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Sticking with ambigamy for a change here (since after all, it's what this blog is supposed to be about) and following up on the past few week's articles, I'm thinking about the art of breaking up. It's a very practical art because life is precious and short. We don't want to waste large amounts of it on futile angst. We want to harvest the lessons and move on. People who mourn the end too long, don't know how short life is, can't help it or have been roughed up by a nasty break up. There's a lot of that last thing going around. I suspect many of us walk around with the soul half knocked out of us by bad break-ups. "Ah, look at all the lonely people, where do they all come from?" the Beatles asked. Some from nasty breakups.
Now you happily stable and mature coupled types might find what follows here a little foreign and even repugnant. Feel free to change the channel. It's meant for folks who still deal with such things as break-ups. (Warning the following program contains juvenile content...)
I once broke up with the same person twice. The first time she left disgusted with me and boy, did I miss her. The second time she left honoring me and I hardly missed her. This informal somewhat-controlled experiment exposed how much my love was about how I felt about myself by means of relationship. If she pockets my self-esteem on her way out the door, I join the lonely people. If she leaves blessing me, I'm OK.
How my relationships have ended often had carry-over effects that drove me to get into the next. If it ends with me feeling like a failure, I'm eager for a shot at redemption and get into the next too soon. And getting in too soon means the angst from the last relationship persisted well into the next. I suspect many of us experience this revolving door effect. It's a reason to either stay with one partner for better or for worse, to put yourself in enforced "quarantine" while you heal between relationships, or to cultivate the art of breaking up generously so the toxic reside doesn't last long.
Breaking up generously: Most people would sign on to that in principle. In practice though an enormous amount of us dis our partners as we exit.
That's a problem with all platitudes like "be generous." We hold them as absolute principles but can make exceptions pretty much any time it's time to apply them. So rather than just pledging to be generous on the way out, it's better to try to understand why so often we are at least tempted not to be.
One key can be found in the Prisoner's Dilemma, the simple core model in an important research field called Game Theory. To get a sense of Prisoner's dilemma, imagine a game of rock, paper, scissors but with only two options. One is the peace sign which translates as "I'm cooperating with you." The other is a familiar one-finger sign which stands for "I'm competing with you."
If you both throw down peace signs you both win points which is the object of the game. But you win far more points when your opposite throws down the peace sign and you throw down the other sign. That is, when you compete with someone who is cooperating you take them to the cleaners because their guard is down. So why not just throw down the other sign consistently? Because if you and the other party both throw down the other sign you both lose. And if you're playing over and over the losses add up.
So which should you throw down? Should you be cooperative or competitive?
Prisoner's dilemma describes situations as diverse as international arms treaty negotiation, purchasing on e-bay, and competition between genes in your own body. It's an exquisite depiction of the ambivalence we feel about risking cooperation and about risking competition in any situation. It's at the heart of such pressing questions as Can I trust him?, Am I getting screwed?, Can I get away with this?, and Should I believe her? The game totters precariously between win-win (your gain is my gain) and win-lose (your gain is my loss and visa versa). Friendship and romance can be modeled as Prisoner's dilemma too.
Friendship is a kind of mutual endorsement by means of cooperation. In any friendship, a habit of throwing down peace signs is established. But as the friendship starts to break down, the temptation to compete and the risks of cooperating increase for both parties. Knowing this makes the temptation even greater. After all, if the other party is about to defect on you, you'd better beat him or her to it.
It becomes like two-person hot potato. Neither party wants to be left cooperating at close range with someone competitive. That's why you start backing out. You don't want to be at close range. It's also why you start dissing. If someone has to be stuck with the hot potato, you want it to be your soon-to-be ex-friend, not you.
You've probably seen all this research on loss aversion of late. It turns out a bird in the hand is worth about five in the bush. We hate giving up what we've already got, including a friend's endorsement of us. And we'll do rash things to hold onto it, including paradoxically dissing friends if need be. That way we neutralize them before the arrow of their disendorsement pierces us. Paradoxically that only makes them more likely to dis us.
As high stakes as the game is in friendships, in romantic partnerships the stakes get much higher. If friends offer endorsement, romantic partners offer uber-endorsement. At its aspired-to ideal it's not just "You're a good person among good people," it's "You're magic. You have exclusive powers to move me."
You know R&B originated in Gospel music. Well, it's not just the chords and rhythm they have in common. Romance and religion and in particular monogamy and monotheism have some striking parallels. At the extreme, a romantic partner isn't just someone who will pray for you, but pray to you. Sex and romantic devotion have things in common with monotheistic prayer. A religious Fundamentalists says if you love God you will pray to him alone. A Romantic Fundamentalist says "If you love me, you will have sex with me alone. I wouldn't enjoy sex with anyone else but you." In the Abrahamic religions, God is to His people as husband is to wife, and the wife must show exclusive devotion for the husband to feel safe. Religious fundamentalists argue that without religion people pay too much attention to sex and romance, but they may not see the ways in which both seem to serve similar needs. An exclusive devotion to God or to a lover seem to promise everlasting life, transcendence of the mundane, and a sense of being fully endorsed by the universe.
What's not to like?
The sad news is that none of us are Gods. Therefore with an uber-endorsement comes the risk of an uber-disendorsement as the relationship ends. The higher you rise in each other's esteem the further you can fall if it ends badly. It's the Icarus Effect, flying into the sun to be a God.
In the high-stakes game of romance, the temptation to cooperate at the beginning is very strong. That's what makes new lovers surge toward each other. Every inch toward greater intimacy is an inch toward greater endorsement. Trouble is, once you've surged all the way in there's no place to go but out, and every inch backing out can feels like an uber-disendorsement. Once the backing out begins, it's eat or be eaten. That's a key to why couples breaking up are often so critical.
If it's any comfort, the risk of uber-disendorsement comes with the game's territory. Sure, sometimes people behave so badly they deserve the uber-disendorsement that comes at the end, but often they don't. Next week I'm going to list some ways to make breaking up smoother, despite this built-in tension.
PS I know it's risking a loss of objectivity to be writing about this stuff as I'm going through my own breakup. It's an experiment, the equivalent of reality-TV. It's reality psychology and the entertainment value may be in scrutinizing me for where I distort the analysis self-servingly. See, I think that problem with platitudes is really worth addressing. This tendency to embrace, only in fair weather the supposedly universal principles that are supposed to serve us in foul weather.
The test of whether I'm doing that is whether I can hold the principles in foul weather. You decide.
