The heart was made to be broken - Oscar Wilde
Romantic breakups are an inevitable part of living, no matter how painful they can be.
Along with eliciting a wide range of emotions, including anger, sadness, and shame, surviving a breakup can mean potential health problems as well. These can include insomnia, reduced immune functioning, depression, and even the temporary heart condition known as "broken heart syndrome." How severe these symptoms can be often depends on the strength of the romantic relationship and how traumatic the breakup itself was.
According to the triangular theory of love first proposed by psychologist Robert J. Sternberg, passion, intimacy, and commitment can interact in different ways to form a typology of different kinds of love experience. Of these different kinds of love, the most well known are infatuation (passionate love) and attachment (companionate love). Romantic couples can progress through different types of love over the course of a relationships (for example, passionate love is most commonly seen in the early stages in a relationship before settling into the more stable companionate form). This also means that the feelings that result from infatuation (whether mutual or one-sided) can be very different from what people in a long-term relationship may experience. It also means that emotional pain that occurs after a breakup can be very different as well.
Which brings us to the painful process of working through heartache. Though dealing with a romantic breakup can take considerable time and effort, research studies looking at romantic relationships and breakups that identify specific strategies people have used to overcome heartache, some of which seem to be more effective than others. And a new study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General tests three of these coping strategies from a neuroscience perspective to see how well they actually work.
To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.
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