Guys Fall Harder

Watch any romantic comedy or read any romance novel and you’d believe that women have it hard when it comes to love. You’d believe they’re surrounded by backward-baseball-cap-wearing bros only out for one night stands, creepy faux rich old geezers, and charming rent-but-not-buy playboys. Women do have problems, but men have one that’s just as bad, if not worse:

Guys fall harder.

This isn’t about whether men or women love more in a relationship. What I’m referring to is bouncing back: when it comes to getting back up from a failed relationship,men do not recover as well as women. More so than women, newly single men must use their confidence to find someone new. After taking a swift kick to the crotch, your average guy is thinking more about how much his nuts hurt than how he’s going to sweep the next girl off her feet. The confidence-destroying-breakup-crowbar strikes deep enough that a man may never walk the same again.

We’ve all seen this on the basketball court: a shooter misses his first few 3s and a jumpy coach benches him. After riding the pine for the rest of the quarter, does that player ever come back and shoot the lights out? Hell no.

As a longtime UCLA basketball fan, we used to have former coach Ben Howland, who was an old-school, hard-nosed defensive mastermind. The way he ran his offense, however, sucked. He’d put in a role-player to shoot some 3s and then pull that player after he missed a few deep shots. His shooters never got in a rhythm and ended up playing a lot of backup minutes after they were benched. During his tenure, Howland never developed a dangerous shooter. Instead, players would be afraid to take shots – even good ones – after they missed a few.

UCLA basketball: better times ahead?

Unlike our benched shooters, women have one huge thing going for them: a built-in stable of willing suitors. Often disguised as longtime friends (more on this later), these happy termites pop out of the woodworks right after your foundation starts its death tilt. Even a slightly below average girl* usually has two or three of these little buggers for some quick attention. A black widow famously eats its males after mating; a newly single woman never goes hungry.
What’s a newly single guy to do against the forces of nature? The first step to moving forward is to get your mind right. Remember the three sidekicks from Disney’s Mulan? (Hint: There was bucktooth, a fat guy, and a gnome). They exemplify exactly what not to do: pining after a girl. Instead of rightly developing his five finger exploding heart technique or no shadow kick, bucktooth and his ilk sing a song about missing “a girl worth fighting for”:

“You can guess what we have missed the most
Since we went off to war
What do we want?
A girl worth fighting for”

This guy is a badass

There’s no quicker way to end up a sack of guts riddled by Mongolian arrows than to sing this shit while in war. By improperly focusing on what they don’t have, the three stooges ignored the path to success. (Seriously, would any self-respecting girl pick those three goobers over the jacked up Shan Yu (villain) with his badass hawk and penetrating eyebrows?)

If you’re newly single, you’re at war. You need to think about how to survive and thrive rather than wonder where your damn horse went. Moral of the story: horse-chasers are doomed to misery.

• Protip for below average women: #1 be nice #2 treadmill #3 mascara.