There is a song by SVMP, Zebatin, and Fallen Oceans called “where do we go when we fall in love”. It is as pure a love song as one gets. Three verses, zero conflicts. It’s lovely. But that kind of love-song romance is not what I’m interested in unraveling here. I’m more interested in the murky, thorny shadows on the other side of love. I’m more interested in where we go when we fall out of love.
Why is it that even the distorted memory of a person we don’t interact with anymore, a person we may not even like anymore, can anchor itself in our minds? Why do we ruminate about someone we can’t stand to be around? On that note, why is it that we can’t stand to be around them?
In a particular podcast episode by No Stupid Questions about closure, the hosts discuss the Zeigarnik effect, a psychological theory that posits that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks, and how it relates to human relationships. The Zeigarnik effect was first named and studied by Bluma Zeigarnik (yay women scientists), who observed the phenomena in a restaurant when she was still a student, as described in the podcast:
Zeigarnik says that she was in a restaurant and she observed that the waiter could keep in their head just, like, a ridiculous number of orders, and drinks, and who’s getting what, and have they been served? So, she’s just marveling at this, and she’s like, “How is it that you can keep all these things in your head?” … But after the waiter serves everyone’s food — and serves it correctly — what happens is they finish eating, this large group that Bluma Zeigarnik’s part of, and one person … goes back to retrieve an item that they left behind. And this guest spots the waiter, and asks for help, and thinks that, “Oh, this waiter who can obviously remember everything” would remember where they were sitting, etc. And the waiter looks at this dinner guest and seemingly has no idea who they even are, much less where they sat and whether they had left something behind. And so, the waiter had kind of erased the hard drive of memory once the task was finished. So, the Zeigarnik effect refers to keeping in our minds unfinished tasks. And when we have closure — when something is checked off or resolved — then that thing exits our mind.
Angela Duckworth, No Stupid Questions
An extension of this theory presented by Tim Wilson and Dan Gilbert, that explanation and understanding enable the regulation of emotional responses, and that our attention lingers on events that are relevant to us but that we don’t understand. They present a new theory on the phenomenon of affective attenuation, which they describe as follows:
Sarah is thrilled when she learns that she won first prize in a fiction writing contest, but within a few days her pleasure fades. When she thinks about the award she is pleased, but not as much as when she first learned that she had won. Sam is despondent when Julie leaves him, but gradually his sadness eases. A year later, he rarely thinks about Julie, and when he does he feels a small twinge of sorrow but not the deep ache of despair. In examples such as these, people experience an intense affective reaction to an event, but their reaction fades over time. They have undergone affective adaptation, defined as the psychological processes that cause an affective response to weaken after one or more exposures to a stimulus (Frederick & Loewenstein, 1999). In this article, we review previous explanations of affective adaptation and propose a new theoretical approach. We suggest that people attend and have affective reactions to events that are self-relevant but poorly understood and that adaptation occurs when they “explain away” these events—when they transform them from extraordinary events that grab attention into ordinary events that do not. That is, when people understand self-relevant events, the “extraordinary becomes commonplace” and those events no longer elicit strong affective reactions.
Explaining Away: A Model of Affective Adaptation, Timothy D. Wilson and Daniel T. Gilbert
In simple terms, our emotional response is greater to events that our “self-relevant” but “poorly understood”, and that response attenuates not just with time, but also with explanation understanding. As it relates to the rupture of a relationship, this suggests that the emotional pain of it lingers while we do not understand how it happened. Like many psychological theories, that statement is intuitive enough, but this dynamic duo of Tim and Dan rallied the humans and crunched the numbers to prove it.
I’m going to append my own theory to this theory of affective adaptation in the context of people falling out of love. I have only the humans I interact with, passively observe, and procure my own stories about to base this on. Having the most data on myself, I am the illustrative example of this study. I wonder if even if the explanation as to why a relationship hurt the people involved, why they couldn’t muster enough collective motivation to heal it, is within reach, that if we feel that accepting that explanation would hurt more than the drawn-out, feigned ignorance of not understanding, that we choose to reject that explanation on some level. Rejecting the explanation means no understanding means no affective adaptation to the stimulus of heartbreak. I wonder if the unadorned explanation that they were not the person you fantasized about, that they found you insufferable, that they would rather spend their time with themselves or with others than with you, that they didn’t find you attractive, that they didn’t respect you, that they resented you for something. That they didn’t love you enough to feel motivated to show it or to work on it. Sometimes some combination of the above, or other insults to your self-worth and sense of lovability, are the explanation, but accepting that is the place we don’t want to go when we fall out of love. We don’t want to accept, that either someone we wanted to feel love from didn’t want to give it to us, or that they were not the perfect partner we imagined them to be, or maybe both.
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