Breaking Up Is NOT Hard To Do

Relationship breakups are not nearly as painful as those who are madly in love think it will be. New research shows that those who believe they are madly in love and fear the breakup will be disastrously painful actually recover much more rapidly than expected.

There appears to be an inverse relationship between how bad the person believes the breakup will be and how easy it actually is for the person to recover. The research, conducted by assistant professor of psychology Eli Finkel from Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, determined that the anticipation of breakup was, for most people, worse than the actual experience.

“Our research shows that a breakup is not nearly as bad as people imagine, and the more you are in love with your partner, the more wrong you are about how upset you are going to be when the dreaded loss actually occurs,” said Finkel.

Fellow researcher and grad student at Northwester, Paul Eastwick, added, “But the overestimates of the most-in-love participants, of how badly they would feel after a breakup, were much greater than the predictions of participants less in love. Their levels of distress were nowhere near their catastrophic predictions.”

Participants involved in the study, which took place over nine months, had to have been in a relationship of at least two months in order to qualify. Participants who were still involved completed questionnaires about their relationships over the course of 38 weeks in order to assist the researchers in measuring expected versus actual stress. Using the data from 26 participants who broke up during the study, the researchers were able to determine that the more “madly in love” the person was, the worse they predicted the breakup would be.

“People tend to be pretty resilient, often more so than they realize,” Eastwick said. “No one is saying that breaking up is a good time. It’s just that people bounce back sooner than they predict.” It is possible, researchers think, that people in relationships fail to take into account the positive ramifications a breakup may have, like being single and having more time to do what they want to do.