Once we were in each other's eyes
It seems that there is always a layer of aura
But now
The aura was about to dissipate
Every love has twists and turns, when the conflict occurs, when the enthusiasm is exhausted, when the two people are relatively speechless, we can't even believe that the person in front of us is the one we once loved. We want to cut off and flee, but we can't accept that the other party has completely disappeared into our own world, so we always cycle back and forth in the division and the union, with a glimmer of expectation in our hearts: maybe this broken mirror still has a chance to reunite.
Cycles and turbulence
What we call "parting and merging" in our lives is called relationship cycling in psychology, and it refers to intimate relationships that have had at least one breakup and compound experience. According to a 2009 study by Dailey et al., about 45 percent of people have experienced an over-union with their current partner, while 61 percent have experienced a breakup with a partner at some point in their lives.
According to relational Turbulence Theory, every shift in intimacy leads to turmoil and chaos, increasing the uncertainty of the relationship. And as the number of breakup-compound cycles increases, the rift between the two becomes more and more difficult to bridge. Numerous studies have shown that intimacy in a relationship cycle leads to less satisfaction, less commitment to each other, less maintenance behaviors and more violent conflict than relationships that end from one to the other. At the same time, the future of the relationship is becoming increasingly unstable.
The stability of intimate relationship development is closely related to personal well-being, so individuals who experience relationship cycles tend to have poor mental health functions. A 2018 study showed that relationship cycles are associated with symptoms such as anxiety and depression, and that individuals experience more pain with each break-up cycle.
But what we want to know more about is whether the pain caused by the relationship cycle is short-term and dissipated over time. Or will it accumulate over a longer period of time and have a profound impact on an individual's future? After all, two people who can be separated and compounded and constantly entangled must have a deep emotional foundation, and it is too difficult to completely cut off this intimate relationship. If it is only a "short pain", it is not unbearable. Therefore, rather than sighing and sighing, we need science to give answers and tell us how to do it.
So, is it worth continuing the love that is divided and combined?
Will tomorrow be better?
J. A. Thompson from the University of Missouri, USA Scholars such as Kale Monk have studied the problem, hypothesizing that relationship cycles are not only related to psychological pain at the time, but also positively correlated with pain over time. In 2021, their findings were published in Family Relations.
Using a longitudinal study, the researchers selected 545 participants in love or marital relationships and collected the data four times over a period of up to 15 months. The variables tested include same-sex or heterosexual, relationship cycle experience, stress and anxiety, violence in relationships, satisfaction with intimate relationships, uncertainty about intimate relationships, etc. Subsequently, the researchers used a multilayer linear model (HLM) to analyze the growth curve of the above variables to explore their changes over time, and added gender, age, ethnicity, etc. as control variables.
The results of the study showed that relationship cycles were ubiquitous in the population, with 33.6% of the subjects saying that they had experienced a combination of parts and combinations, and showed more stress and anxiety. At the same time, over time, individuals with high relationship cycles will also experience more psychological pain, and this phenomenon exists in both same-sex and heterosexual relationships. Unlike our daily experience of "pain fades with time," in the four phases of study sampling, the longer the time dragged on for subjects who were always experiencing division and integration, the greater the pain experienced.
In addition, the study also found that individual age is negatively correlated with psychological pain, and as age increases, individuals experience significantly less psychological pain; in terms of gender differences, women experience more pain than men; and violence in relationships is also significantly associated with psychological pain, the more individuals with more history of violence, the greater the pain reported at baseline level, but the pain does not last over time; similarly, psychological pain is positively correlated with relationship uncertainty and negatively correlated with relationship satisfaction. And none of them last with time.
In short, people who have had a history of breakup-compounding will not only experience more psychological pain, but will not be alleviated or disappeared in a short period of time. Breakup - The more frequently people reunite, the greater the pain they experience.
Be better at each other
Early relationship experiences can have an impact on future relationship outcomes, and individuals who have experienced relationship cycles before marriage tend to lack confidence in marriage, have less satisfaction, and are more likely to separate after marriage. Such a conclusion seems to be a bit pessimistic, as Mr. Yang Dai once said: When the fate comes to an end, it is better to entangle with it than to politely withdraw, return yourself to yourself, and return others to others. Let the flowers become flowers, let the trees become trees, and from then on the landscape will never meet again.
But in this regard, researcher Kale Monk specifically pointed out that in some of their other studies, there are still some couples who believe that it is the days of the breakup that make them realize how important each other is. Therefore, when faced with a relationship cycle, excessive pessimism and optimism are not desirable. Thinking about how to change the existing mode of getting along and avoid falling into the quagmire of separation and integration may be the "middle way" of intimate relationships.
Author | Zhao Kai
bibliography
Monk, J. K.,Ogolsky, B. G., & Maniotes, C. (2021). On–off relationship instability and distressover time in same‐and different‐sex relationships. Family Relations, 1-14. https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12614
Reynolds, E. (2022,February 24). People in on-again, off-again relationships experience morepsychological distress. BPS Research Digest. https://digest.bps.org.uk/2022/02/24/people-in-on-again-off-again-relationships-experience-more-psychological-distress/