When you break up with someone, or someone breaks up with you, it’s expected—mandatory, really—that your friends tell you what a jerk your ex is. How you’re better off without him/her. How you deserve more and they thought so all along but weren’t saying anything just to be polite. The idea is that you need to view the now-severed relationship in an unflattering light in order to “move on” and “heal” and stop being such a downer.
It’s supposed to make you feel better.
And, according to an article in Cognition and Emotion, your friends are right. Not necessarily about your ex being a jerk, but about the importance of thinking less of the person you were formerly with.
The study involved 65 undergraduates who had recently broken up with someone whom they had been dating for more than four months. Researchers asked them to fill out a questionnaire about their ex and also had them take a computer test that rated their reactions to negative words, including the name of their former boyfriend/girlfriend. The latter test was given because:
… tracking ex-partner evaluations is problematic given that individuals may report having “realised” that the lost relationship was bad all along (in an attempt to save face and maintain pride) but may not actually believe this. Hence, simply asking individuals to assess the quality of their former romantic relationship may not reliably reveal their underlying appraisal of the relationship.
What they found was that people who indicated strong negative feelings about their ex in the immediate aftermath of the breakup were less likely to be depressed. The subjects were re-tested a month later, and those whose feelings had grown more negative also generally felt better.
From the paper:
Given the importance of negative evaluations in post-break-up adjustment, future work should explore whether friends and family members might help people adjust to a recent break-up by drawing attention to the negative aspects of the former relationship.
I think this falls neatly into the category of “Things We Kind of Already Knew But It’s Nice that Science Has Confirmed Them.”
Also worth noting in the scholarly literature on breaking up is Duck’s model of relationship dissolution, which divides break-ups into four categories: pre-existing doom, mechanical failure, process loss, and sudden death. That makes breaking up sound like a plane crash which, coincidentally, is often how it feels.
(The paper is not available online. The researcher is Christopher P. Fagundes of the University of Utah. Neil Sedaka is lip-syncing.)
10 Responses to The Importance of Hating Your Ex
n8snake - May 11, 2010 at 4:14 pm
This can also be applied to former WORK environments? In order to feel okay about leaving a job, you end up a ‘disgruntled’ employee.
cleverclogs - May 12, 2010 at 9:25 am
I forgot how much I enjoy Neil Sedaka (and thanks for anticipating my question about whether he’s lip-syncing) – although have you ever heard this song directly after a breakup? He’s so upbeat it makes you want to rip the radio out of the car.
22220218 - May 12, 2010 at 12:40 pm
Acknowleging the hate is important. Face it, you hate the ex. Accept that you can think and have thought of the most heinous evil actions you would like to inflict on or wish would happen to the ex. Forgiveness needs to follow. And, forgiveness is not saying that what the ex did was okay. Forgiveness is severing yourself from the relationship, walking away from it and the hate toward it altogether, leaving the matter at the Cross and the ex to the Almighty. This takes a long time, sometimes years. But, when the unforgiveness lifts off, the freedom is euphoric.
tekton - May 12, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Hating the ex reflexively would seem to preclude gaining any wisdom from the failure of the relationship – wisdom about oneself, about people, about life, about God. Hating the ex largely if not entirely places the responsibility for the relationship’s failure on the other person, meaning that the ‘hater’ is likely to learn little to nothing of lasting value from the experience. Perhaps there’s more to life than just making oneself feel good – understanding truth, even when it hurts, is a greater good.
ellenhunt - May 12, 2010 at 1:58 pm
Hey everybody! “Feeling better about yourself” is helped by being a clueless jerk without any capacity for self-examination. Details at 11:00! Even academia has figured this out – finally. Now this blithering turkey is extrapolating from the above pearl of wisdom to urge, “Hey! Go with it! To be a good friend, help us all be clueless, narcissitic, classless jerks!” Could anything be more shallow? Could narcissism be served better? Could an academic paper be more deserving of an Ignobel?
ksledge - May 12, 2010 at 2:13 pm
What we don’t know is that all else equal, hating the ex is better. These results tell me that if you broke up from a really crummy relationship in which you were treated badly, you aren’t depressed afterwards. But if you broke up from a relationship in which you were treated ok and your ex was a decent person, you will be more depressed. It doesn’t tell me that at the end of an average relationship, feeling hate towards your ex afterwards makes you cope better.
davi2665 - May 12, 2010 at 2:32 pm
From this great new insight comes the wisdom that if a break up has occurred, then taking little responsibility for the relationship failure, casting blame towards the ex, and expressing the destructive emotion of hate will result in a better “feel good” response. What shallow, narcissistic, drivel. For someone who actually is willing to accept an appropriate share of blame for a relationship failure, and has even one neuron worth of self-reflection, hating the ex and wallowing in the self-pity of anger and blame is a sure way to achieve little or no personal growth, so that the next relationship can proceed down the same failed path, probably ending up with the same end result. Those who still hate the ex after a period of time show their own immaturity.
hannahouse - May 12, 2010 at 3:17 pm
Negativity, if properly directed, can indeed yield positive results!
pandelic - May 12, 2010 at 4:32 pm
Notwithstanding ksledge is right, the conclusions to be drawn seem to be up to interpretation…If “will this stress me out” is the criterion for one’s actions, I think we’ll find many decisions very easy to make:* why bother ever being courteous* why bother apologizing for any mistakes we may make* why think of the ramifications our actions may have on other people* why worry about affecting future generations or our external environment negatively…if we could otherwise feel perfectly fine?The evolution of morality points strongly towards an increasingly active shouldering of responsibilities that weren’t necessarily our burden to begin with. Empathy for others, compassion for non-human living things, and the ability to weigh long term benefits against the short are all potentially stressful affairs which probably increase one’s risk of depression.
11250382 - May 17, 2010 at 9:24 am
Hate then forgive. It works. Trying to put yourself on a higher plane immediately is often self-destructive and results in prolonged depression. What is wrong with feeling human emotion? Feel it, move through it, move on.