When we say, as Neil Sedaka once said over and over again, that breaking up is hard to do, we are usually thinking about the loathsome chore of dumping a boyfriend or girlfriend, the guilt that comes of having to break someone's heart, and the guilt that comes of not feeling that guilty after all. It's not pleasant, but it has to be done. In this sense, breaking up is hard to do in the same way that writing thank you letters is hard to do.
Breaking up is, of course, much harder to do if you are the person getting dumped. Getting dumped isn't really breaking up; it's being told to piss off. The ground drops from under your feet, the air is knocked out of your lungs and a section of your brain is given over to internal screaming. Someone you loved and trusted now won't speak to you or return your phone calls, disappearing with a large chunk of your social network in tow.
The first time it happens is the scariest, catching you by surprise, usually when you're of too tender an age to regard temporary insanity as a learning experience. As for the worst time, for most of us it is probably still to come and there is nothing we can do to brace ourselves. Relationships often come to a point at which you can either stay together forever or break up. How can we possibly prepare for both outcomes?
It's clear that men and women nurse broken hearts differently, although it is not always clear what those differences are. One thirtysomething woman's recipe for a cure ("A little bit of stalking, quite a lot of bad-mouthing, too much alcohol and then sleeping with other people") sounds like it would work just as well, or as badly, for either sex. Men may be encouraged to put the old relationship behind them more quickly, but that doesn't mean they do.
In his new book Independence Day (published tomorrow by Abacus), Jim Keeble charts his months-long, bitterly funny, broken-hearted odyssey through the United States after being dumped by his girlfriend of seven years as he proposed to her in Niagara Falls, the honeymoon capital of the universe. It is a chronicle of misery, self-pity, ill-advised dating and generous alcohol intake which will be surprisingly familiar to men who thought they invented this particular form of therapy. "I think it's much more lonely in a way, being a dumped man," says Keeble, who is feeling much better now. "I think there are real differences in the support network."
By which he means to say that for men there is no support network, at least not among other men. "There is sympathy for half an hour," he says, "then it's 'Let's go and have a drink' and 'Isn't she fit, there at the bar, why don't you go and talk to her?' " Male friends rapidly lose patience with the abject, pathetic wallowing that is a necessary, if unattractive, part of getting over someone. They tend to want to solve your problem for you as quickly and simply as possible, and alcohol and sex are what they most often prescribe.
Dumped men often prefer the company of women at such difficult times, as women seem more familiar with the pathology of the broken heart. "I found I'd hang out with female friends a bit more after it happened," Keeble says. "You could go around the block several times talking about it. Which is actually pretty much all you want to do."
It is interesting to note that after a break-up, men and women do not necessarily retreat to the exclusive company of their own gender. One obvious reason for this is the need to spread yourself as thinly as possible. As you lurch from self-pity to self-help speak, from grumbling that all men are bastards to making secret late-night phone calls and begging him to take you back, from drunk to drunker still, most of your friends will be too annoyed by you to look after you full-time.
You end up seeking the company of whomever you think is prepared to tell you what you want to hear, whether it's "You're better off without her" or "Maybe you should ring her right now". You re-establish contact with all those old friends, male or female, who always thought your boyfriend was an idiot.
By the third week, dumped men and dumped women have usually exhausted their supply of sympathetic single friends and progress to hanging around the homes of happily married couples, with predictably depressing results. After a month or so, it's necessary to start lying about being well and truly on the mend, because no one in your acquaintance wants to hear otherwise.
One key difference between the sexes is how they handle the severe dent to one's self-esteem that being chucked necessarily entails. Traditionally, women use a break-up as an opportunity for self-improvement, changing their job or their hair, losing weight, moving house. Men, on the other hand, prefer to go off the rails, emerging from a period of self-destruction considerably worse for wear, chastened but none the wiser.
Jim Keeble's epic trip around some of America's more soulless tourist destinations was just a more adventurous version of this well-worn method. "I was on this nihilism kick. The future didn't exist," he says. "I just wanted to go to these places that had this image of hedonism, reinvention and superficiality. I guess Vegas, LA and Florida are pretty much the key destinations for that."
He also points out that this strategy is perhaps not as useless as it sounds. "Maybe it's a sort of short sharp shock therapy. You plunge completely into the unknown and you're forced to build up armour very quickly." In the rush to get over the pain of a broken heart, anything that seems like it might help is worth a try.
The difference in the approaches of the sexes to being dumped is in the end fairly negligible, since none of them does any good. Time is the only healer for a broken heart, a process that is rather too slow for most of us, followed by falling in love again, a process that is entirely too unpredictable to be relied upon. Following his travels around the landscape of his own broken heart, Keeble has an alternative solution. "I recommend everybody goes out and writes a book. That's the way forward."
But even years later, he can't look forward without a glance back. "Seven years and then you go and ask somebody to marry you and they say no. In Niagara Falls. It was pretty uncool."
