Letting Go: How and Why Relationships End, and the Strategies We Use to Exit

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Letting Go: How and Why Relationships End, and the Strategies We Use to Exit

Advanced Social Psychology · Chapter 8: Friendship, Love, and Close RelationshipsSection 8.7 · lesson 53 of 8510 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

Dissolution as a process, the strategies people use to exit, and what recovery needs.

  • Describe Duck's phase model of dissolution
  • Identify the major predictors of relationship breakdown
  • Compare disengagement strategies on 2 dimensions
  • Explain account-making and post-dissolution resilience

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Everything said in the video, section by section (1,242 words). Read along, or search it.

Friendship, Love, and Close Relationships

Letting Go

Relationships end, and the ending has a structure worth knowing. The central claim of this section is that dissolution is a process. Not an event, which is how people usually describe it. There are phases, and couples often cycle through them more than once. We will look at how people actually exit relationships. Six strategies, which vary along two independent dimensions. Then the costs, which are physical as well as psychological. And then recovery, where one finding surprises most students. Resilience after a breakup is not the exception. It is, by a good margin, the most common outcome.

Three Accounts

Why Relationships End

Dissolution is multiply determined, and three traditions each name a different cause. Social exchange accounts point at a threshold. Relationships end when outcomes fall below the comparison level for alternatives. That is, when remaining is perceived as worse than leaving. Attachment accounts point at a disposition instead. Insecure attachment styles increase dissolution risk, in two different ways. Anxious attachment generates excessive conflict. Avoidant attachment generates emotional distancing. And Gottman's research points at behavior. Communication quality, and specifically the presence of the Four Horsemen. That is the strongest behavioral predictor of dissolution we have. These three are not competing. One breakup can satisfy all three descriptions.

Macro Predictors

Structural Risk Factors

Alongside the dyadic accounts sit macro-level structural predictors. Young age at relationship formation is one. Lower socioeconomic status, and lower educational attainment. Prior relationship dissolution, either one's own or parental. Cohabitation before marriage. And discrepant values on high-stakes issues. Religion, politics, and the desire for children. Now, how does a structural fact reach a marriage? It does not act on the relationship directly. It works through dyadic mechanisms. By constraining resources, or by increasing stress. Or by reducing the social network's support for the relationship.

Duck, 1982

Dissolution Has Phases

Steve Duck's model, from nineteen eighty-two, gives dissolution a shape. Four sequential phases, with a fifth added later. The intrapsychic phase comes first, and it is entirely private. Then the dyadic phase, where it becomes a conversation. Then the social phase, where it becomes public. Then grave-dressing, where the official story gets written. And then resurrection, added by Rollie and Duck in two thousand six. Notice the direction those phases travel. From inside one head, outward to two people, then to a network. And finally back inward, to a self that has to be rebuilt. That trajectory is the model's real contribution.

The Phases

What Happens in Each

Take them one at a time. The intrapsychic phase is private cognition about costs. And about the threshold of acceptability. Nothing has been said aloud yet, to anyone. The dyadic phase is confrontation between the partners. Negotiation, and discussion of the relationship's future. The social phase is going public with the dissolution. Mobilizing social networks, and account-making for audiences. The grave-dressing phase is retrospective construction. A post-hoc account of the relationship, and of its ending. One that preserves self-esteem, and social image. Now, grave-dressing is not a polite word for lying. It names a normal task: producing a version you can live with, and repeat.

A Process

Rarely a Single Event

Each phase carries its own cognitive processes and social behaviors. And its own psychological challenges. But the model's most useful claim is about shape, not content. Dissolution is rarely a single event. It is a process, and it can involve multiple re-entry points. Couples may cycle through the phases repeatedly before separating. That cycling matters more than it sounds. A couple who reached the dyadic phase and came back has not failed. They have completed a loop most dissolving relationships run several times. Which changes what an intervention at any phase can expect to achieve. You are rarely stopping a breakup. You are often changing which loop it runs.

Baxter, 1984

Two Dimensions of Exit

So how do people actually exit relationships? The strategies vary in directness, in honesty, and in one more thing. Concern for the partner's face. Baxter, in nineteen eighty-four, classified them along two dimensions. Directness is the first. Explicit communication of the wish to end it, or implicit: said, or only shown. Other-orientation is the second dimension. Concern for the partner's feelings, versus a self-focused exit. Whose comfort the method is optimized for, in short. And the two dimensions are independent, which matters. A strategy can be direct and unkind, or indirect and considerate. Treating directness as the same thing as cruelty is the common misreading.

Six Strategies

How People Actually Leave

Six strategies fill out that two-dimensional space. Withdrawal or avoidance is low on both. Reducing contact, without any explanation. Pseudo de-escalation is low in directness, moderate in other-orientation. That is let us just be friends, without genuine intent. Cost escalation is low on both, and ugliest: behaving badly to provoke the partner to leave. Positive tone is high on both dimensions. An honest, kind conversation acknowledging mutual care. Justification is direct but self-focused. Explaining your reasons without regard for the partner's response. And negotiated farewell is high on both: collaborative discussion of terms and feelings. Those last two, positive tone and negotiated farewell, damage both parties least. And both are high on directness, the dimension people sacrifice first to be kind.

The Cost

What Dissolution Does to a Body

The costs of dissolution are physical, not only emotional. Particularly for long-term or marital relationships. Sbarra and Hazan reviewed this in two thousand eight. Elevated depression, and elevated anxiety. Disrupted sleep, and weakened immune function. Increased cortisol reactivity. And increased risk of all-cause mortality. The magnitude of all that is moderated by four things. Attachment style, first: anxious individuals show more intense, prolonged responses. The presence of children, which complicates the practical dimensions. Economic dependence. And the quality of social support after the dissolution.

Account-Making

Turning an Experience Into a Story

So what actually helps recovery? Harvey, Weber, and Orbuch, in nineteen ninety, proposed one mechanism. The construction of a coherent narrative account of the relationship and its ending. And then confiding, in the specific sense of sharing that account. Sharing it with trusted others is part of the mechanism, not an extra. Here is what account-making achieves. It reduces rumination, by changing the form of the experience. An affectively overwhelming experience becomes a comprehensible story. Which facilitates meaning-making, and emotional processing. Notice where this sits in Duck's model. It is exactly what the social and grave-dressing phases consist of. What looks like telling everyone your version is, mechanically, the recovery.

Bonanno, 2004

Resilience Is the Common Outcome

Not all relationship dissolution produces lasting harm. Bonanno's research on resilience following loss, from two thousand four. A substantial proportion of people maintain stable psychological functioning. Estimated at between thirty-five and sixty-five percent, depending on context. They show minimal disruption to daily functioning. And a rapid return to baseline. That finding challenges the lay theory of grief fairly directly. Resilience here is not the exception. It is the modal outcome. And the predictors of a resilient response are known. Secure attachment, and high self-concept clarity. Strong social support, and economic autonomy. Plus the perception that the dissolution was chosen, rather than imposed.

Consolidate

Rebuilding a Self That Was Shared

The resurrection phase is the reconstructive work at the end. Rebuilding a self independent of the relationship, and revising relationship goals. Self-expansion theory explains why that work is necessary. If a relationship expanded the self, ending it contracts the self. Which is exactly the complaint people report: I lost part of myself. And the repair follows from the same theory. New activities and relationships that expand the self in novel directions. Carry five things forward from this section. Dissolution is predicted by exchange outcomes, attachment, communication, and structure. Duck's phases run from private deliberation through to resurrection. Negotiated farewell and positive tone damage both parties least. Account-making is a central mechanism, and resilient adjustment is common.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Letting Go: How and Why Relationships End, and the Strategies We Use to Exit

What are Duck's stages of relationship breakdown?
Steve Duck's 1982 model treats a breakup as a process with four phases: intrapsychic, dyadic, social, and grave-dressing; Rollie and Duck added a fifth, resurrection, in 2006. One partner first weighs dissatisfaction privately, then the partners confront it, then it goes public among friends and family. Grave-dressing builds an acceptable story of the ending, and resurrection rebuilds the self. Couples may cycle through phases more than once.
What strategies do people use to end a relationship?
Communication researcher Leslie Baxter classified breakup strategies by how direct they are and how much they consider the partner's feelings. Strategies include withdrawal or avoidance, pseudo-de-escalation (proposing to just be friends without meaning it), cost escalation (behaving badly so the partner leaves), justification, positive tone, and negotiated farewell. Direct, considerate strategies such as positive tone and negotiated farewell tend to do the least damage. Directness and kindness are separate dimensions.
How does a breakup affect physical and mental health?
Breakups, especially of long-term or marital relationships, can affect both body and mind. Research, much of it reviewed by David Sbarra and colleagues, links dissolution to depression, anxiety, disrupted sleep, weaker immune function, and greater cortisol reactivity, and divorce is associated with higher all-cause mortality. Effects tend to be stronger for anxiously attached people and depend on children, economic dependence, and the social support available afterward.
How do most people recover after a breakup?
Many people recover well; George Bonanno's research on bereavement and trauma (2004) found that resilience, meaning stable functioning with only brief disruption, is a common response to loss rather than the exception, and breakups often follow a similar pattern. Recovery is helped by account-making, which Harvey, Weber, and Orbuch (1990) described as building a coherent story of the relationship and its end and sharing it with trusted others. Secure attachment, social support, and feeling the breakup was chosen also predict better adjustment.

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