Examining Breakups Through a Scientific Lens

Hollywood has had a long hold on portraying blissful relationships gone dour and sour. Breakups are the stuff of dramas and comedies that directors feed into movie reels. This often makes us forget just how down home real and familiar the breakup experience is to most of us. While many turn to self-help books and write letters to columnists to help us solve our woes, a lot of us aren't aware of how scientists are getting more and more adept at scrutinizing this social phenomenon. It's an interesting, refreshing, albeit technical way of looking at things, and it may snuff the romance out of it, but it turns out that science has a lot to say about love, relationships and breakups.

A Gender Bender

So how does gender fare in the breakup picture? Is one gender really more culpable for breakups over another? Some sociologists point out that males tend to respond to relationship-threatening conflicts by just avoiding them altogether. More concretely put, husbands usually avoid conflicts more than wives. A survey found that females generally have significantly more reasons for breaking up than males did. They were more likely to consider a lack of equity, openness and autonomy beyond the relationship as reasons for the split, while males predominantly accounted for a lack of "magic quality" in the relationship as their primary reason. Turns out that even science can't rule out the inexplicable and often elusive "spark" as a qualifier for healthy relationships.

And the common notion that women are more likely to fantasize on "happily ever after"? A myth debunked. In one study, 87 participants were given scenarios on three fictitious couples and asked to evaluate their likely actions after going through certain conflicts. While females were expected to more often predict that the couples would try to work things out and stay together, the study found that gender does not play a key role in influencing the way a person perceives others. Females were as likely as males to predict that the fictitious couples would stay together or break up. A common cultural background seems to influence our ideologies and notions much more, transcending the age-old gender divide. The most powerful key in influencing our perception of other people turns out to be nothing biologically inherent, after all: optimism is still the most potent remedy for negative outlooks, and optimistic people were the only ones more likely to predict that the couples would be able to mend their relationships.

Beating the Breakup Blues

Our first breakup apparently plays a greater role in spelling out how we view ourselves in our subsequent relationships. Good experiences in our first romantic relationships that are characterized by strength, excitement, pride, and happy memories are likely to lead to stable relationships in the future than those who recall negative accounts involving hostility, shame, stress, and fear. Four patterns generally emerge in our subsequent relationships, each a telling legacy of that very first breakup. Secure individuals were likely to have had a mutually positive experience, and they exude a positive sense of both themselves and that of their partners. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are fearful individuals, who, possibly as a result of trauma and loss of faith, tend to have negative recollections of both oneself and their partner. Somewhere in between, we can be either dismissive or preoccupied, with the former involving a positive sense of self but not of one's partner, perhaps due to a history of suspicion or betrayal, and the latter involving a positive sense of partner but not of oneself. While most of us have likely had the circumstances surrounding our first relationships already etched into history's books, achieving a healthy, positive perspective of oneself and one's partners in relationships is certainly still a viable task. A conscious effort to evaluate and rectify one's current perspective from time to time contributes greatly to dispelling most of the negative vibes we pick up and espouse along the bumpy roads of a relationship. The past may be unchangeable but it is definitely not unconquerable.

Social scientists have evaluated individual responses to breakups by measuring attachment related anxiety, which is associated with greater preoccupation with one's lost partner, more extreme physical and emotional distress, exaggerated attempts to reestablish the relationship, dysfunctional coping strategies, and angry and vengeful actions. One would believe that the gravity of individual reactions to breakups would be parallel to one's degree of attachment to their partners. Contrary to what most of us would expect, a study conducted in the US involving 5000 internet respondents found that after a breakup, the most distressed respondents were those who were less attached to their partners. Conversely, those who had a greater degree of attachment were those who were able to deal with the post-breakup trauma with self-reliant coping strategies. Those respondents classified as "less secure", unable to avoid the anxiety that followed a breakup, were more prone to adopt social coping strategies-turning to family and friends for consolation. The lowest scorers on "security" suffered the greatest degrees of anxiety, and they were more likely to use drugs and alcohol to cope with their loss.

The Bottom Line

As you will see, it's all a matter of perspective. Going through one breakup can only open new doors that will lead to the one person who will make us realize why it never worked out it with anyone else. They're a necessary step in our quest to find the perfect "one." And if that sounds too sappy for your liking, think of it this way: if he or she were so "great", you wouldn't have had to break up with him/her after all, would you? Leave it to science to prove it to you.