If heartbreak and loneliness have a springtime, it is the winter. And here, at the end of the darkest, coldest, most seasonally affected and disordered time of the year, I've found myself surrounded by men going through relationship End Times.
We seem to always hear that relationships are more important to women, but if you get a chance to witness a man during a breakup, you quickly realize that's not the case. Of course, you may not hear about it at all.
Last year, researchers at Wake Forest University in North Carolina reported that men - the stoic bunch that we are - have a harder time than women with breakups, largely because we nurture fewer, if any, confidants to talk through it with. Often, the only person that a man would have relied on to share intimate feelings of loss with is the very person who is going or gone and, well, talking to her is not the greatest idea.
So how do men cope? I contacted several friends recently under the promise of anonymity to hear some stories. The initial thing that I discovered from my informal survey is that men are masters at the first of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's famous "five stages of grief" model: denial.
"I do a lot of drugs and have as much anonymous sex as possible," one friend told me. And how does that work out for him? "Not well, usually. It just makes me more depressed and lonely. But it does serve as an escape in the moment."
Another friend said that, after a recent breakup, he put his head deep into his work. "Although," he added, "for weeks, at every lunch hour, I couldn't help myself from driving home to watch porn on the Internet."
Longer-term forms of denial included that tried-and-true path of the rebound relationship. "I fell hard for another woman, felt all the love and desire that for whatever reason I couldn't give to my ex," wrote one friend in an e-mail. "The new woman was truly a goddess, the embodiment of my long-standing fantasy of 'the one.' I told her I loved her and I wrote the most lyrical love letters of my life. Yet at the same time, I was going out for long walks and crying - weeping! - for indeterminate reasons that had to do with regret and guilt."
He says that the love built on "the fault lines of an earthquake" didn't work out so well in the end.
This friend's story of heading too prematurely into something new reminded me of an e-mail I received some months back from a woman imploring me to write about what she called an epidemic of "relationship addiction" in men. Why can't guys just suck it up and be alone for a while as they recover, she wondered?
I thought she had a point and, in fact, I had discovered this lesson first-hand, though inadvertently. As well as employing a combination of the above forms of distraction, I once decided to avoid facing heartbreak by burying my nose in learning something new: Buddhist meditation. Imagine how annoyed I was when I discovered the main principle of my distraction from dealing with loneliness was to sit for hours on end with the reality of said loneliness. (Thanks a lot, Buddhism!) The worst thing, I discovered, was that similar to the bad drug trips of my youth, my loneliness made me afraid that it would last forever.
After sharing that experience with another pal last week, he told me it reminded him of the time he took a wrong turn in Sedona, Ariz., at dusk and found himself lost in the pitch dark for hours with no reception on his cell phone. "At one point, I gave up and sat down, certain that I was going to die all alone out there," he said. "As it turned out, there was a road just a few hundred feet away from where I was, but that doesn't mean anything if you don't know it's there."
Of course, he eventually did stand up and find that road. And I found out, after the worst part of the heartbreak had faded and I realized I could build a happy life on my own, that the desperate need to not be alone was the very thing that had been holding me back from starting anew.
"Fallow time is absolutely necessary," my friend of the aforementioned rebound agreed. "Without it, unless you're crazy, you can't sincerely start something new." Instead of Buddhism, he told me he faced the ruin of his relationship a little less directly, but certainly more poetically. At night, he found himself watching car crashes and plane crashes on YouTube. "It was completely unconscious. I didn't know until later why I'd been doing it."
And then, after a few weeks of despairing at the wreckage, he got a work assignment that took him to another city. "At my deepest depression, my boss called me up and I had to fly off to a new life for a while. That shook me out of it. Out of the dark winter."
Winter always comes again, of course, and so might heartbreak. But in the end, as women supposedly have already figured out, it's not so lonely during those long nights if you can find a few friends with whom to share stories. Or, you know, your favourite disaster videos.
Micah Toub is the author of Growing Up Jung: Coming of Age as the Son of Two Shrinks .