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After a breakup, many people undergoing such an unpleasant process will experience something akin to an astronaut landing on a distant planet without a map or instructions on what to expect during their time there. They will have to negotiate their new and novel social circumstances as would Indiana Jones: they will have to “make it up as they go.” Yet this is no way to navigate through such an unpleasant experience such as a breakup; one full of unforeseen pratfalls and likely painful surprises.
In other words, people who begin the breakup process often enter an unfamiliar territory in which they have no idea how to proceed. After all, what kinds of training does “society” provide its members in matters of the heart; much less with how to successfully survive a breakup? Most people who undergo a breakup do so with limited information on how to proceed. And most of them will stumble along the way because of their ignorance in such matters. You, however, don’t have to proceed with such limited knowledge. This section will provide you with the map and the knowledge about how to successfully navigate through such an unpleasant experience.
Although every relationship is full of their own nuanced differences, they all still follow a similar pattern that inevitably emerges and plays out along some predictable parameters. That is, most relationships and thus their associated breakups follow similar patterns that can be both examined and understood. Therefore, knowledge about how breakups develop and play out can help anyone who must endure such an unpleasant process.
In this section, we will examine two (2) processes associated with the breakup process. The first is RRD: or the Revisionist Romance Disorder. This phenomenon tends to make a person undergoing a breakup remember only the positive aspects of their past relationship. And the longer the breakup draws out, and despite any empirical evidence to the reality of the relationship, the more RRD makes the person affected by it remember only the good times the partners had during the previous pleasant stages of the past relationship.
The other phenomenon that affects a person undergoing a breakup is called Dumper’s Remorse. This process involves a person mentally changing the context of the reasons for their separation. Persons affected by this phenomenon tend to convince themselves that perhaps they had it all wrong and thus, they come to convince themselves that they may have just unintentionally broken up with their one and only soul mate.
Let’s first examine RRD: or the phenomenon called Revisionist Romance Disorder. RRD is a condition in which your brain will play a trick on you about your recent breakup. Whenever a person is afflicted by RRD, the more time that passes after their breakup, the more they tend to only remember the good times they had during their relationship. It doesn’t matter whether or not that person was in a relationship with a Charles Manson clone. RRD will likely rear its head and it will somehow convince that person that their ex was nothing short of a saint.
I realize that what you are reading may be hard to comprehend; that a person could breakup with a Charles Manson clone and then come to view them as a saint. But trust me on this one; such a turn of events is entirely possible. And those uninitiated souls who have experienced RRD first hand tended to be perplexed by its seemingly implausible manifestations.
This phenomenon is difficult to explain in any scientific manner, but rest assured, RRD is a “real” phenomenon. So I think it’s best that we address it in this section focused on helping recent breakup sufferers successfully navigating through such an unpleasant event. Otherwise, if we don’t address this phenomenon, RRD will emerge seemingly out of nowhere, and the person undergoing the breakup will begin to think that perhaps something is wrong with them. Rest assured; if you experience such feelings after a breakup, there is nothing wrong with you. RRD is par for the course in any breakup.
The second condition we will examine is called Dumper’s Remorse. Dumper’s Remorse is different from RRD because it’s not about being deluded about what kind of person your ex was all along, but rather Dumper’s Remorse is about second-guessing yourself. In short, Dumper’s Remorse will make its victim confuse the context of their negative or unpleasant experiences in favor of a more flattering perspective of such events.
Take for example my friend Julie. At one time during her relationship, she would become upset at the fact that her husband would often come home late from work. She absolutely hated that he would arrive home two or three hours late after he got off work. During those after-work hours, Julie would convince herself that her husband was engaged in a myriad of unethical behaviors. She imagined only the worst scenarios as she pondered what her husband was up to during these post-work time periods.
Eventually, Julie convinced herself that she could no longer endure this feeling and thus she decided to divorce her husband. Thus, despite the pain it caused her, she plowed ahead and filed the necessary paperwork required to enact the divorce proceedings.
But soon after Julie and her husband were divorced, she had to wrap her head around the fact that now her ex-husband would never be coming home. Suddenly, she started to feel that her husband coming home late from work wasn’t as bad as the fact that now that they were divorced, he would never be coming back home. Julie hadn’t realized that the context of her husband’s tardiness could change once they had actually got divorced.
In their book It’s Called a Breakup Because It’s Broken, author Greg Behrendt and his wife and coauthor Amiira Ruotola-Behrendt call this phenomenon “Blindsight.” According to these coauthors, “Blindsight creates an inability to see the past as it actually happened. The drunk that forgot your birthday becomes “the one that got away.”
In Julie’s case, she now began to convince herself that she could more easily tolerate her husband’s tardiness. After all, compared to the fact that he would never be coming through the doors of their home, him arriving late paled in comparison to the fact that now he would never return home to her. Thus, Julie ultimately convinced herself that perhaps she had made a mistake in pressing for a divorce from him. In fact, she convinced herself that should she reconcile with him, she could now more easily tolerate him arriving home late versus the idea of him never returning home.
As Julie began to reenter the dating scene, she began to realize just how difficult it was to establish a personal “match” with any new prospective partner. Thus, as time passed, Julie began asking herself, “Did I throw out the man of my dreams?” with whom she convinced herself that she could tolerate any such habit of tardiness if it would relieve her of the loneliness she felt after meeting a steady stream of men with whom she had no immediate attraction to. After all, a tardy lover was better than no lover at all.
Most people who undergo (experience) a breakup haven’t any clue as to how to proceed in such dreary circumstances. After all, in American society, there are plenty of ideas and examples about how to get into a relationship. However, there are hardly any ideas or examples about how to get out of a relationship. Therefore, most people haven’t the faintest idea about how to successfully navigate through a breakup in order to reach closure in such dreadful circumstances. But because of the information contained in this section on surviving a breakup, the reader will at least be aware of these phenomena. Plus, the reader will receive a sort of roadmap of where they are located during this often daunting and confusing period of their life.
Be Willing to Read a Pink Book
(story about Tony here)