I've actually heard of this before, a friend of mine who works in psychology told me about it and this was her explanation for what was going on. Three factors she said were at play:

Firstly, men are instinctually more distant from their emotions so they typically need a lot more support dealing with their emotions than women do, and yet we typically as a society do the opposite.

And because we don't teach men at all how manage their emotions, let alone how to handle break-ups, they never process any of the emotions of their break-ups. Meaning their relationships become intertwined because they never get any real mental separation from them.

There are many beliefs over why this is, but my friend believes increasingly that it is to do with cultural conditioning. For example, you will see loads of resources and information offering support to women for how to handle break-ups, from magazines, to blog posts, to everything. There are even countless films about women dealing with break-ups, TV shows, YouTube pages.

However, you will seldom find anything offering men any kind of real information and advice over how to properly handle a breakup. More often than not even in TV and films where men go through break-ups, the response normally is to simply get drunk and forget about it with friends trolling you over the breakup.

So basically we teach women to process their emotions after break-ups, and how to get over them, whereas we teach men to ignore them because that's how you get over them. That makes it more difficult for men to get over break-ups and makes it more difficult for them to separate past relationships from new ones.

Secondly, countless evidence has shown that women are simply better at the smaller details. My friend put it a bit like this, and apologies for sweeping generalisations here, but hopefully it will help highlight the point she was making, younger women are typically very good at identifying what shade of red they are looking at, as they get older they get even better at identifying what shade of red they are looking at.

Men on the other hand, typically go the other way and as they get older red becomes even more red no matter what shade it is. So men typically become less and less interested in the smaller points whereas women typically become more interested in them.

This creates a divergence between men and women when it comes to understanding each other, because men find it increasingly harder to remember the smaller points and find it more difficult to understand why they matter so much, whereas women typically go the opposite way.

Thirdly, if we are talking about older men, women simply are more likely to be in better health, especially cognitively speaking, than men are. So men are more likely to suffer memory problems along with other health problems as they get older than women are.

Hope this helps, though don't quote me on this, as I'm recounting something from a few years back LOL! And interesting and insightful post as ever, Lisa! Thanks for sharing :-)