This story is from April 8, 2008

Heartbreak Hotel

Mohini Mehrotra / TNN / Apr 8, 2008, 00:00 IST

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Heartbreak affects men six times more than it does women, and we have a study and live examples to prove it. Here are a few...

doweshowbellyad=0; Kareena (TOI photo) More picsHeartbreak can kill. And, it is no longer an old wives�� tale. In fact, it now has the stamp of a scientific research on it. According to a study, heartbreak can kill and it affects men six times more than it does women.
Explains Sameer Malhotra, HoD, Psychology and Psychiatry, Fortis Hospitals, New Delhi, ��The symptoms that people with a broken heart manifest are trauma, anger, frustration and betrayal.It is followed by depression.
Men usually take it worse and suffer greatly because they are not very expressive. Since they have to hold on to the male, macho image, they don��t openly express their grief and sorrow.�� And, it is not just your guy-next-door who suffers from it. Here��s a whole list of celeb men who got a bad case of broken heart syndrome...
Shahid Kapur-Kareena Kapoor

Things weren��t easy for Shahid Kapur when he and Kareena Kapoor broke up. For one, Kareena was flaunting her affair with Saif Ali Khan for everybody who cared to see.
Shahid appeared on a telly show soon after, which became famous for the pained expression he carried throughout. He also said later, ��It will be dishonest to say that this doesn��t affect me. I am human, it hurts to see and read this all the time. I guess I have no choice but to live and deal with it.�� Shahid also stopped socialising for some time and became quite a loner.

He turned to work to drown his woes, ��I hold nothing against anybody. If I do, it will pull me down, and I��m not like that. I��ll cherish the good memories of that relationship and move on. That��s what I��m doing - looking at the positive side, focusing on my work and trying to be happy.�� Now that��s a brave
effort!
Salman Rushdie-Padma Lakshmi
Sometimes, a broken heart can give you a writer��s block. And, this situation can be worse than death if you happen to be an acclaimed author, working on your next masterpiece and wrestling with a deadline. That��s exactly what happened to Salman Rushdie when he faced a break-up from Wife No. 3 (or was it four?), Padma Lakshmi. He says about that phase, ��It provoked a crippling bout of writer��s block which threatened to end my literary career.
I got very worried that I��d lost it because the break-up of my marriage suddenly intervened in an extremely emotionally violent way and there were two months or so - May, June - where I really couldn��t work.�� He adds, ��My book lay in front of me like an unfinished bridge. You��ve got all these girders and bits hanging out like nerve endings and the question is, how can you rejoin them?�� Lakshmi was reportedly already dating Ted Frostmann by then.
Vivek Oberoi-Aishwarya
Vivek Oberoi was another man spurned in love and seen suffering from the ��broken heart syndrome��. His break up with the golden girl, now Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, made him leave Mani Ratnam��s film Guru as he couldn��t possibly work with her anymore.
It was heard that they were dating each other when they began shooting for the movie, and post break-up, Vivek went into isolation and stopped socialising. Quite some time after that, in an interview he said, ��I think I will steer away from serious relationships for a long time. It will take a while for me to recover from what happened to me earlier. I cannot commit to anyone.��
Vikram Bhatt-Ameesha Patel
If an actress made a break-up look like a walk in the park, it was Ameesha Patel. Vikram Bhatt was still wondering she-loves-me-anymore-or-not when the lady was already collecting her stuff from his house. Vikram, meanwhile, is still heartbroken.
As he says, ��It is the one who loves less who gets out of love very fast. The one who loves more has difficulty in getting over the relationship. As Shakespeare rightly says, ��Everyone is someone��s fool��, I think it depends on how much you have invested in the relationship that makes it either easy or difficult for you to move on.��

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