How to Not Die Alone: The Surprising Science of Finding Love

by Logan Ury

Don’t break up with someone in public. I see that as a weaselly attempt to ensure the other person doesn’t make a scene. You know what? Maybe they will! It’s your right to break up with them, and it’s their right to have a strong emotional response to that action.

You could say something like: “I really care about you, and I don’t want to hurt you, but I think we need to break up. We both know this relationship hasn’t been working for a while. We tried to make it better, but at this point, I don’t think we can make the changes we need to. I want us to both find love and be happy, but I don’t think this relationship is going to give us that.” Another example of an opener: “I need to talk to you. I love you, and I love so many aspects of our relationship, but I’m not happy, and I don’t know that you are, either. This is insanely hard to say, because I don’t want to hurt you. I’m so grateful for the time we’ve had together, but after giving it a lot of thought, I don’t think we should be together.”

But if they say, “What’s wrong with me?” don’t answer. Here’s why: They’re the wrong person for you, but there’s nothing inherently “wrong” with them, and even if there is, you’re not in a position to say that.

Behavioral scientists love to use positive incentives or negative incentives to change how people act. For example, one of my clients wrote a check for $10,000 to the presidential campaign of a candidate he strongly opposed. He gave his friend permission to mail it in if he missed the deadline to break up with his girlfriend. He broke up with her later that day.

Throughout the conversation, check in with both yourself and the other person to avoid flooding. This is a physical and mental state when your cortisol—stress hormone—rises and your body enters fight-or-flight mode. It helped our ancestors when they were at risk of being killed by a tiger, but it’s definitely not the right mental setting for a crucial conversation.

To avoid making this mistake, set up a Ulysses Contract or a pre-commitment device. In Homer’s epic tale The Odyssey, Captain Ulysses knows his crew will be sailing past the enchanting Sirens. He’s heard about their captivating song, which causes sailors to redirect their ships and crash into their shores. Rather than depend on his own willpower, he makes a plan. He directs his crew to tie him to the mast of his ship so he can’t change course. He tells his sailors to put wax in their ears so they won’t be able to hear the song. He protects himself from temptation by making a plan in advance.

When you actively agree to do something, you feel like the decision is yours, and you see it as a reflection of your own preferences and ideals.

You consult your research and see short-term survival rates: 90 percent for surgery and 100 percent for radiation. What would you pick? What about if, instead, you read about short-term mortality rates—10 percent for surgery and 0 percent for radiation? In a now-famous study, health care researcher Barbara McNeil asked physicians to make that exact hypothetical choice. And she asked one group of doctors to choose based on survival rates and the other group on death rates. Perhaps alarmingly, the exact same information, presented in two different ways, resulted in vastly different decisions. When she described the surgical option in terms of the chance of survival, 84 percent of physicians chose this option. When she discussed surgery in terms of the chance of dying, only half of them opted for this treatment. Why did this happen? The doctors responded to how the outlooks were framed. The framing effect is our tendency to evaluate things differently based on how they’re presented—whether that’s a surgeon assessing risk, or a heartbroken person deciding how to move on after the end of a relationship.

According to Gary Lewandowski, a professor and former chair in the department of psychology at Monmouth University, we’re more resilient than we think. He studied a group that you might anticipate would be the saddest in the wake of a breakup: people who had been in a long-term relationship for at least a few years, had been broken up within the last few months, and hadn’t found a new partner. Instinctually, we’d expect the majority of them to view the breakup as a terrible experience. Yet, when Lewandowski and his colleagues talked to this group, they learned that only a third of them saw the breakup as negative. Around 25 percent saw it as neutral, and 41 percent saw it as positive.