Last week, I woke up to a missed phone call from a friend of mine. Now, I wake up at 6am and generally go to sleep around midnight, which means that this call either came in during booty call hours or “something bad happened” hours.

I knew immediately that given who it was, she must have had an issue with her boyfriend and it was bad enough to completely disregard all rules of decorum and cause her to call me at 5 AM. One thing I’ve learned about women over time is that when something happens, you all HAVE to speak on it, to somebody. Somebody HAS to listen to it. It can’t stay in your head or you’ll die.

The worst part is, when I called her back, she told me that she waited to call me.

Guys don’t do this. It’s not that we won’t call our boys to tell him that we broke up, but we definitely ain’t calling the homey at 5AM to tell him. We’ll sleep it off and tell them later. See, our after-breakup decorum is different.

So here are some after breakup methods of men and women:

Men

1) Go the strip club

I don’t know what it is about seeing T & A after a breakup that makes us feel better…EVEN IF YOU’VE BEEN CHEATING. Men are some odd ducks. I got a homeboy who cheated on his girl so much (we all found out later) that going to a strip club was nothing short of ironic.

2) Go the regular club and spend way more money than we should

Guys are escapist in nature. Something bad happens personally, we go straight for temporary distractions.

3) Try to fall into some new tang

If women ever need proof of how easy it is for men to get some stank, the after-breakup-head-clearing-smang is proof. Either there is a union out there of women whose specific job is to be the rebound smangee or sympathy is the best aphrodisiac EVER.

Notice very few of these have anything to do with talking it out. That happens muuuuuuuuch later in manworld. We’re more destructive obviously.

Women

1) Call somebody immediately after the breakup occurs, even if that means 3am

Anybody ever notice that breakups never happen at convenient hours? It’s always mad late which sucks for the friends of the woman because she’s going to call SOMEBODY (as alluded to before). Men and women both do this, but women in greater numbers; a pissed off woman doesn’t care about who she inconveniences. You don’t answer the phone at midnight and she’s gonna call until you do even if that means she has to stay up all night. Word to the wise evil men out there: by not answering the phone when your pissed off girl calls, you are DIRECTLY responsible for ruining somebody else’s evening. Just answer the damn phone.

2) Call homegirls together to talk about it, usually in bash-that-man-and-uplift-your-girl situation

Not that there’s anything wrong with this.

3) Make some dramatic change

Bulldoze a home. Cut her hair. Move to Australia. Go back to get another PhD in Environmental Justice with a concentration in Lower-Income Communities and Guam. Collect seashells by the seashore then write a coffee-table book. Start a company.

Women can be amazingly productive in tragedy. While most men do great things in hopes of impressing a woman, I think the only man to do something great because of a break up was Mark Zuckerberg.

Anyway, what are the other different ways that men and women deal with breakups? What were YOUR methods of dealing?