What is it with guys? It’s like they don’t have feelings or something!
There you are, sitting in your PJs, crying, feeling like your heart has been ripped out, and trying to make it better with a big tub of ice cream, while he acts like nothing happened.
I know it seems like he doesn’t care, but the truth is that a breakup is never easy on anyone.
Now, while some guys like to move on as quickly as possible and never look back, a lot of men actually find it very hard to get over a woman they like.
Turns out that a lot of the time when a guy acts like he doesn’t care after a breakup, it’s actually because he cares.
And because guys are taught that they have to be tough and hide their feelings from a very young age, it’s in their nature to want to hide their feelings and vulnerabilities.
Here are 10 reasons why guys act like they don’t care after a breakup:
1) They’re afraid to show how much they care
When a guy’s heart is broken and he has no control over the situation, he’s going to try to hide how much he’s hurting and just how much he cares.
He doesn’t want to appear weak and pathetic. You’ve broken his heart, and in his mind, you’re the one who doesn’t care.
He doesn’t want you to see how weak he is and how much pain he is in so he will bottle up all of his emotions and pretend he’s fine.
While it’s not the healthiest way to deal with your emotions, it’s completely understandable why he would act like this.
So, no matter how cold he seems, you should know that he’s probably hurting as much as you are.
2) They think you will take it as a win
On the one hand, some women will regret breaking up with their men. They’ll realize that he was actually a really good guy and that the reasons for the split were silly.
Other women, however, will get bitter after the breakup and will decide to look at it as a victory. They’ll tell themselves and their friends, “He just wasn’t good enough for me. I was right to break up with him!”
That’s why some guys act like they don’t care. They don’t want to feed your ego and make you feel like you’ve won.
They want to move on from the breakup and forget about you, but seeing you walk away with a smile on your face only makes them feel worse.
3) It’s a defense mechanism to numb the pain
When an intense and long-term relationship ends, it’s like a death.
Think about it: Your guy has lost someone he loved and cared about and his feelings for you are going to be as strong, intense, and real as if he had lost a family member.
He has lost his best friend, his lover, and the person he dreamt of spending his future with.
When someone close to you passes away, you don’t want to wallow in the pain and sadness; you want to heal and move on as soon as possible so that you can remember them for the good times you shared together and not the pain.
This is why he may want to act like he doesn’t care; he wants to numb the pain and get over the break-up quickly so that he doesn’t have to remember the heartbreak and sadness any longer.
But just like with an actual death, he’ll realize that he can’t just skip the stages of grief. He needs to feel his way through the different stages in order to heal.
4) They still have feelings for you
After a relationship ends, a man may act like he doesn’t care because he’s too proud to admit that he still has feelings for you.
He doesn’t want to look weak and have you know you still have power over him.
He doesn’t want to appear desperate and needy for your attention, affection, and love; so he will walk away from you and act like he doesn’t care.
If you’re the one who broke up with him, while he was perfectly happy to stay in the relationship, he may not know how to deal with his emotions and get them under control.
That’s why he’s acting like he doesn’t care because if he didn’t, he’d have to tell you that you’re the love of his life and that he wants you back – and you’ll just reject him again.
5) They’re embarrassed and humiliated
When you break up with a guy, it can leave him feeling embarrassed and humiliated.
It only makes things worse if you broke up with him in front of his friends or family, or if there was a huge argument in public that led to the breakup.
Either way, he feels like he was humiliated in front of others. Some men walk away from the situation and try to act like they don’t care because they are too embarrassed and don’t want to show any emotion or weakness.
What it all comes down to is saving face: He doesn’t want to admit that the break-up made him cry because he feels like it makes him a lesser man.
6) You‘ve broken their heart too many times before
Some people are constantly breaking up and making up. I have these friends that have been together on and off for ten years. Ten years, can you believe it? It’s like, decide what you want already!
Could this be the case with you guys?
Maybe he loved you and wanted to start a family with you, but you have broken his heart too many times, and he just can’t take it anymore.
Or maybe you hurt him by flirting with other men, lying to him, or treating him very badly in the past; which is why he decided that he can’t take any more pain from you and has ended the relationship.
Now, he doesn’t want to show how much he cares, he wants you to feel sorry for hurting him.
He wants to shut you out and make you feel like you are nothing to him so that you can feel like he did so many times before.
7) They’re trying to make you jealous
Is he already dating other women?
If you only recently broke up and your ex is already back on the dating scene, it may look like he doesn’t care. But here’s the thing: he’s most probably doing it because he still has feelings for you!
In his mind, the surest way to get you back is to make you jealous. Once you see him with other women, you’ll realize you could lose him forever and come running back to him!
Honestly, I think that this is a very immature way of trying to get you back and simply makes him look desperate and foolish.
The sad truth is that that’s what a lot of guys are like and if you still care about him, you’ll overlook it.
8) They want to make you feel bad
He feels terrible, so his solution is to make you feel even worse.
How very grown-up! Right?
You may have broken up with him and ended the relationship with a smug smile on your face like you were the winner (or at least that’s how he saw it) and now he wants to make you feel bad.
So he acts like an a**. He’s cold and pretends like he doesn’t care about you or the breakup.
This is a very childish way of reacting to the breakup and shows that he is not capable of dealing with the situation in a healthy way.
9) Humiliation and rejection trigger primal instincts in men
Men’s egos are very fragile and they get incredibly embarrassed when they aren’t able to satisfy a woman like they think they should.
Humiliation also plays a role in why many guys don’t talk to the woman they just broke up with.
If you rejected him or broke up with him, chances are he’s feeling humiliated and ashamed.
10) They don’t trust you anymore
If you broke up with a guy and he didn’t do anything wrong, he’ll definitely be confused about why you didn’t want to continue the relationship and he’ll be desperately trying to figure out what he did wrong.
If you broke up with him and didn’t give any real reasons why or if the breakup was very emotional, he won’t trust you not to hurt him again.
And because he doesn’t trust you anymore, he won’t want to open up to you and will hide his feelings away.
11) They want to move on as quickly as possible
Some guys just want to move on as quickly as possible after a breakup. They don’t have time to feel sorry for themselves and mope around feeling sad; they have other things to do with their lives.
So, for these men, acting like they don’t care about the breakup and moving on as quickly as possible is the best way to get over heartbreak.
This is one of the reasons why many men don’t answer phone calls when a woman tries to get in touch after a breakup. They don’t want to go back to that time of sadness and heartbreak, so they ignore your calls and texts.
12) They’re holding a grudge
Breakups will often leave behind a bad taste in both partners’ mouths as they start to resent each other for how things ended between them.
The way the relationship ended might have been a mess. He could feel like it was your fault and that you didn’t treat him with respect. This could make him decide to get revenge.
By acting like he doesn’t care, he’s hoping to hurt you and make you feel as bad as he does.
13) They don’t want to stay friends
I know that to a lot of us women, the idea of staying friends with an ex, especially if he’s a nice guy sounds great, but he may not feel the same way.
If he wasn’t good enough to be your boyfriend, he doesn’t want the consolation prize of being your buddy.
In fact, after a breakup, a lot of guys decide that they don’t want to stay friends with their ex.
They don’t want to remain friends because they associate their ex-partner with negative feelings and memories that they would rather not relive.
Therefore, they try to cut all ties with their ex as quickly as possible so that their new life can begin without any regrets or insecurities.
It might make you feel bad, but if you don’t want him, you need to let him go.
14) They’re scared of commitment
Men who break up because they have commitment issues will act like they don’t care.
The relationship was probably starting to get serious which scared your man and he decided to pick a fight and break up. Now he’s acting cold and indifferent.
But the truth is, he cares about you a lot and that scares him. That’s why he sabotaged your relationship.
He’s obviously got some issues to deal with and isn’t ready to be with you yet.
15) They’re afraid of being rejected
Maybe you got into yet another fight and you said you wanted to break up and he said that he wanted to work things out and you refused.
Effectively, you rejected him.
So what’s he going to do? Show you how sad he is? How shi**y it feels to be him?
No. He’s going to pretend to be ok and try to move on with his life.
He’s not going to try to win you back because he’s afraid you’ll reject him again.
Bottom line: Don’t take break-up behavior at face value, always dig deeper to understand why guys act like they don’t care after a breakup.
Final thoughts
These are just a few reasons why guys act like they don’t care after a breakup. It is important to remember, however, that there’s no one-size-fits-all way of reacting to a breakup, and no one reaction is better than another.
There are a lot of factors that come into play during a break-up and afterward, and these factors can determine how a guy reacts to the breakup.
If you’re still upset about his apparent indifference and are obsessing about the breakup – wondering why it didn’t work out – I recommend watching shaman Rudá Iandê’s free masterclass on how to construct a joyful and fulfilling relationship.
What I learned from watching the video is that a lot of the time the relationships we have with other people fail because of the relationships we have with ourselves.
Not only did he help me understand why I was having trouble finding a meaningful relationship, but he offered a practical solution to the problem.
So what are you waiting for? Change the way you approach love and relationships by watching his free video now.
