Dissolution of Relationships, Processes

“Breaking up is hard to do,” according to a song by Neil Sedaka. Though Sedaka may make a seemingly obvious point, he and the countless other songwriters who manage to put words and melodies to the experience of relationship breakup are clearly on to something. Songs about relationships, and especially their endings, land at the top of music charts for two very simple reasons—humans are relational creatures, and interpersonal relationships often end. For these same reasons, the ending of relationships has occupied an important place in interpersonal relationship research since the late 1970s and early 1980s.

What Sedaka did not take note of in his anthem to relationship dissolution is the fact that breaking up is hard to research. Given the ethical constraints that deny researchers the choice of random assignment to partners at the start of relationships, research has typically dealt only with partners who are known to have been in already broken relationships or else are asked to imagine what that would be like, and only recently have longitudinal studies been attempted. Data from most available research are either retrospective or imaginative, and this allows participants to put their stories into [Page 446]an orderly report irrespective of what might actually have happened in the process of breakup. This can lead to the reports of breakup being rationalized or stripped of some of the complexity that they most likely deserve.

Given this proviso, there have been many explanations offered by researchers about the causes of, stages of, and processes of what has been termed relational dissolution, termination, disengagement, and deterioration, but capturing and generalizing about this phenomenon has proven somewhat challenging due to the dynamic nature of relationship change and negotiation, as well as limitations of research methods. Although most research and literature focuses on romantic relationships, there is distinct research that delineates the disengagement processes of marriages, friendships, and dating relationships separately. This entry gives a modest overview of that research, showing the various ways relational scholars have attempted to characterize the nature of relationship dissolution across and within relational types.