George Loewenstein has spent decades studying the forces that govern our emotional lives. A Carnegie Mellon professor and one of the founders of behavioral economics, he has researched everything from curiosity and boredom to whether having more sex actually increases people’s happiness. But in his new book, The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us, Loewenstein turns his attention to the feelings most of us would rather avoid. As part of the project, he conducted a “Misery Survey,” asking people to describe the worst experiences of their lives. In this excerpt, he examines one of the most devastating, and enduring, forms of misery: rejection.
In Plato’s Symposium, the character of Aristophanes relates a myth about how people once had a “double nature.” Instead of one face, they had two. Instead of four limbs, they had eight. Possessed of tremendous strength and agility, they could walk upright but also bend themselves into circles and roll around at high speed. Such fearsome creatures posed a threat to the gods on Mount Olympus. Should they be annihilated? Zeus chewed on the question for a long time before a eureka moment came to him.
“Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners,” he said. “Men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us.”
Zeus sliced the ur-people into two halves, and dispatched Apollo to clean up the mess. Apollo yanked skin, sculpted breasts, forged mouths. When he was finished, each person looked at their newly detached other half—and panicked. They flung their arms around each other, entwined, longing to be one again, until “they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect.”
Out of pity, Zeus made a few tweaks to save the species from extinction, but he left in place that aching desire to become whole. It’s this pursuit of the lost half that Plato called love. With this myth, he introduced the idea of “soulmates”—the notion that each of us is searching for the one who will complete us. But at the same time, he offered a visceral explanation for why it hurts so much to break up.
When we describe the misery of rejection, we often reach for metaphors that evoke physical pain: heartbreak, open wounds, tearing of flesh. The British writer Diana Athill, in her memoir Instead of a Letter, offers one of the most vivid accounts I’ve come across. She was ghosted by her longtime love and fiancé, who left without even sending a note to explain why. The event haunted her for the rest of her life. Of all psychological pains, Athill believed that rejection is “nearest to the physical—to that of a finger crushed in a door, or a tooth under a drill.”
The (sort of) funny thing about the fact that people use the language of physical pain to describe the misery of a bad breakup is that we are almost completely unable to remember what physical pain feels like. The British clinical psychologist Stephen Morley distinguished three possible variants of memory for physical pain: (1) actually reexperiencing the sensory feelings of the pain; (2) recalling the sensory, intensity, and emotional qualities of that pain without reexperiencing it; and (3) merely remembering the circumstances in which the pain occurred.
He conducted a study in which subjects were first asked to think about a painful event from their past and then answer questions designed to gauge how they remembered it. Fifty-nine percent were able to recall at least some aspect of the pain sensation, while 41 percent reported no recall of the pain sensation at all. In other words, they knew they had been hurt but forgot what it felt like. Not a single subject in the study reported actually reexperiencing their pain.
