George Loewenstein has spent decades studying the forces that govern our emotional lives. A Carnegie Mellon professor and one of the founders of behavioral economics, he has researched everything from curiosity and boredom to whether having more sex actually increases people’s happiness. But in his new book, The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us, Loewenstein turns his attention to the feelings most of us would rather avoid. As part of the project, he conducted a “Misery Survey,” asking people to describe the worst experiences of their lives. In this excerpt, he examines one of the most devastating, and enduring, forms of misery: rejection.
It’s ironic, then, that when we suffer from rejection and find ourselves at a loss for how to describe it, we reach for the language of physical pain—essentially, we’re trying to convey the awfulness of one indescribable thing by analogizing it to another indescribable thing. Of course, the big difference between these two sensations is that, in the case of physical pain, we can’t remember what it felt like, but in the case of rejection we can’t seem to forget.
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What little research there is on romantic breakups shows that it is among the “worst events” that people experience. Over 40 percent of people struggle with depression in the aftermath of a rejection, and 12 percent classified these episodes as “moderate to severe.” Women are more likely than men to report severe depression and hopelessness following breakups, but men are three to four times more likely to commit suicide. Heart attacks and strokes occur disproportionately following rejections, and rejected individuals often show symptoms that are typically associated with drug withdrawal, including anxiety, depression, crying, loss of appetite, and irritability.
After analyzing the survey responses about rejection, I believe that part of the reason why this particular misery is so devastating is because of how it undermines our self-esteem. If we had a relatively positive self-image before a breakup, it is often difficult to maintain it afterward. A sixty-year- old male from my survey captured this feeling when describing a breakup that happened thirty years earlier, which he rated a 9 out of 10 in severity: “When she moved on it was very hard for me to separate the fact that we probably weren’t right for each other long-term from the idea that there was something wrong with me.”
The connection to ego may help explain why rejections are so painful, even for people who had already been contemplating ending their relationship—but then their partner beat them to the punch. A thirty-five- year-old female writing about a rejection fourteen years earlier reported on the relationship in remarkably unflattering terms: “We were actually incompatible in a lot of ways and aside from his charisma and ambition, there were a lot of things I didn’t like about him. I didn’t respect a lot of his habits that weren’t very healthy. And most strangely, I wasn’t even physically attracted to him!” But none of this prevented her from being devastated when he dumped her: “It felt out of the blue…I was hung up for so long.”
Results from the survey supported the idea that unexpected rejection is especially painful. A sixty-two-year-old male whose wife rejected him four years earlier to “explore her sexuality” reported that the rejection was still an ongoing source of pain: “The marriage wasn’t strong, but I was caught completely off-guard.” An eighty-two-year-old man reported on a rejection that he rated a 10 on the badness scale, and that, twenty-one years later, he said, continues to be a source of pain: “My second wife, a businesswoman, came home from work one day and said she bought a house. I said I will put mine up for sale. She said you are not coming with me. We subsequently divorced. I cried every day for 9 months. Then, she called me and said she had cancer and would I take care of her. I did.”
Any kind of rejection hurts. But we might not appreciate just how deeply, how reflexively, or how irrationally rejection affects us if not for the foundational work of the Purdue social psychologist Kip Williams. Williams didn’t begin by studying big, obvious rejections like getting dumped by your romantic partner. He started with something tiny.
One day, he was at the lake with his dog, stretched out on a blanket, when a stray Frisbee landed nearby. He threw it back to one of the two guys who’d been playing and got ready to sit back down—when the Frisbee came flying back. Just like that, he was in the game, happily tossing the Frisbee back and forth. Then, after a few minutes, something strange happened: “They just stopped throwing it to me. They just started throwing it to each other. At first, you know, I’m thinking they’re toying around with me a little bit, and I’m maybe smiling. And then I realized it’s just never going to get to me again.”
When that realization hit, Williams felt two things in quick succession: an emotion (the sting of rejection), and a meta-emotion (embarrassment over just how much it stung). He slunk back toward his blanket and his dog, and then it hit him: this setup—or something like it—was the perfect way to study social exclusion in the lab.
He began with a simple in-person game. Three participants (two of whom were actually confederates) tossed a ball around in a triangle. After a few rounds, the confederates stopped including the real subject in their game of catch, quietly leaving the third person out.
The emotional effects were immediate—hurt, confusion, lowered self-esteem. Williams later developed a computer-based version called Cyberball to re-create the experience virtually and saw a similarly sharp drop in mood and self-esteem. In a follow-up study, Williams tested whether it mattered if the other players were computer programs instead of actual humans. It didn’t. Even those participants who were explicitly told they were playing against artificial agents still experienced the pain of rejection. Cyberball revealed that rejection isn’t a social judgment we reason our way through. It’s a reflex—like flinching when someone’s about to strike us.
Later studies added physiological and neurological evidence. During the game, the rejected participants showed heightened stress responses, including spikes in blood pressure. And in an fMRI study that tracked brain activity while people were playing Cyberball, researchers found that rejection activated the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex—a brain region also involved in processing physical pain. This may help explain why, as I noted earlier, we tend to describe rejection by employing physical metaphors like heartbreak or gut-punch. Inside the brain, physical and social pain are nearly indistinguishable.
There are very good evolutionary reasons why rejection stings as much as it does. For much of human history, being left out of the group could get you killed. So rejection is a strong signal pushing us to do whatever we can to get back into the fold. Ideally, it pushes us to repair a relationship, adjust our behavior, make new connections. In such cases, the pain of rejection may be miserable but it’s also purposeful—and usually temporary, even if we are forced to relive it from time to time thanks to our less-than-charitable memory.
After being rejected, a person is faced with a key decision: whether to devalue your past relationship or maintain a positive perspective despite your broken heart and whatever new (and often upsetting) information you learned about your ex in the course of the breakup. Each strategy has a different downside. Denigrating the relationship—deciding, for instance, that the rejecter was evil, dishonest, unworthy of your respect or time— devalues your own history, in effect consigning the whole relationship to the trash bin. Maintaining a positive outlook on the relationship, in contrast, preserves memories and history, but renders the demise of the relationship more painful.
Another decision that those who are rejected face, at least if anger is mixed in with sorrow, is where to direct that anger. If you catch your significant other in flagrante with another person—and a very large fraction of rejections are connected in one way or another to infidelity—you face the decision of whom to blame: your partner or their love object. Even when this decision is seemingly made on the spur of the moment, my guess is that it incorporates an element of rationality. If the cuckolded partner still harbors a hope of remaining together, then the natural target is the lover, who can be blamed for “corrupting” the loved one. But if the victim of infidelity really wants out of the relationship, they will blame their partner.
A sixty-one-year-old female from my survey, for example, whose boyfriend met a new woman on a bike trip, reported thoughts of revenge. “I daydreamed about killing myself, so he would really feel bad about what he had done, and also about going to confront her/hurt her (I’m not a violent or suicidal person and would never have done so).” Tellingly, she did not contemplate hurting or killing him.
Reluctant as I am to dispense advice in a book so skeptical of self-help, I’ll make one suggestion: if reconciliation is possible after a rejection—and if the person has other redeeming qualities—it may be worth trying to forgive them. I was struck by how many respondents ended up back with the person who had cheated on them or broken things off. In some cases, that choice clearly led to more pain. But in many others, it turned out to be the right call.
A fifty-one-year-old female reported on a rejection thirty years earlier that she rated an 8 in badness: “I fell in love with this man who had a girlfriend in another town. He cheated on her with me for several weeks, then he went back to her. I was devastated even though I knew he was going to do that. I spent months trying to talk myself into disliking him so I wouldn’t feel bad about it.”
The story, however, has a happy ending: “We met again years later, became friends, dated, and we’ve been married for twenty years. I still felt a little bit of the hurt from before, but he declared that that was in the past. I’ve always had a hard time holding a grudge against people I love, so I agreed to go out with him again. I let my guard down and let him in.”
Adapted from the book The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us by George Loewenstein. Published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us
