A: It's hard on the ego to learn why somebody’s leaving you, but it beats needing a Ouija board.

It’s the mystery that’s causing the problem. Typically, when rotten things happen to us, our feel-bad emotions (like anger and sadness) rise up — driving us to take a wiser course of action the next time so we’ll keep those bad feelings from popping by again: “Wassup? Got any beer?” 

Knowing the wiser course starts with knowing what to avoid. But all you’ve got is a terrible itch — the itch of uncertainty about why this guy vanished — and little hope of yanking him in to give you answers: “Wanted/Reward — ex-boyfriend who ghosted me, last seen on 3/11/2018 carrying the remains of my dignity in a green reusable bag.”

However, you can probably dupe your mind into believing it has the answer. Research by cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga suggests our mind is quick to create stories to fill in and make sense out of incomplete information — and then we tend to go right ahead and believe our stories. To take advantage of this, imagine a possible reason the guy vamoosed on you — and then just decide to accept it as THE reason.  

What might also help is transforming your thoughts of the guy into a material object — a piece of garbage, in fact — and throwing it away. And yes, I get that this sounds absurd, but there’s a growing area of social science research — embodied cognition — that finds taking action is a highly efficient way to change our feelings. Accordingly, social psychologist Pablo Brinol had research participants write a negative thought on a piece of paper and then rip the paper up and throw it into a nearby trash can. This actually led to participants “mentally disposing” of their disturbing thinking to a great degree.

Should the guy sneak back into your thoughts, don’t worry; just widen the shot. Shift your focus from him to yourself — looking at how you maybe crossed your fingers that you had a keeper instead of seeing whether that actually was the case. Understanding what you should do differently is the first step toward expanding the male companionship in your life — amusing as it can be to spend your nights watching your current partner get loaded on catnip and try to make sweet love to your throw pillows.

In the mood for shrug 

I’m a 35-year-old guy. My fiancee broke up with me a year ago. I was devastated. We don’t have any contact now, but I still love her. I haven’t been on one date since our breakup, and I reminisce about her constantly. My guy friends are like, “Move on, dude. Get a life!” But honestly, that’s not that helpful. What is the best way to get over an ex besides time?

That which does not kill you makes you crap company on poker night. “Jeez, man, quit crying on the cards!” 

Your buddies surely mean well in taking the “just say the magic words!” approach — “Get over it! Lotta fish in the sea, man!” — but you’re trying to recover from a breakup, not summon a genie. Lingering feelings of love for your fiancee are the problem. 

As for a solution, research by cognitive psychologist Sandra J.E. Langeslag suggests you can decrease those feelings through “negative reappraisal” of your ex-partner — basically looking back and trying to see all the “bad” in her. 

For example, focus on her annoying habits and rude and stupid things she said and did.

When Langeslag’s research participants mentally trashed their ex-partner, it did diminish the love they felt for their ex...yay! However, there was a side effect: All of this negative thinking — not surprisingly —made participants feel pretty bummed out. But helpfully, Langeslag came around with a second strategy that helped them block out the feelbad: distraction — answering questions “about positive things unrelated to the breakup or the partner (e.g., What is your favorite food? Why?).” 

Probably an even better source of distraction is turning to what Langeslag calls a “secondary task” (like playing a video game). Keep up the negativity and the distracting secondary tasks and before long, you should find yourself ready for a level-three distraction: losing yourself in a forest of Tinder hussies.

Credible fret 

“Hey, where’s the boyfriend?” your friend asks as she plops down on the couch next to you. You look at your phone: “Well, according to my tracking device, he’s at the end of Main, turning right onto Slauson.”

Jealousy gets a bad rap. Sure, it’s sometimes a sign that your self-worth is in the toilet. But it can also be a sign that your boyfriend has been sneaking off to the toilet at work with his boss’s busty assistant.

Evolutionary psychologist David Buss notes that sexual jealousy appears to be one of the “mate guarding adaptations” that evolved over human history — a sort of police dog of emotions to protect us from being cheated on. Buss observes that sexual jealousy is activated by “threats to mate retention,” including “the presence of mate poachers” (rivals trying to lure your partner away), “cues to infidelity, or even subtle signals that suggest that a partner might be dissatisfied with the current relationship.” 

But there are signals, and then there are meaningful signals. A possibly helpful thing to recognize is that we have overprotective defense systems. “Defense expression is often excessive,” observes psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist Randolph Nesse. This isn’t an accident or a design flaw. It’s evolution saying, “Hey, hon, let’s be on the safe side here.”

Consider the smoke alarm that’s a little oversensitive. This can be annoying when it screams for the hook and ladders whenever the neighbor lights incense next to her tub. But it’s far less annoying than waking up to your toes being crisped by your flaming bedroom rug. 

Figure out the source of your feelings so you can address it. 

Is there something amiss in your psychology that leads you to be overly sensitive — to see a threat where it doesn’t really exist — or are you sensing some meaningful danger to your relationship? 

It’s one thing to follow the person you love with your eyes as he walks off; it’s another thing entirely to do it with a pair of high-powered binoculars and a bug sewn into his laptop bag.

Seize the meh 

These days, your relationships probably start when you eyeball a woman on the street: “Whoa! I bet she’d be seriously mediocre in bed!”

Next, you discover that she’s a real yawn out of the sack, too — and you’re in! 

Now, it’s possible that you’re way more emotionally sensitive than most people, to the point where a loss that others would eventually recover from hits you like a never-ending colonoscopy (with, um, artisanal anesthesia: “If you’ll just bite this stick...”). 

Even if you are super sensitive, avoiding the pain comes at a substantial price: living a gray goulash of a life, spending every day with some uninspiring somebody you don’t really care about. But consider that we evolved to be resilient — to heal from emotional injuries as we do physical ones. However, in order for you to do this — and to see that you might actually be able to stand the pain of loss — you need to view resilience not as some mysterious emotional gift but as a practice. 

Resilience comes out of what clinical psychologist Salvatore Maddi calls “hardiness.” He writes that “hardiness ... provides the courage and motivation to do the hard, strategic work of turning stressful circumstances from potential disasters into growth opportunities.” His research finds that hardiness is made up of three “interrelated attitudes,” which he calls the three Cs: Commitment, Control, and Challenge.

Commitment is the desire to engage with people and life instead of pulling away and isolating yourself. Control is the motivation to take action to improve your life “rather than sinking into passivity and powerlessness.” Challenge is the willingness to face the stress life throws at you and use it as a learning experience “rather than playing it safe by avoiding uncertainties and potential threats.”  

These attitudes might not come naturally to you. But you can choose to take them up, same as you might other “unnatural practices,” like monogamy and wearing deodorant. Understanding that there are steps you can take to recover from heartbreak might give you the courage to go for a woman you really love. 

Sure, that woman might leave you -—causing you big-time pain. But consider that risk avoidance — like by being with a woman you don’t really care about — isn’t pain avoidance. The pain is just different. It’s low-dose extended-release — like frequently experiencing the post-sex horror that leads you to want to grab your clothes and make a run for it before the woman next to you wakes up. And then you remember a couple of essential points: She’s your wife, not some Tinder rando, and it’s your apartment. 

Give pizza a chance

Though women assume that men think the ideal female body shape is modeliciously skinny, consider that construction workers rarely yell out, “Hey, Hotstuff! Great set of ribs!”

In studies exploring men’s and women’s ideas of the ideal female body weight, women consistently “perceive men as being attracted to thinner female figures than is true in reality,” writes social psychologist Viren Swami. And it isn’t just North American men who like fleshier women. Swami ran a massive survey — of 7,434 men and women in 26 countries, across 10 world regions — and “men across all world regions except East Asia selected a significantly heavier figure as being most physically attractive compared to what women believed was most attractive to men.”

Swami and his colleagues speculate that “women exposed to magazines marketed to women may form skewed perceptions of what body types are most appealing to men.” 

But don’t despair. Swami’s study and others measure the preferences of the “average” man. There is no such person. 

Or, as an epidemiologist friend of mine often reminds me, there are “individual differences” — meaning individuals’ preferences vary.

In other words, there are men out there who will be seriously into a woman like you — a woman who can do amazing feats in the bedroom, like removing a pair of skinny jeans without calling 911 and asking for firemen to come over with the Jaws of Life.

•

(c.) 2018, Amy Alkon, all rights reserved. Got a problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA  90405, or e-mail This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (advicegoddess.com). Weekly radio show: blogtalkradio.com/amyalkon