Breaking up is hard to do--but an unconscious "script" that most ofus follow may make it simpler. That was the finding of a group of psychologists at Texas Christian University, who were intrigued by reports that people act out such a script on first dates. Is there a typical sequence of events, they wondered, for the end of a relationship? To find out, they asked 80 college students to list the steps a couple might take to split up. The students gave the same responses 84 percent of the time--enough overlap to constitute a breakup blueprint.
Dina Battaglia, the study's lead researcher, thinks that people follow such mental maps because we're "cognitive misers." Says Battaglia: "We don't want to have to process every piece of information that comes our way, so we use a script to guide our actions." The script suggested by college students starts with the partners noticing other people and becoming uninterested in each other, then shifts to an attempt to work things out. Conflicts flare again, and after two more tries at reconciliation, the typical couple calls it quits: a total of 16 steps in all. Battaglia emphasizes that this script is not etched in stone, but simply a storyline many breakups follow. And it's specific to the population studied: The script for people in their 30s, for example, might be quite different.
