If you've taken your share of knocks in love, then in some moment of heartbreak you've surely thought to yourself: there's no way I'll ever get over him/her. Maybe right now you still believe you'll never let go of a love that cut all the way to the bone; maybe you're still convinced that the one you love most in this whole life has to be them. But let me tell you this: everything is going to get better, and soon. Because all of that is just your affective forecasting at work, and its accuracy is, in truth, very limited.
Affective Forecasting
Affective forecasting is our way of predicting how we'll feel in the future, and it's all too easy for us to mispredict the intensity and duration of those future emotions because of something called impact bias. Affective forecasting can apply to positive or negative feelings alike. You might predict you'll be thrilled for ages once you get into the academic programme of your dreams, only to find the joy isn't what you imagined, and that you even feel a bit flat. Or, in a moment of heartbreak and despair, you might predict you'll go on hurting this badly for a long time to come, maybe even forever, only to find you walk out of the sadness faster than you ever expected. That's because you overestimated how much a single event would affect you — impact bias at work — and so wrongly predicted the intensity and persistence of your future feelings.
Can't Find Your Way Out of the Shadow of a Breakup?
No doubt you've been through it too: in the aftermath of a breakup, crying your eyes out, washing your face every night with what feels like a litre of tears, certain that there's no chance this lifetime of yours will ever hold real joy and happiness again. A few months later, you're at karaoke with friends belting out "Heartbreak Without Sin", cheering on the single life. A year and a half on, you've slowly thrown yourself back into the busyness of work or study, and as for that someone, they slipped to the back of your mind long ago. Perhaps, in the quiet of a still night, you walk the corridor of memory one more time, but do you still feel that fierce grief? No. More often there's a smile rising from somewhere deep inside, glad that the two of you once had happiness, glad that you took something away from that relationship. Looking back with a wry smile, you'll realise that without even noticing, you've let go of them. That "there's no way I'll ever get over them" you said back then was only your misprediction of the duration and intensity of your future feelings. Letting go isn't so hard after all, and the sorrow doesn't last anywhere near as long.
In the moment of a breakup, feeling heartache, loss, anger, even despair, is normal and entirely understandable. The first step to walking out of the shadow of a breakup is to hold on to this idea. If you feel you've been sunk in grief for a long time and still don't want to let go, then ask yourself whether it's simply that you can't make peace with how things ended. But the end of a relationship always has its reasons, and they can be traced, so if you still can't make peace with it, you can try to work out what those reasons were. At the very least, you can take something away from the relationship that's now in the past. When you meet your next someone, you'll be able to get along all the better. You might sigh that what you learned with this person can only be passed on to the next, but that's just how love and connection go. If you don't want this regret to repeat itself, hope that in your next relationship you'll know better how to treasure the other person.
When you want to let go, when you want to walk out of the pain, it means you've actually had enough of this kind of grief and you have the drive to walk out of it. You can remind yourself that your own brain will trick you, will make you believe the sorrow will last a lifetime. As long as you're willing to believe you can walk out of it, you can let go of them, and everything will start to feel easier.
To everyone nursing a broken heart: everything is going to be alright, and you'll recover faster than you imagine. That person who's now in the past matters less than you think. Trust that everything that breaks your heart will pass too. You deserve a happiness that suits you better!
References:
Gilbert, D.T., Pinel, E.C., Wilson, T.D., Blumberg, S.J., & Wheatley, T.P. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617–638. https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.75.3.617
Wilson, Timothy D., Gilbert, Daniel T. (2003). Affective Forecasting. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 345–411. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(03)01006-2
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