Why Are We So Shocked When Women Happily Move on After a Breakup?

I have spent the better part of this last year worried about Jennifer Garner (in all honesty, she should be the one worried about me). Anyway, I have woken up from deep slumbers hoping this perfect woman finds the love she so deserves. She’s perfect, right? But after her split from Ben Affleck, she said she was “looking forward to getting past the pity stage.” It seemed she was never moving on.

Well, now her divorce is final and she has a boyfriend.

I also thought Anna Faris would be a mess after her divorce from Chris Pratt; nope, turns out she’d moved on (publicly at least) before he did. Two months after their split she was spotted with cinematographer Michael Barrett and they have been serious ever since.

After her split from Channing Tatum, I thought Jenna Dewan would be dancing out the pain behind closed doors. No again. She’s now dating Tony winner Steve Kazee, who’s very sexy and successful in his own right, which is saying a lot considering she just got divorced from Magic Mike.

Ariana Grande’s latest song, "Thank U, Next," is dedicated to the exes she’s left behind, which includes ex-fiance Pete Davidson, who she moved on from so fast he's probably still wondering wtf just happened.

Which makes one wonder, why do we always think women are sitting around suffering, crying, and eating themselves into a stupor when they’re not?

Live Science tried to take on the topic of which sex moves on faster after a split, and they found that while “women tend to feel the emotional pain associated with a breakup more acutely than men, men take longer to ‘get over’ their former lover.”

Researchers from Binghamton University and University College London conducted a study asking 5,705 people in 96 countries to rate the physical and emotional pain they felt after a breakup on a scale from one (no pain) to 10 (unbearable pain).

“On average, women ranked their emotional pain — including feelings like sadness and depression, as well as anxiety, fear and loss of focus — as being slightly higher than those of their male counterparts. Women also reported feeling the physical pain of a breakup (things like insomnia, panic attacks, eating disorders and weight change) more acutely than men.”

So, is this why we think women more affected by breakups than men? Because they feel it more?

About 85 percent of women will experience a romantic breakup in their lifetime, reports Psychology Today. And they take it hard, because “from a biological perspective, women bear the larger minimum parental investment — nine months of gestation as well as the metabolic costs of lactation—and therefore are more 'selective' in their mate choice."

But the report adds, the way women handle rejection can shape how, and how well, they cope with it. “Adopting this attitude of analyzing a rejection] may help ease the pain of a breakup,” Psychology Today said. “Critical self-analysis, while understandably depressing, can benefit us in the long run…While women lost more self-esteem after a breakup (twice as much as men), they were almost always able to identify a silver lining of increased personal awareness and greater perceptivity regarding future relationships.”

Men on the other hand, really don’t analyze it so much. “Biology also plays a role in expediting breakup pain for men,” said PT. “When a men enters a relationship with a woman, his testosterone levels drop, making him more susceptible to bonding with oxytocin (a.k.a. the hormone that makes you feel lovey dovey). But once he decides to exit the relationship, his testosterone goes back up, reducing the effect of the oxytocin: He literally stops feeling love. In other words, when he's done, he's done, because his body helps him to disconnect."

In the end, no one emerges unscathed. How to get over it a bit faster? One study said, “One of the most effective ways for either gender to recover from a breakup is to date someone new.”

Exactly what these ladies are doing.