Have you ever been in a relationship that, when it ended, it convinced you there would never be a chance for recovery? If you are the type who is responding with a “life is over” mentality — or even if you’re not — we’ve got good news. A new study shows that our brains are in reality evolutionally equipped to survive heartbreak.
Looking at “evolutionary psychology literature,” researchers at the University of Cincinnati and Saint Louis and Florid State Universities found “humans are built to experience the pain of a breakup and then move on to a new partner, and that our brains actually facilitate the severing of romantic ties,” Huffington Post reports.
“In our evolutionary past, selection pressures may have been such that individuals who could successfully jettison a mate and find a new one, when the situation called for it, would have been better able to solve the evolutionary imperative of reproduction — in other words, they sent more of their genes on to the next generation,” Dr. Brian Boutwell, an epidemiologist at Saint Louis University and the study’s lead author, told the news site.
Boutwell and his team examined the “process” of ending a relationship and “falling out of love” and the process of entering a new relationship. To build their hypothesis they noted that whatever it is that makes us fall in love also causes us to present addictive behaviors from a brain circuitry standpoint.
So basically, our brain falls back to the same process for falling out of love that it does to overcome addictions like alcohol and cocaine. It’s an evolutionary behavior exhibited by both men and women though, Boutwell notes, men and women break up for different reasons.
“Males would be especially likely to jettison a mate when they expect that a partner has been sexually unfaithful,” Boutwell said in an email to the website. “Females, on the other hand, would be expected to jettison a mate when they have become unable (or unwilling) to provide resources and to ensure the survival and safety of the female and her offspring.”
The behavior essentially makes human beings “serial monogamists.”
“We virtually never mate for life with one partner, so mate ejection provides a mechanism for moving between partners when that becomes necessary,” Boutwell concluded.
You can read the findings for yourself in the March 2 edition of the journal Review of General Psychology.