Insight into guys, for the teen girl

[mollyringle]

My younger sister writes:

---

I have been the therapy go-to for a teenager who is going through her very
first real heartbreak. It involves the normal crying, asking questions,
speculating, wailing, wanting-to-change-her-hair, overanalyzing, and
general life sucks kind of things.

After I got off the phone with her, I asked Justin a question which I
would like you to all answer:

I know that men and women Think differently/ process events differently. I
know that during times of heartache men do not sit around with their
friends and cry, do drastic things to their hair, overanalyze, etc.. So...
what do they do? Do they brood? Do they go do Active things to distract
themselves? Do they dive into their work? Do they take a deep breath, and
then cope and move on? Do they punch holes in walls? what?

---

I answered:

Poor girl. She will never ever get over it. (Until of course next year. And then when she's 27 she'll email him and they'll have a good laugh and ask each other how their spouses are doing, and it'll all be fine.)

My instinct is that younger guys (teens) go into a sulk and get really irritable, and older guys throw themselves into work and projects, also with the irritable. Some drink. Some slag the girl off to their friends. More emotional types will sit around with their friends and dissect it and ask "why, why, why," actually. Really depends on the guy. But that's just my instinct. I'll ask my LiveJournal people and see what they think.

So. Go ahead, tell us what you think.

Comments

[kalquessa.livejournal.com]

I'd say it probably differs from person to person. I know guys who just go into their work room and come out a few days later having constructed a cedar chest/painted a landscape/built a motorcycle practically from scratch. At which point, I offer food and a beer and suggest that maybe a shower would be good sometime in the near future.

And I know guys who want to give me the long (really long) sad story of their heartbreak from beginning to end and then have a very ill-fated conversation with me that always starts with "Marie...you're a girl...explain why..." At which point I profess to be from Neptune in a desperate attempt to avoid having to explain girls to anyone because really, I don't understand them myself most of the time.

[mollyringle.livejournal.com]

Your first paragraph reminds me of Owen Wilson in Meet the Parents--"Yeah, I carved it [the wedding gazebo thing] out of a single piece of wood."

And the second reminds me of Spike crying to everyone about how Drusilla left him for a Chaos Demon. Which, really, no one else can explain either, Dru being all kinds of insane from the get-go. :)