There's no shortage of advice on radio call-in shows, in Dr. Laura best sellers, in country songs for how to deal with breakups. But for all the scholarly research on matters such as how partners grow apart or whether divorced people are more depressed than married folk, almost no one had devoted significant science to the universal process of getting over heartbreak. Sbarra thinks he might have gained insight into how this process works. His 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.
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.