"One study examined the expected impact of breaking up with a romantic partner and compared it to its actual impact...Students who had not experienced a romantic breakup, called 'luckies,' reported on their own overall happiness and then predicted how unhappy they would be 2 months after a breakup. The researchers compared this estimate with the happiness of people who had recently broken up, labeled 'leftovers.'...Leftovers were just as happy as luckies, but luckies predicted they would be much less happy 2 months after a breakup than leftovers actually were...
Although some breakups are indeed devastating, and divorce has many costs, people tend to overestimate how much a romantic break would diminish their life satisfaction [emphasis is my own, not the author's]."
--Social Psychology, pg. 220, by Gilovich, Keltner, Chen, and Nisbett
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