“Men,” says Dr. Eaker-Weil, “are more pathetic than women [hey, she said it, not us]. They’re like sad puppy dogs. There’s no question that they suffer more than women do, because they don’t deal with the conflict for so long that it festers and grows, and when they finally do acknowledge it, the suffering is that much more intense.”
Well, many of our respondents could certainly back that up. Some of our stories from the male rueing class far exceeded the limits of reasonable pain. During this stage, the guys we interviewed seemed to have a marked propensity for self- destruction and self-punishment. Then again, G. Gordon Liddy was a man, so why are we so surprised?
“We broke up at the end of the summer,” remembered a twenty-eight-year-old ad copywriter, “and it was agony. I felt like I had been ripped apart. I was a vegetable. A few nights later, a bunch of guys and I were supposed to throw a party together. I got an industrial-size tank of nitrous and made out with the tank all night; it was the only way I could get myself to laugh. Nothing mattered except her—and the misery I felt when I thought about her. I sat on my bed and listened to sad songs, read her letters over and over, replayed memories in my head. I smoked tons of pot and drank gallons of beer. In four months, I gained twenty pounds from beer drinking, without ever leaving my room. There was a trail of beer cans from my bed to the bathroom. The only time I ever went out of the house was to get cigarettes, beer, and porn magazines. I didn‘t even want to masturbate that much— I did it anyway, constantly— because I didn‘t feel a physical need for it. My soul hurt too much. One night, I was so depressed, I got into bed with a friend of mine— a guy; it wasn’t sexual at all—and cried my eyes out. I slept there with him that night. I was desperate. I didn‘t know what I would do, I needed someone to be with me.”
Not a pretty picture—but a pretty common one. “I regularly got drunk by noon,” said a freelance graphic artist, thirty. “I sat around and watched television and talked on the phone. The drinking made me fall asleep; I did it so I could forget. Then I’d wake up at night and couldn‘t go back to sleep. I’d toss and turn. I couldn‘t eat. I lost a lot of weight. I never shaved; I showered two or three times a week. I went through about six months of feeling sorry for myself until I got so bored, so revolted by my own pathetic-ness, that I had to come out of it.” Another, a thirty-five-year-old screenplay writer, remembered “wandering into the bathroom every now and then, looking into the mirror, and cutting off a random hank of hair. Looking back, maybe it was a clumsy, desperate attempt at self-improvement. Or maybe it was just self- destruction: I hated myself and I wanted to punish myself by looking as bad as possible.”
All of our men cited “letting things slip” as a primary symptom of their misery at this time. “I couldn‘t believe that such a tumultuous thing could happen in my life and everything else would go on like normal,” said one corporate lawyer, thirty-two. “I left things all over my apartment. I killed cacti by not watering them—and they don’t need a lot of water. I didn‘t pay my bills, I didn‘t renew my lease, my license expired, my telephone was turned off, my car lease expired, my insurance expired, I destroyed my credit. I destroyed my life. The only relationship I had that I treated in a normal way was with my cleaning lady. She took care of me, she left me notes—it was a stable thing. The rest was minute by minute. It was hell. There was no method to my madness.”
Apparently, wallowing can be a real time-consumer: Most of our guys had time for little else. “Right after we broke up, I went away to Europe,” said a thirty-three-year-old architect. “When I returned, the first time I walked into the apartment, I felt like I was being stabbed; everything was populated by images of her. I watched Death in Venice on a movie channel every night for a week. I’d walk out onto my balcony—ten stories up—and have suicidal visions. I had come back to the States to work on a project, but after two weeks of total inactivity, I realized I had to tell my boss I couldn‘t do it. My boss, thank god, was cool about it. He said don’t worry, and transferred me to a project in another city, where I wouldn’t be so reminded of her. That experience was like breaking a fever. I knew that that was the worst it could ever get.”
In this stage, guys also have a tendency to be once burned, thrice shy. They retreat like the tide when it comes to women, relationships, and intimacy. “At this point, men don’t want to make contact with women at all,” says Dr. Eaker-Weil. “They’re angry or they’re afraid. They took the risk—and to them it’s a huge risk—of falling in love, and they lost. They aren’t willing to put themselves on the line again.” As one guy told us, “I wasn’t in a relationship for two years after the breakup. I didn‘t trust myself not to hurt another girl. I was afraid that I was still angry, that I would take it out on her. I had already fallen off the horse once, so to speak; I just couldn‘t face getting back on again.”
