How long does it take a heart to heal?

There was a social media meltdown a few months ago when Mick Jagger was snapped with a brunette looking presumably post-sex-cosy on the balcony of his hotel room in Zurich last week.

It was a mere eleven weeks since the death of his long-term girlfriend L’Wren – a shockingly short period of mourning for a woman he spent 13 years with, according to most of the posts and comments.

Which begs the question: how long is the official mourning period supposed to be? What is the acceptable length of time someone like Mick is supposed to wait before being linked romantically to anyone else?

A quick survey of around a dozen friends settled on ‘at least a year’ - with the view that the longer the relationship, the longer the person should take to get over losing them.

But is there really a ‘one size fits all’ model for grieving? Particularly for someone struggling with desperately tragic and traumatic emotions triggered by a partner’s suicide?

I’ve seen people who I know loved their partner passionately, react very differently after losing them to either death or divorce.

Some dealt with death in a matter or fact fashion and got on with task of rebuilding their lives quickly.

Others never did recover, choosing instead to exist in a voluntary time warp, remaining faithful to their past, absent partners forever by reliving their memories on a mental conveyor belt, on a never-ending loop.

How we cope is dependent on our moral code, upbringing, personality, life experience, religion, maturity and a thousand other individual factors.

Some people deal with loss by disappearing under the duvet for months. Others drink their way through it or bury themselves in work.

A friend of mine ran her way back to sanity after her partner died unexpectedly. It made perfect sense to her: she wanted to run from what had happened, so she did.

Another locked himself away for eight months with endless box sets and basically distracted his brain until he could face the horror of what happened.

We all have different coping mechanisms.

Mick is rumoured to be a sex addict and has always been notoriously unfaithful.

I’m not sure what we expected of him but it was fairly predictable that he’d try to make himself feel better by sleeping with someone.

Sex is a coping mechanism for sex addicts: just as alcoholics fall off the wagon during a crisis, sex addicts fall into bed with strangers.

Add to this that men and women tend to deal with the death of a relationship differently.

Women like to make sense of what’s happened before moving onto the next.

A lot of men don’t ever analyse their relationships or life circumstances and remain action focused.

If they find themselves single, for whatever reason, their solution is simply to find another partner so that’s what they do.

There is also another very human, primitive reason for seeking sex after a tragic loss: it provides comfort, albeit temporary.

Mick’s actions might not be terribly sensible, popular or mannerly but it’s not uncommon to crave sex - the act of which creates life - when confronted with death.