Dating Tips
For Men

Should you have sex to get over an ex?

January 29, 2016
▪ 4 mins read
Contents

Rebound sex

I am joined by the top break up coach Laura Yates to tell you how to cope after a breakup. We discuss should you have sex to get over an ex and the different ways to get closure.

The interview

Laura is helping me today to address big underlying movers and the leavers that will help you have better relationships with women. She is a breakup coach. First of all breakup coaches exist. Secondly, it's important. And thirdly, she's gonna be here helping me talk to you how you can recover effectively and move on after a breakup. Sometimes you have breakups that are so strong that they change your DNA. So thank you very much for joining me.

Laura

Thank you for having me, Hayley.

Hayley

The first thing I wanted to start with is acknowledging the fact that when you say breakup coach, you think it is female orientated. That it would be something that girls need help with. But you said that most of your clients are guys going through something?

Laura

Yeah, it was something that surprised me as well. I thought when I first started doing this, it would be mainly women that would be attracted to what I do. But no, it's guys. It's guys!

Hayley

There's a sort of expectation, isn't there? Even when you say the word breakup in the media, you think of girls. This is what girls do. When they have a breakup, they cry, they have a girls night out with friends. And then you think about what is there for guys? Or how guys communicate and respond? And you might be thinking, why is a breakup getting through that important to me? The problem is, if you go through something really nasty and you don't process it or deal with it properly, it rears its ugly head later on.

Laura

It certainly does. It comes back to bite you.

Hayley

If a guy had a rough breakup, and it doesn't have to be someone that you were with for years. It could just be someone you dated for a while, but you had lots of positive expectations around them. And then you find that she's just not into the relationship, she sees you as a friend or bails on you. And then two months later, she appears on Facebook in a relationship with someone else. That is a knife, a dagger to the back.

Laura

Certainly. And just because you're a guy, it doesn't affect you any less.

Hayley

Exactly. And in the spirit of this podcast except that men have as many feelings as women.

So, a guy goes through a breakup, long term or short term, and doesn't process those feelings. And boy doesn't process we're thinking you're having distraction, going on Tinder or Happen or something, and trying to find something else to plug that gap that you're feeling. For guys, a more instinctual reaction to feeling pain and suffering is to go into anger or hostility. And you might find flares of that coming out. Are there any other signs that guys aren't processing breakups properly? You'd find it would manifest or would come up in the different areas of their lives that they haven't kind of fully got over what happened with their ex.

Laura

A lot of the time, what you were saying about anger and that kind of that sense of bitterness.Those instilled attitudes about women or whoever they're dating can feed into their next relationships and the next people that they're dating. They come into that interaction, or that relationship or that dating situation with negative beliefs from the past relationship that they haven't actually resolved. They haven't done the work on themselves.

The funny thing with those emotions is we have some primal emotions that are in there. Apes have them. And in our civilised world, we're not allowed to express them. You might feel really angry. But are you allowed to tear off a shirt and beat your chest and thump? No, no. Are you allowed to cry and for how long? Well, no. What happens is almost all that emotion gets trapped in your body. You might feel extreme tension in your shoulders.

Hayley

The tension! I bite down and grind my teeth in my sleep because I've got all that tension still in. My shoulders hurt because when you feel threatened or under attack you hunch. It manifests in the body, it really does. You might find those feelings and that tension not only can cause you physical discomfort, but it means that you can be quick to anger.

You'll notice that you're reacting disproportionately to everything. This, to me, says unresolved emotional stuff from the past. So really, even if you had this breakup, maybe it was a long time ago, but you're recognising now, by listening to this, that actually is something that's still affecting how you're interacting, not just with women, but with your other relationships. You know, I bought or in here, because she's got some amazing kind of guidance on how you can start to deal with things properly to start getting some of that trauma out.

Laura

Definitely. It's about intercepting those things if you can feel that tension coming on, and you can feel all of those emotions where you might act irrationally, there are things that you can do to intercept that rise. Just have that mindfulness.

Hayley

That self-awareness really helps.

As human beings as we go about our lives, stuff happens to us. And we're often not given the tools to deal with it. Particularly guys since they are not allowed to be emotional or express themselves or feel bad.

.....

To listen to the rest of Should you have sex to get over an ex? podcast click below! You should subscribe to my podcast here so you never miss another episode! And finally, if you want some instant advice, make sure to join my Hayley Quinn Club!

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About the author

Hayley Quinn is a leading dating and relationship coach, with 3 million views of her TEDx talk and 18 million YouTube views. She is spokesperson for Match, a columnist for Cosmopolitan, a regular contributor to international media, and has been published by Harper Collins (“The Last First Date”, 2023) and Simon & Schuster (“Do This, Not That: Dating”, 2023).

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