I have a weak spot for the sort of pop psychology studies that end up being spread around by the internet; I justify that interest by telling myself that regardless of their reliability, many folks clearly believe in them — which makes them worth reflecting on for that reason alone.
In reality, breaking up doesn’t feel that bad is this week’s attention-grabber:
“We underestimate our ability to survive heartbreak,” said Eli Finkel, an assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University, whose study appears online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Finkel and colleague Paul Eastwick studied young lovers — especially those who profess ardent affection — to see if their predictions of devastation matched their actual angst when that love was lost.
“On average, people overestimate how distressed they will be following a breakup,” Finkel said in a telephone interview.
That makes good sense.
What I wonder is, how much of that “ability to survive” is a testament to the reality that the relationship wasn’t particularly significant? How much is attributable to our ability to grow emotional scar tissue? After all, as any veteran of divorce will tell you (and I am a thrice-decorated veteran of that agonizing process), it’s often tough to distinguish between numbness and recovery.
Folks often ask me about how I “survived” three divorces. I get that question a lot, especially from those who are in the midst of their first (and, one hopes, their final) divorce. “How could you go through this again and again and not be permanently devastated?”, they inquire. Some of that resilience and willingness to begin again is a result of grace, surely. And some of it is also attributable to stubbornness. (See my post last year on “the king of starting over”.)
But let’s be honest: ending a marriage (or any other significant, long-term relationship) is desperately painful. It’s agonizing, crazy-making, soul-scarring. When I was going through my second and third divorces, I remember thinking to myself “How could I ever have put myself back in this situation? How did I forget how much this hurts?” (It’s a question I also ask myself around mile 23 of every marathon, and I’ve heard from some of my female friends that they ask themselves the same thing when they give birth for the second or third time.) And of course, the answer is that most of us have not only a great capacity to endure pain, but a great capacity to forget. Time is just slow-acting Percoset, sweet anesthesia coming at its own maddening pace.
But anesthesia and real recovery aren’t the same thing. The absence of pain is not always a reliable indicator of good emotional health. I know plenty of young people who move serially from relationship to relationship, and I know them well enough to know that their post-break-up insouciance isn’t an act. But for many, the real pain comes months or even years later. Sometimes, we need a shot of anesthetic to get us out of an unhealthy relationship. Two or three weeks after the break-up, we’re smiling and laughing and feeling on top of the world; three months later, we’re curled pathetically on the couch, sniffling in misery. The lag time between the separation and feeling the hurt is often quite substantial (and, in my experience, it’s a good deal longer for men than for women.) And during that lag time — the period between leaving the dentist’s chair and the novocaine wearing off — it’s easy to underestimate just how much the loss of a love really did hurt.
Do I feel today the pain of three divorces and a half-dozen other serious break-ups? No. But in order to move forward, I had to go back (in therapy, in spiritual retreats, in writing) and look carefully at each of those many past relationships. I needed to feel the pain — and cop to the pain I inflicted. It took a lot of work to make sure that I wasn’t mixing up numb forgetfulness with genuine healing.
And I suspect that some of the folks in this little study will discover that they’ve been mixing up those very things.
Is this more truth from Prof. Schwyzer? Thanks to you wisdom, (which always seems to affirm that which I am experiencing as a young man) I may have the courage to commit to a breakup - that which always seems to be so much more difficult than committing to regular relationship maintenance.
On average, people overestimate how distressed they will be following a breakup
That’s probably right in general, but:
“The nine-month study involved college students who had been dating at least two months who filled out questionnaires every two weeks.”
I think break up can indeed “feel that bad” sometimes, especially if you talk about couples, who divorce after living for years together and raising children. College students, who haven’t had yet enough time to buy a house, raise children and live for years together, aren’t a suitable group to make such experiment on, unless you want to talk about relatively short-term relationships. What’s 2 months or even 2 years without taking all kinds of responsibilities on yourself as a couple compared to f.e. 5 years of marriage?
Also, a good point about “anesthesia and real recovery aren’t the same thing” and feeling pain even years after the break up. Again, I believe it’s especially true for long term couples. Divorcing after having children makes it worse too.