But for all the scholarly research on matters such as how partners grow apart or whether divorcees are more depressed than married folk, almost no one had devoted significant science to the universal process of getting over heartbreak. Still in the early months of his research, Sbarra believes he might have gained insight into how this process works. Sbarra's adviser at Virginia, veteran psychology professor Robert E. Emery, followed a group of divorcing couples for 12 years and developed a theory that suffering a divorce is different from suffering a partner's death. Arguably, it's much worse. But when one's ex still walks the earth, the possibility of reconciliation, however slight, throws that healing process out of whack, Emery said.
Emery theorizes that after a breakup, emotions oscillate wildly but fairly predictably.
One day, the person is overwhelmed with feelings of love, the next perhaps with anger, then a surge of sadness. As time passes, though, these three emotions recur, but at diminished levels in cycles that begin to fall in sync. By the end, the griever's feelings have mellowed to the point where he feels faint love, dim resentment and vague sadness all at the same time. That was the theory, anyway. All they needed to conduct the test, dubbed the Virginia Dissolution Study, was a steady supply of people falling in and out of love.