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The more extreme your ex’s emotional reaction to your breakup– whether it’s love, hate or awful deep sadness– the more likely your ex still loves you. Research from the University of Birmingham suggests that women experience more emotional and physical pain after a breakup, but men don’t recover from their pain as fully. It takes men longer to process their feelings of grief and loss after a breakup or separation because they tend to repress their emotions. While women tend to grieve and genuinely move on sooner, often men never do. If your ex was a man and really loved you once, he probably still does and has handled the breakup emotionally by burying his feelings instead of fully processing them.