup effectively. That doesn’t mean you can’t cry, feel anxious, stressed, lonely, panicky, and so on. Of course, you all feel this way right now. It simply means that you need to take one action at a time, wait, observe and analyze how that makes you feel.

Don’t just react to whatever you feel within the day, or even the week. Set some longer-term plans, goals, ideals, hopes, dreams of what you want to achieve. And then work towards those plans. And as you keep working on them, you’ll slowly over time relieve a lot of the tension like the rubber band that is slowly released, and as that happens, I’m sure you’ll naturally figure out which of your initial goals no longer make sense, and you’ll stick to those that make you happy. 

So, guys, stay stoic, set a long-term plan, and don’t freak out. Don’t take that instant, high-impact action that you think will snap you back into control. Regaining control after a breakup takes time, so take your time. You got this, stay strong, don’t give up, and don’t rush too much.

Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you this time. Let me know in the comments how you feel about your breakup.