Shankar Vedantam

This is Hidden Brain.

I'm Shankar Vedantam.

For thousands of years, poets and musicians have celebrated the arrival of love.

Songs like At Last talk about the long-awaited moment when a soulmate says yes and the doors of heaven open.

But while musicians preach the melodies of love,

and manuals teach people how to fall in love, there is much less advice about how we should think, feel, and act at the end of relationships.

Today, we bring you the conclusion of our month-long series about love.

Our focus over the past few weeks has been on what comes after the euphoric buzz of new infatuation has worn off.

We've explored how to better understand our partners and how to be better understood.

We've talked about acceptance and apologies and how to let go of our annoyances and frustrations with the people we love.

Today though, we're going to look at what happens when rifts between partners are too wide to bridge.

We're going to talk about the psychology of breakups.

We'll examine the most common mistakes we make when it comes to splitting up and explore techniques that can help us do better.

How to set the past to rest.

This week on Hidden Brain.

Any aspiring novelist will tell you that it's easy to start a story and very hard to bring it to a close.

The same is true in real life, as most of us have discovered.

Navigating the conclusion of a relationship with someone we loved and who once loved us is not simple.

Antonio Pasqualeone is a psychologist at the University of Windsor in Canada.

He studies the emotions we feel around these complicated events and how they shape our behavior.