We've all seen it in movies before: Guy breaks up with a girl; girl screams, cries, sobs on the phone with her best friend, eats ice cream.

She's allowed to be emotional, vulnerable, and maybe even write poetry.

There's often a montage where she gets a haircut, has a glow up, and turns her pain and grief into something more powerful.

This is how Hollywood says breakups work – at least for women.

It's a flawed stereotype, obviously. But according to Jessie Stephens, author of Heartsick, a narrative non-fiction book about breakups, it's ultimately useful for women with broken hearts to have a certain "script" like this to follow.

"It's an imperfect script. But there are a series of steps that women know to take, which is partly born from watching other women around them, but also popular culture.

"It is a way of putting one foot in front of the other."

So, what about men? Jessie says pop culture — and society generally — doesn't arm men with the same "script" to deal with a broken heart, and they often "don't know what to do next".

"Whenever I have read about heartbreak, or watch stories of heartbreak, it almost always belongs to women.

"I think that when men face romantic rejection, there's a different level of shock, because they haven't seen it represented in in as many ways."

This is a bigger problem than breakups, according to Jessie. It's also about the struggles men sometimes have with emotional vulnerability.

"I think it is at odds with masculinity, especially Australian masculinity, to be hurt, and to be emotional, and to cry, and to wallow.

"We still mock men for crying or call them 'cry babies' for having any of those feelings."

I put this idea to some of my close male friends. Was Jessie right? Did they also feel rudderless in a breakup, like they didn't have a guidebook to follow while mending their sore heart?

They all agreed that them, and men they knew, often quietly grappled with breakups in a way that was uniquely lonely, isolating, and masculine.

"I think men sometimes struggle with breakups because we aren't as good as at processing feelings as women," offered a friend, Jeremy, while acknowledging that it was a generalisation.

He pointed out that men — especially young men — were more likely to end their lives than women.

"The stakes are high," he said.

Jessie Stephens agreed. The reasons for suicide are complex and multifactorial, and a breakup doesn't explain suicidality, but the experience of heartbreak makes men vulnerable.

"One study suggested as many as four in five men who end their own lives have come out of a relationship recently," she said.

My friend gave another explanation of the male breakup experience. Men often lacked community, he said, which was an essential ingredient for dealing with a breakup.

"I think that a lot of men find themselves in relationships where potentially a lot of their social world is built around their relationship.

"When that falls apart, they find themselves not only without an immediate companion, but also without a whole sort of social universe, a whole feeling of belonging."

And my friend Dave wished men had more guidance with breakups. He took a leaf out of the classic female breakup "script" and went to the hairdressers to deal with a broken heart. Shaving his head felt great, he said.

"It was a way for me to have deeper conversations with friends as well. They could see that something had changed on the outside, and it was a way to talk about what I was going through on the inside.

"I wish men felt more comfortable engaging in some of those rituals."

Gery Karantzas, an expert on relationships and social psychology at Deakin University, wasn't convinced that men and women grappled with heartbreak that differently.

"When you look at the science on the ground, and you look for those differences [between how men and women cope with breakups], those differences are overstated.

"That is, men and women experience negative emotions around breakup largely to a similar degree."

Rather, Dr Karantzas said, relationship science said "attachment theory" was a better predictor of how anyone of any gender will deal with their relationship breakdown.

Attachment theory is a psychological theory about how humans develop and maintain relationships and helps explain the way we "think, feel and behave in relationships".

According to the theory, each person's different attachment patterns are formed through the love, support, and safety they received from caregivers throughout childhood.

You might have heard of the term, but do you know what attachment style you have?

Dr Karantzas said if you were anxiously '"attached" in your relationship, you'd likely carry that anxiety into your breakup. If you were "avoidant" in your relationship, you might also have been avoidant when it ended.

He argued that the context of the relationship break down was also crucial — more than the gender of who was involved.

"I think it has more to do with the nature of the breakup, how it went down, what was it about, and the kind of individual characteristics that people have — some known and some unknown characteristics — that probably play out in the way that we experience breakup, cope with it, and any grief and loss symptoms that we experience."

While Jessie Stephens agreed that attachment theory played an important role in relationships, she said the social pre-conceptions and stereotypes about relationships were so strong, and so influential, they couldn't be ignored.

"I don't think that we can divorce the socialised elements of masculinity and femininity from the break up experience.

"Until a man can cry on television as easily as a woman can, I think that we're going to see differences in emotional processing."

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