Love and intimacy in a close relationship can bring about the greatest happiness and fulfillment, but conversely, a breakup can tear apart the self and leave one in a spiraling destruction of self-concept. Self-concept, or personal identity, is composed of one’s traits, values, appearance, hobbies, and social circle. When you find yourself in a crisis of despair after parting ways with the one you loved, it can be hard to understand the context of it all. Oftentimes, you might find yourself reminiscing about the good times with your partner, wishing you could have it all back instead of accepting the mismatching interests and arguments that pushed you apart. So, before you start making those regrettable texts to your ex, consider the science social psychologists have been uncovering in understanding your emotions following that dreaded breakup.
At Northwestern University, social psychologists Erica Slotter, Wendi Gardner, and Eli Finke, developed a study utilizing a series of self-report questionnaires to examine the emotional effects of a breakup on undergraduates college students. Questions focused on the domain of self-concept in the areas of physical appearance, participation in activities, social life, future goals, and values, and answers were then evaluated to determine a general rating of self-concept clarity.
What Slotter, Gardner, and Finkel found is that when recalling the end of a recent romantic relationship, participants of their study reported significant declines in self-concept clarity. Furthermore, in a second part of the study, participants who were currently in an active romantic relationship were put up to a similar questionnaire in which they were asked to predict their attitudes and emotions if their relationship were to end. Just as participants who recalled a past breakup reported a decline in self-concept clarity, those who were asked to imagine a future breakup also responded with answers suggesting a significant loss of identity in terms of self-concept content. Simply put, following a breakup, you experience a period of distress in which you lose confidence in your purpose and identity.
Now, this makes sense since when one is involved in a committed, romantic relationship some, or all, aspects of one’s partner become partially one’s own. This is known as the Inclusion-of-Other-in-Self (IOS) model; where the self and partner become cognitively fused to some degree. For example, benefits to your partner also benefit yourself, your partner’s perspectives become your own, and your partner’s characteristics become shared characteristics. Therefore, when you and your partner split, it is as if a part of you leaves with them; this is what makes the breakup so painful.
These findings all seem pretty ominous, but what does it all mean for those of us struggling to get over that past relationship? Just as aspects of one’s life and character abruptly departed, a genuine opportunity to reinvent oneself has arrived. Like spring cleaning or remodeling an old, dirty house into a sparkling new abode, a breakup sets up the self for the chance to be the best it can be. Dust off those old vinyls, dig up those soccer cleats from high school, wax up that water-logged surfboard. By rekindling an old hobby, or better yet, kickstarting a new one, you can rebuild your self-concept clarity and successfully leave a romantic breakup in the past where it belongs.
It is naïve to not expect emotional distress following a breakup with a loved one and there are many ways to go about dealing with the accompanying feelings, but just as the findings of Slotter, Gardner, and Finkel’s study illustrate the reasons for anguish, it also opens a door to understanding and harnessing our psychological processes for the betterment of our happiness and subjective well-being. So, instead of staring at old photos and wishing you could go back, make a positive out of a negative and take a look at yourself and decide: who do you want to be?
Sources:
- http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/eli-finkel/documents/57_SlotterGardnerFinkelInPress_PSPB.pdf
- http://www.ipearlab.org/media/publications/Self-Expansion_Theory___Encyclopedia_of_Social_Psychology.pdf
