If You Think About Breaking Up Then a Breakup Will Probably Happen

The self-fulfilling prophecy: it's the offspring of anxiety and the cousin of the vicious cycle. It's what happens when your mangled thoughts about your relationship's potential demise start to mangle the relationship itself, which—starved of the space it needed to blossom into the shape it was meant to—curls up, dries out, and goes gentle into that good night instead. Dust off the husk; it's back to the drawing board for you.

What effect, if any, the "perceived risk" of a relationship ending has on people's actual relationships, is a question explored in a new article published by Springer's journal Motivation and Emotion. Researchers from Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Italy questioned more than 100 attached people on their commitment and feelings after subtly suggesting their relationship could very well implode at some point. Or any point, really. They did this by plying them them with sad statistics suggesting inevitable doom, and by providing skewed "feedback" about the chance of their relationship ending. After this surprise onslaught, participants were asked how committed they were to their relationship and how they felt about their partner. Astonishingly, they felt far more positively about both when the idea of a break up was not being intravenously fed into their soul. In contrast, when they were made to consider the strong possibility of a separation, their hearts became fearful and their feelings ran cold. What can we learn from this experiment on 100 Italians, who having donated their tender hearts to science now sit alone in their childhood bedrooms questioning life? "Reduced relationship commitment … leads to dissolution considerations and, thereby, to actual relationship breakup," according to co-author Giuseppe Pantaleo. "Relationship breakup, in turn, plays a critical role in the onset of depression, psychological distress, and reduced life satisfaction."

It is important, adds Pantaleo, that psychologists, clinicians, and counsellors understand "the causal role that perceived risk plays in the outcomes of their clients' romantic relationships." It is important, we will add here, to also run from researchers from Vita-Salute San Raffaele University.

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