Love 2.0: How to Move On
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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.
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. Antonio Pasqualeone, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you so much for having me, Shankar. Antonio, as a young man in your late teens and 20s, you were an aspiring actor. I understand that you also like to write poetry. You must have cut quite a romantic figure.
It depends what you... call romantic. But yeah, I started as a... I wasn't sure if I wanted to study biology and go to medicine or if I wanted to go into theater. I ended up going into theater and somehow ended up in a compromise, which I think is psychology. And many years later, I sort of realized that There's something that happens on stage. An actor generates an emotional experience on stage for the entertainment of the audience. But those are real emotional experiences. A therapist could help somebody have an emotional experience that's curative in its own right. This isn't for the entertainment of anybody. This is their life. It's for the purposes of health care, that going through certain experiences can be curative, a corrective emotional experience.
What kind of poetry did you write at this time of your life?
Mostly quite bad poetry. Thanks for asking. You know, a lot of them, I guess I identified very much with the lovesick kind of unrequited love poetry, right? I think that was also part of an identity that somehow I had, you know, this is like late adolescence, early 20s sort of thing.
So I understand that you had a girlfriend at the time, someone that you cared about deeply. But at one point, the relationship founded.
I was very enamored. Right. And I think I kind of, you know, the relationship sort of fizzled out. But my approach, I guess, was to lean in harder. Right. So I had a friend who was also became an actor and a scriptwriter. And that probably didn't help, probably made things worse looking back. But the last attempt, the rally was to go in the street underneath her balcony of her apartment to call her out. She comes out on the balcony and I proceed to serenade her with the help of a buddy and There's singing, a poem might have been read, a big finish, bucket of sand with fireworks in it to end it all. Oh my gosh. Yeah, kind of a crash and burn, but very dramatic. You know, looking back... You know, it was about the performance.
It wasn't about the relationship. Right. And it wasn't about what I needed. There wasn't a lot of relating, actually. I mean, that became a turning point, right, where I kind of realized I wasn't attending to to what's happening inside me, which is this, you know, sense of insecurity, sense of what did I really need?
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Speakers
10 identified
Antonio Pascual-Leone 27 min
Shankar Vedantam 21 min
Phil Fernbach 17 min
Listener (Rob) / same caller used twice 1 min
Actor clip (The Descendants - George Clooney's character)
Listener (Monica from St. Paul)
Actor clip (Crazy Stupid Love - Steve Carell's character)
Unknown
Actor clip (Marriage Story - Adam Driver's character)
Unknown (brief show IDs, likely producer/announcer)