Although women experience more emotional pain after a romantic breakup, they are more resilient and recover more fully after the loss than men do, according to a recent study.
"At some point, clearly, women get over a breakup," Craig Morris, lead author of the study and a research associate at Binghamton University in New York, told HealthDay. "They will discuss in great detail the pain, the suffering, the misery, but they are talking about it in the past."
Morris explained that after a breakup, women bounce back and return to the dating scene better than they were before.
For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from more than 5,700 people in 96 countries to "rate the emotional and physical pain of breakup on a scale of one to 10," or none to unbearable, Yahoo Health reported.
They found that women tend to be more negatively affected by breakups, reporting higher levels of both physical and emotional pain. Women averaged 6.84 in terms of emotional anguish versus 6.58 in men. In terms of physical pain, women averaged 4.21 versus men's 3.75.
"Put simply, women are evolved to invest far more in a relationship than a man," Morris said in a statement. "A brief romantic encounter could lead to nine months of pregnancy followed by many years of lactation for an ancestral woman, while the man may have 'left the scene' literally minutes after the encounter, with no further biological investment. It is this 'risk' of higher biological investment that, over evolutionary time, has made women choosier about selecting a high-quality mate. Hence, the loss of a relationship with a high-quality mate 'hurts' more for a woman."
While breakups hit women the hardest emotionally and physically, women tend to recover more fully and come out emotionally stronger. Men, on the other hand, never fully recover -- they simply move on.
Although men don't "hurt" as much as women do immediately after a breakup, they will likely "feel the loss deeply and for a very long period of time as it 'sinks in,'" Morris said.
Morris said that breakups are important because most people will experience an average of three by age 30, with at least one affecting us strongly enough that it substantially decreases our quality of life for weeks or months.
"People lose jobs, students withdraw from classes, and individuals can initiate extremely self-destructive behavior patterns following a breakup," he said. "With better understanding of this emotional and physical response to a breakup -- Post Relationship Grief -- we can perhaps develop a way to mitigate its effects in already high-risk individuals."
The findings are detailed in the journal Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences.
