Quit Yer Bitchin' and Get Over It, Pansies

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Despite the laments of pining pop stars and sad sack poets, U.S. researchers now think breaking up may not be so hard to do.

"We underestimate our ability to survive heartbreak," said Eli Finkel, an assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern University, whose study appears online in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Finkel and colleague Paul Eastwick studied young lovers -- especially those who profess ardent affection -- to see if their predictions of devastation matched their actual angst when that love was lost.

"On average, people overestimate how distressed they will be following a breakup," Finkel said in a telephone interview.

The nine-month study involved college students who had been dating at least two months who filled out questionnaires every two weeks. They gathered data from 26 people -- 10 women and 16 men -- who broke up with their partners during the first six months of the study.

The participants' forecasts of distress two weeks before the breakup were compared to their actual experience as recorded over four different periods of time.

Not surprisingly, they found the more people were in love, the harder they took the breakup.

"People who are more in love really are a little more upset after a breakup, but their perceptions about how distraught they will be are dramatically overstated when compared to reality," Finkel said.

"At the end of the day it, it is just less bad than you thought."

Lucy said:

That's only step one.
You need to get to step 2: anonymous sex with plenty of strangers. I volunteer to pretend to be plenty of strangers for you to practice on, 'cause I'm unselfish like that.
Step three is to steal their underpants.

Saraphine said:

And yeah break ups can be really hard sometimes, and really not other times. I dated someone for 10 days and was devastated when it was over. I was engaged to someone who I lived with (twice!) and it being over was no biggie. The way they acted though, is another story....

Lucy said:

That's only step one.
You need to get to step 2: anonymous sex with plenty of strangers. I volunteer to pretend to be plenty of strangers for you to practice on, 'cause I'm unselfish like that.
Step three is to steal their underpants.

Ascanius said:

I think it might be even easier with long relationships. That's been my experience, anyway. The easiest breakup I ever had was at the end of a five year relationship. We both just kind of realized that we'd spent enough time together and it was time to move on. And we knew each other well enough to know that our relationship wasn't doing either of us any good. There were a lot of bitter love-dead conversations in the six months or so leading up to the breakup, but no big blowouts.

As an aside, how do these researchers gauge how 'in love' people are?