14 DAY TRIAL // Can you think of some lyrics that are more common than "Don't break my heart" or "Unbreak my heart"? Still, a new research at the Northwestern University reveals that lovers, even when deeply in love, recover much better, almost immediately, following a breakup than they could have thought, experiencing much less distress than they had forecast before the end of the relationship.
Even if love-crazed subjects predicted a "Romeo and Juliet" drama, the real-life breakups seem to be much less tragic. "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 co-author Eli Finkel, assistant professor of psychology in Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
"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," said lead author Paul Eastwick, a graduate student in psychology at Northwestern.
This confirms previous research showing that people have remarkably poor insight when predicting the level of their distress in the evening of emotional events. When forecasting a breakup, people seem to miss the good outcomes following a breakup, like the benefits of living alone.
Each subject in the research was involved in a dating relationship for over two months. The subjects completed a set of questionnaires twice monthly for 38 weeks, a total of 20 online sessions. The questionnaires assessed predicted and actual stress, and if the subjects were very much in love.
The data came from 26 people (10 female and 16 male) who finished their relationships in the first six months of the study. The predicted distress reported two weeks before the breakup was four points higher than that experienced in the initial weeks and months following the event. "People tend to be pretty resilient, often more so than they realize. No one is saying that breaking up is a good time. It's just that people bounce back sooner than they predict.", Eastwick said.