Breaking Up Is Hard To Do: Why We Need Connection and Friendship

While there certainly are a lot of silly love songs out there, we also sing a lot about breakups. We lament achey breaky hearts, wrecking balls, and falling to pieces. We croon about how love is a battlefield, how it tears us apart, and when it leaves we’re in a world with no air. We emerge torn by those who leave scars. Because sometimes it lasts in love but sometimes it hurts instead.

Though the end of a relationship, whether romantic or friendly, is not a physical event, we often describe breakups in the physical language of the body. We speak of being punched in the gut or slapped in the face.

And this isn’t just English speakers — many other languages use similar references to bodily pain to describe the feelings associated with social rejection and isolation.

Why? Is a broken heart truly painful?

In Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, social neuroscientist Matthew Lieberman reveals what the science tells us about that question.

Here’s the really interesting thing Lieberman has found in his research — physical pain and social pain (rejection and disconnection) are experienced in the same parts of the brain. He designed a study where subjects played a simulated video game of catch with two other players (who the participants were told were being controlled by other subjects in other MRI machines, but in fact were just part of the computer program).

After a few rounds of friendly catch, the other two players suddenly stopped throwing the ball to the subject. He was rejected. And the researchers knew he felt sad — not because he said anything, but because the emotion centers of his brain were activated, along with the same parts of the brain that register physical pain.

Another fascinating study had two groups who reported daily on their levels of social pain — feelings of rejection, isolation, embarrassment — over the course of three weeks. Each group also took a pill each day — one group took an inert placebo, the other took an active medication. While levels of social pain were similar in the early days of the experiment, by day 9 the medicated group was consistently reporting less social pain each day, and the difference between the two groups continued to widen until day 21. 

Are you ready for the cool part? The medication they were taking was Tylenol.

Say what?! Tylenol can lessen your feelings of emotional pain.

Lieberman concludes, “Our sensitivity to social rejection is so central to our well-being that our brains treat it like a painful event.”

Our Faustian Bargain

When our friendships or romantic relationships end, we feel pain. It hurts.

Why? Why do we feel pain at all?

Well, obviously, pain has an important survival benefit — physical pain tells us to take our hand off the stove or to stop our attempt at doing the splits when we’re 40. Our ancestors who were less sensitive to pain were much more likely to suffer fatal injuries, and therefore were less likely to survive to adulthood and pass their genes on to their offspring.

But does heartbreak have a survival benefit? In a way, it does.

Human infants are born completely helpless. An infant needs caring adults to provide for its most basic needs: food, shelter, love, and nurturing touch. When an infant doesn’t get that care, she feels pain.

Loving connections with others are not a want for the infant — they are a need. Without adults emotionally bonded to the child, the child would not survive. The infant is primed to cry in her distress, and the brains of adults are primed to be agitated by the cries of their offspring and to satisfy their demands. It looks like Maslow had his hierarchy a bit wrong — social connection with others is the most basic of our needs, without which no other needs can be met.

Not all animals have this need. Some animals eat their young. Why are humans different?

It’s that big ol‘ brain of ours. We are born long before our brains are mature, for the simple reason that we would never make it out of our mothers with fully developed craniums. We are born helpless, and therefore we’re wired to connect in powerful relationships with other humans so we can be taken care of and grow up big and strong and send our genetic material on into the future.

Lieberman describes this as the Faustian bargain we made with evolution: Want to compose music or build skyscrapers or learn quantum physics when you grow up? Then you need emotional connections with others, and it’ll hurt when you lose them. And sorry, you can’t shut that system off once you’re fully grown.

We need friendship and deep social connections. Research demonstrates that having poor social connections is as dangerous to our health as smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. So we enter into the bargain. We reach out to others, we become vulnerable and exposed and cared for and protected. We do this with no guarantee that the relationship will last.

We do it for our survival.

So reach out and nurture your connections with others. Your life depends on it.