*****
There are plenty of good reasons why the death of a relationship is so unbearable. There's shame, failure, guilt, anger/incredulousness at the other person's inability to see how incredible you are and sadness over that very same thing, plus the personal rejection of your Very Being.
The Czechs have a lovely word for it: litost. "Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery," writes Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
But this torment is more than just the nature of breakups, the need to experience darkness to appreciate the light, blah blah blah. Breakups also activate all kinds of neurochemical, physical and psychological fuckery that makes the whole business even more painful. Stupid biology.
There are plenty of good reasons why the death of a relationship is so unbearable. There's shame, failure, guilt, anger/incredulousness at the other person's inability to see how incredible you are and sadness over that very same thing, plus the personal rejection of your Very Being.
The Czechs have a lovely word for it: litost. "Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery," writes Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.
But this torment is more than just the nature of breakups, the need to experience darkness to appreciate the light, blah blah blah. Breakups also activate all kinds of neurochemical, physical and psychological fuckery that makes the whole business even more painful. Stupid biology.
To wit:
--Breakups turn you into a jonesing
addict.
If the
beginning of a love affair is a kind of chemical-fueled madness, so
is the ending, but in reverse. In one of the crueler aspects of
neurochemistry, just when you're hitting the personal low of a
breakup is also when dopamine—the reward chemical that made you
feel so damn good in the beginning-- decides to flee the scene,
making you desperate for another hit. Dopamine acts in
the same way as any drug of abuse, according to Helen Fisher in
Why
We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love: “If the
beloved breaks off the relationship, the lover shows all the common
signs of withdrawal, including depression, crying spells,
anxiety,insomnia, loss of appetite (or binge eating), irritability,
and chronic loneliness. Like all addicts, the lover then goes to
unhealthy, humiliating, even physically dangerous lengths to procure
their narcotic.” (Note:
Having tried the “unhealthy, humiliating” Plan of Action, I can
advise with some authority that it's not gonna go well for you.)
--Breakups
actually hurt, physically.
In one study researchers had subjects “who recently experienced an unwanted breakup view a photograph of their ex-partner as they think about being rejected.” This was pretty cruel and probably not worth the 50 bucks or whatever the subjects got, but we learned that psychic trauma activates the same parts of the brain that process physical pain. Meaning, your brain experiences emotional pain as it would if you spilled hot coffee on yourself. Or, more accurately, kept spilling coffee on yourself every time you heard that one song on the radio, went on Instagram, etc...
In one study researchers had subjects “who recently experienced an unwanted breakup view a photograph of their ex-partner as they think about being rejected.” This was pretty cruel and probably not worth the 50 bucks or whatever the subjects got, but we learned that psychic trauma activates the same parts of the brain that process physical pain. Meaning, your brain experiences emotional pain as it would if you spilled hot coffee on yourself. Or, more accurately, kept spilling coffee on yourself every time you heard that one song on the radio, went on Instagram, etc...
--Breakups are depressing, officially.
In
a study of poor sods who'd been rejected by a partner within the
past 8 weeks, 40% experienced clinically measurable depression, with
12% of those having moderate to severe depression. All breakups
involve an amount of grief (and indeed, in another of those “think
about how much your break up sucked while we look at your brain with
an MRI” studies,
the parts of the brain associated with grief lit up.) but sometimes
the grief becomes “complicated grief.” Complicated grief is an
unwieldy beast of grief lasting 6 months or more (or, way too much
virtual hot coffee spilling), featuring unpleasantries like
over-rumination and mooning, bad dreams, and the excessive playing of
Elliot Smith songs.
--Your stupid brain can actually start to get off on your suffering.
Anyone who has looked in the mirror to
examine their tragic selves mid-cry knows there is a certain joy in
one's own deep suffering. But sometimes that sort of
self-schadenfreude can become addictive in itself. In some people,
enduring grief triggers
the reward center in their brains, making them seek the dark
feelings so they can get a little happy chemical hit.
--You lose your sense of self.
Without the identity
created within the relationship (i.e.“We like paddleboarding”),
some emerge bleary-eyed from a breakup with a hazy
sense of who they are. The sort of psychic rootlessness is
compounded by the loss of the sense of having a secure base within
the relationship and with that partner. “Wherever that person is,
that's your emotional home,” writes Emily Nagoski, Ph.D. in Come
As You Are. Without that, you're kind of homeless, emotionally.
--It's even worse for people with
“anxious attachment styles.”
Only half of people in U.S. have a
“secure attachment style,” that is, they have relationships
easily and trust others like normal healthy people, while the rest of
us flounder about, either clinging too much (attachment anxious) or
preemptively cutting and running (attachment avoidant). Those with
attachment
anxious styles show “greater preoccupation with the lost
partner, greater perseveration over the loss, more extreme physical
and emotional distress, exaggerated attempts to reestablish the
relationship, partner-related sexual motivation, angry and vengeful
behavior, interference with exploratory activities, dysfunctional
coping strategies, and disordered resolution.” Meanwhile, for the
attachment avoidant—you know who you are—there was little such
emotional fallout. Bastards.
--Breakups kick in our survival
biology.
Attachment is a survival mechanism. A
baby needs secure attachment or it will die. “When (our
relationships) are threatened, we do whatever it takes to hold on to
them, because there are no higher stakes than our connection with our
attachment objects,” writes Nagoski, citing Harry Harlow's “monster
mother” studies. Harlow bonded infant monkeys with mechanical
“mothers,” then rigged the mothers to shake the babies, spike
them or jet cold air on them to force them away. The babies responded
to this rather shabby treatment by running right back into the arms
of those unpredictably cruel, rejecting mothers. Not only that, they
became desperate to fix the relationship and tried to win back the
mother by flirting with her, grooming and stroking her. That is,
behavior some among us may recognize quite well.
So yeah, it's bad. With the combination
of biological, chemical and emotional havoc a breakup causes, it's a
wonder any of us ever get over it. But we do. If you can just accept
you're going to be fucked for a while--and not in the way you'd
like—the appeal of spending car rides furtively weeping to Joni
Mitchell's “All I Want” will eventually fade and you will
indeed get over it. At some point. You might have to listen to a
whole lot of “All I Want.”
In the meantime, take solace in the
words of Nietzche, a dude not exactly known for being
consoling. “Ultimately, it is the desire, not the desired, that we
love,” wrote Nietzche. That is, that passion is still in you
regardless of who its recipient is. And hell, the next person might
be even better at appreciating it.
In other words, you're probably better
off without 'em. Sorta.
xoxo
jill
