I have a hard time breaking up. My history suggests that unless a red line is crossed I will usually go back. I have broken up with my current girl friend about 5 times in 6 months. I never made it for more than 3 days. When a woman breaks up with me I am usually over joyed mixed with a little ego jolt that quickly heals over. It has always been hard for me to walk away from someone who resisted the break up. I usually try and end things quickly if I suspect it won’t last anyway. My current girlfriend I really do care about a lot but I just don’t like being in relationships. I confessed to cheating on her so she would break it off with me and just wash her hands of the relationship. ( I didn’t really cheat) It backfired and she latched on even tighter. I don’t know what the heck to do. I wish we could just date a couple of times a month.
Dude, you don’t want a girlfriend. What you need is called “friends with benefits.” Plenty of 'em out there.
For the O.P. yeah, painting with a broad brush & neither men nor women are a monolith and yadda yadda disclaimers, that’s been my experience (and observation) as well.
Some men seem to use “imma break up wid you!” as a way to communicate that they’re not just mad, but, like, super double plus mad. Then they cool off and aren’t mad anymore, and presto, the breakup is off.
Contributing my own anecdata (thanks, Nava!), I’ve had a couple of guys who broke up with me, or I with them, who tried to be the ever-successful “just friends,” which turned into “just friends with benefits,” which circled back around to why we broke up in the first place.
OTOH, when I broke up with someone it usually wasn’t because I didn’t care anymore but because it was too painful for whatever reason. That, of course, was a big factor in the above scenario.
No I spend even just a few moments thinking about it, I have had a couple relationships where the woman initiated a break up, but then changed her mind and came back.
No I know of other relationships where the same thing happened.
I really don’t understand this idea of “women are just such different creatures.”
Or that when men breakup they leave.
I know several instances of dudes getting home to find the locks changed and all their stuff in the hallway, but where the people kicking them out were also-male roomies who were tired of their shit. Similar situations with all-female roomies have been along the lines of talking (with better or worse manners) and establishing a date when some of them would leave. I don’t know how much this varies between cultures: I’ve encountered both situations in the US, Spain and the UK.
La maté porque era mía (I killed her 'cos she was mine).
“You can’t do this!” and “you can’t do this to me!” are stereotypical bad-breakup reactions. Experience has shown me that they’re also highly likely to come up when an underling gives notice to a bad boss. “Whaaat? Bang bang” seems to be the extreme version of “you can’t quit, I’m firing you!”
Another reason women tend to break up more decisively may be that, generally speaking, it is easier for a woman to find a mate than a man. She has less reason to hold on to her ex or go back to him, when options are more readily available to her.
There are approximately equal numbers of men and women in the het dating world, so this is pretty obviously a myth. It’s often repeated, but not actually supported by evidence or rational thought.
This seems like one of those things which is on an overlapping spectrum. More aggressive or assertive people probably break up more decisively. On balance, though, women bear children and so in theory have more at stake in relationships. Women probably suffer a disproportionate amount of abuse as well. Men are less likely to want to be perceived as weak or indecisive. So it’s a toss-up. From my modest experience, though, woman break up a little more decisively.
This is not only anecdata, but hearsay as well. Anyway, a friend of mine who came into her bisexuality in her late twenties remarked to me after her second ever same-sex relationship had ended that women broke up differently than men. According to her, men would play it cool initially and pretend not to be hurting, but would eventually call you drunk and crying at 3 a.m. begging for another chance. Women, on the other hand, would make no pretense to hide their grief right after a breakup, but would then, with unnerving decisiveness, get over it and move on and never look back. Of course, her sample size was not only small, it was skewed; from puberty through grad school she’d dated only men, and as a fully-fledged working adult since then had dated only women. But I’ve often wondered if she might’ve stumbled onto something nevertheless. Men in our society are discouraged from expressing sadness in general, and it’s hard to get over something when you bottle up your feelings. If a person, regardless of gender, has a strong support network of people they can be honest and vulnerable with outside their romantic relationship, they might be less prone to falling in and out of a relationship that’s not quite working.
Nonsense. If a woman wants to get laid, she can go to a bar and find a partner. It is much, much harder for men. I do agree that finding a long-term partner is equally difficult.
In my experience men have used breaking up as a lever in arguments, or to test how upset I’ll get. They are always really quite surprised when the drama stops immediately and I respect their decision. No going back.
Sometimes they think they can avoid “cheating” by breaking up for while, grabbing their hot prospect, and then getting their long-term honey back. It kills me when the women fall for this and take them back.
I’ve always had a hard and fast rule that I do not go back to a relationship after it has ended. I broke it only once, three years later when I thought the boy had matured and changed. I had to ask the local police to help me get him out of my life the second time. I won’t be making that mistake again.
[quote=“TruCelt, post:31, topic:839021”]
Nonsense. If a woman wants to get laid, she can go to a bar and find a partner. It is much, much harder for men. I do agree that finding a long-term partner is equally difficult.
If a guy wants to get laid, he can go to a bar and find a partner. Or go to a phone book and call an escort service. “Going to a bar” is also not any kind of 100% guaranteed solution for women, the idea that it is is a myth which seems to be mostly based on only counting young, conventionally attractive women with really low standards as ‘women’ for the test.
Also, if you’re talking about simply having sex without any further relationship, there isn’t any need for a breakup, so I’m not sure what it has to do with this thread.
And it’s not as if “getting laid” is the same thing as “getting laid right”… simultaneous, earth-shattering orgasms the first time a couple share a bed (or wall, or countertop, or…) is popular with romance writers but not really something to be expected.
I must say, I’ve never heard the word “anecdata” before, but I like it.
Yes, this goes back to my point about the assumption of ‘really low standards’. According to a 2016 study, heterosexual men orgasm in 95% of their sexual encounters, while heterosexual women only do so 65% of the time. Even if a woman has a 100% success rate with TrueCelt’s “go to a bar and find a partner” technique, by statistics approximately a third of those hookups are not going to result in a sexual encounter during which she achieves orgasm. I would say that most men would consider a “hook-up” where they didn’t actually get off to be a failed hookup, but for TrueCelt and Velocity’s claims to be true the women they’re considering have to be willing to treat a sexual encounter where they did not achieve orgasm as a successful hook-up.
The study in question: Differences in Orgasm Frequency Among Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Heterosexual Men and Women in a U.S. National Sample | Archives of Sexual Behavior
What’s the basis for your assertion that “there are approximately equal numbers of men and women in the het dating world”?
Based on the facts that 1) male partners tend to be older than females, and 2) men have a shorter life expectancy, it would seem logically that there should be more females than males in the dating pool. The only way around this is if you argue that a lower percentage of females are interested in (het) relationships.
[I appreciate that what I’m saying does not support the post you were responding to, and this is a comment on your assertion on its own.]
OK, I’m sorry. I did not mean to support the complete hijack of the thread. Can we get off this tangent please? If you honestly believe that it’s just as easy for a man to “find a mate” as it is for a woman, then by all means go on believing that. Or start another thread about it. Maybe we do have different definitions of what “find a mate” means. I dunno - thought I’d made room for that in my answer.
At any rate, the OP was interesting and I’d love for us to continue that discussion.
I used the word “approximately” to indicate that I didn’t mean “exactly” or “universally across every demographic subset you can assemble”. I’m not really sure what level of rigor you expect in a quick message board post that explicitly uses the word “approximately”, but it appears to be absurdly high to me. And, again noting that this is a short messageboard post and not a multi-page academically rigorous study, it would also be sensible to realize that I was probably discussing the domain implied by the person I was responding to, especially since I also mentioned that they were likely not accounting for the demographic you’re now explicitly focused on.
I’d be willing to bet good money that the people claiming that it was easy for women to find a mate in a thread about dating was A. Not making a claim about the pool of people interested in dating, but instead the pool of people interested in hookups and B. Was not considering women over retirement age even exist and are part of whatever pool is being talked about. I’m pretty sure the claim that ‘women can just go to a bar and get laid anytime they want’ isn’t really meant to apply to an octogenarian woman who has to drag her oxygen tank with her.
If you don’t want to discuss something, don’t discuss it. But repeating your false claims packed with misleading wording that are irrelevant to the main topic of the thread (hookups vs dating) while telling people who point out the many problems with your claim and its relevance to this thread is not going to prompt me to ‘find another thread about it’.
If you want discussion of what you said to stop, stop repeating it.
I don’t think it’s necessarily true even approximately (though it might be). The demographic issue that I raised is significantly exacerbated by the fact that many people are already in relationships, and since (for hets) these are 1-1 male-female this magnifies the discrepancy for the unattached people. So suppose (to make up a number) that the ratio of women to men in the demographic we’re discussing is 105/100, or a 5% imbalance, but suppose that 70 of these men and women are already in relationships, then the ratio of the remaining people looking for relationships is 35/30, which is a 16.7% imbalance.
I think your “A” is a bit odd, since the entire thread is about people ending relationships, not hookups. (If you were discussing hookups then your logic is extremely tenuous, since the notion that women are as interested in hookups as men seems very dubious, and at any rate can’t be just blithely assumed. But I don’t think the thread is about hookups to begin with.)
And as for “B”, you may have missed the point here. Even the cohort of women below retirement age would naturally have relationships with some men above retirement age, due to the age difference. And that older male cohort is smaller than the younger female cohort it’s being compared to. This is true at all ages, though it gets significantly exacerbated as the ages increase.