You Will Feel Better Than You Expect

There is a study that is often summarised as proving breakups hurt less than you think. The summary is roughly right and the details are worth having, because they change what you can do with it.

Researchers recruited students at the start of a term and tracked them for nine months. Those in relationships were asked, repeatedly, how distressed they expected to be if the relationship ended. Then the researchers waited to see whose relationships ended, and measured those people at several points afterwards.

The predictions were too high. Not slightly: the gap between predicted and actual distress was large, it appeared at the first measurement after the breakup, and it did not close over the following months. Both lines fell over time, and the predicted line stayed well above the real one throughout.

And the error was biggest among the people most in love. They did feel worse than the others, which is what you would expect. They had also overestimated by much more, so the mistake grew faster than the feeling.

Why does this happen?

Because imagining a future emotion means imagining the event, and the event is not what you will be doing. You picture the conversation, the empty flat, the mutual friends. You do not picture the shift at work, the email that needs answering, the thing your sister says on the phone, the film you end up watching. All of those will be there, taking up attention, and they do not appear in the forecast because the forecast is about the breakup.

This is a specific, named effect, and it is not about relationships. Affective forecasting errors show up almost everywhere people predict their own feelings. People overestimate how long a promotion will make them happy, how miserable a long commute will make them, how much a lottery win will change things. The lottery result is the famous one and the direction is the same: the imagined event dominates the forecast and ordinary life dominates the outcome.

Now the caveat, which matters.

The published analysis rests on a small number of people. Sixty-nine students were tracked, and the ones who broke up during the relevant window numbered in the twenties. That is a small sample for an effect size, and anybody quoting a precise figure from it is quoting something fragile.

So what is safe to take?

The direction and the mechanism. The direction, because it is consistent with a large body of forecasting research that does not depend on this study. The mechanism, because it explains why the error has the shape it has and predicts where else it will appear.

What is not safe is a number. Do not tell anybody they will feel thirty per cent better than they expect.

The useful application is narrower and sharper than the headline. If somebody is staying in an unhappy relationship largely because of how they imagine the aftermath, the forecast doing the work in that decision is systematically inflated. That is not advice to leave. It is a correction to one input of the decision, and it is the kind of thing worth knowing about yourself in advance, because you cannot notice it from inside the forecast.