A dozen lessons in love: Part 5

Love will tear us apart

If I’m getting my searches right, this classic from Joy Division only reached No.13 in the UK charts and No.42 in the US. if ever you wanted a “people are stupid” argument against democracy either side of the pond, then this is surely it (with Americans being slightly more stupid than Brits, obviously). The song was released in June 1980 a month or so after the suicide of Ian Curtis, the band’s lead singer, at the age of 23. The song is principally about the disintegration of Curtis’ marriage.

It’s interesting that he thought love - rather than the loss of love - would tear his relationship apart. Our understanding of any concept starts with its definition. Love can be defined in positive and negative ways. It can be characterised by good feelings, trust, respect and support, and it can also manifest as misery, jealousy, and control. A loss of love is much less arousing, may result in indifference and could cause less damage than the negative aspects of love. So, the presence of love could well tear a relationship apart much more than its absence.

In starting to read around the science of love for my new book, I have found some evidence that there are differences in the extreme reactions of men and women to a breakdown in a relationship. Men tend to turn their rejection and rage towards their ex and women tend to turn on themselves through self-harm. There are certainly many more instances of a male injuring or killing their female ex than vice versa. It will be interesting and challenging discussing gender differences in the new book. In general, the differences within genders swamp those that exist across genders and men and women are nowhere near as different as sometimes assumed – but some important differences in some context surely exist.

Thankfully, most people don’t have such an extreme and harmful response to the breakdown of a relationship. Whilst many friends might be heard saying “what a shame” and “such a waste” when a relationship ends, a break-up is likely to be in the best long- term interests of both parties. How many of you are with someone now who is substantively worse than a previous partner? So, if in doubt, it’s probably best to get out. Try not to let the “stick at it” narrative fool you into staying past the point when it would be better for you to get out. Before too long, and probably a lot sooner than you predict, you’ll probably find someone you’re happier with and better suited to.

The happiness literature is full of evidence showing that we adapt to most of what life throws at us. A break-up can be very painful, and can tear many people apart, but not for too long. Over time, and much sooner than most of us will predict, we make sense of the break-up and are able to provide a good explanation for why the relationship was not right for us. Human beings are great at sense-making and being able to tell good stories for why things turned out as they did. This is crucial to adaptation; to our ability to bounce back from adversity. It doesn’t matter much whether the story is “true” (whatever that might mean), only that it makes sense to us.

Unfortunately, we also adapt to many positive aspects of life. Think about how you make sense of a pay rise so that it quickly doesn’t feel like you’ve been given very much at all. We also adapt to our relationships and get easily get stuck in a rut. The opening line of Love will tear us apart is “when routine bites hard and ambitions are low”. We are creatures of habit, which generally helps to make life easier for us but can also dampen down happiness. Cass Sunstein and Tali Sharot in Look Again provide some tips on how we can shake up our experiences in ways that enhance happiness. (they’ve both been on my podcast Breaking Beliefism by the way, with all episodes coming in under 30 mins to reduce adaptation – and boredom).

We could certainly all do with shaking up our relationships and activities from time to time. This doesn’t have to mean changing them so much as changing the ways we experience them. What we attend to determines what we do and how we feel. In Happiness by Design, I illustrate how attention is the production process of happiness, converting inputs, including our relationships, into feelings of pleasure and purpose. So, whatever the nature and status of your “loving” relationships, it might be worth thinking about how you can tweak them ever so slightly to bring even more happiness to you and them.