Okay, yes, it's intuitive that a breakup will probably hurt. How long you dated someone, your feelings for this person, the intensity of the relationship, how much a part of your life your ex was, etc., all play a role in how much the breakup, and getting over this person, will hurt.
Being dumped or being the dumper will probably also play a role in how you may feel after a breakup. I explore this more here. Rejection has its own science as to why it hurts, and being on that end speaks to self-esteem consequences and one's belonging needs.
In my post, Solving For "S," I explore how creating a relationship (and being in a relationship) engenders various "feel good" chemicals. When you're in a long-term relationship your body develops a tolerance for these hormones and those feelings become your norm. When you dissolve that relationship, you are for all intents and purposes yanking those chemicals off your neural receptors. You go from a high to a low fairly quickly, and so a breakup can be compared to withdrawing from cocaine addiction.
Think about too how emotional pain isn't just emotional; it can become physical. Emotional pain piggybacks on the brain's physical pain pathways, and as I write about in my rejection post linked above, Dr. Guy Winch cites a study which supports this truth by suggesting that Tylenol can decrease emotional pain. Additionally, like any other stress, breakups cause a surge in adrenaline and cortisol, which causes increased blood pressure, nausea, accelerated heart rate, decreased appetite, trouble sleeping, and increased irritability.
There are probably several other fun facts (and factoids) regarding the science behind why breakups hurt so much, but as I do best, I'm going to put in my personal take here.
After various serious breakups I remember feeling so down that I felt like I was never going to be happy again. Sometimes it can take awhile for me to feel back to myself, for me to feel clearheaded and stop thinking about the ex in question every second of every day, for me to get back to my day-to-day and move on with my life.
There is definitely a sense of loss that contributes to this feeling. A breakup is losing someone who played a big role in your life. Depending on the relationship, this loss can be more or less great. There is also the loss of the relationship and what that meant, whether that just means the concept of it or specific things about the relationship. Perhaps being in a relationship made you feel special, safe, taken care of, like everything else was a little bit more manageable with this person on your team, whatever. It's all gone.
There's the not being able to talk to this person too. It's especially hard when this was the person you shared everything with, the person that you called first when you wanted to share or talk about something, the person that maybe you texted throughout the day about every random thing that happened... (You could stay friends, sure, but this complicates things and doesn't let you get over each other. In this day and age it's so easy to digitally stalk someone and keep tabs on him/her, which also lends itself to not being able move on. In the sixth paragraph of this post I call upon Samara O'Shea's work to talk about how to apply your efforts to get over someone and stop the overanalyzing and cyberstalking.)
Questioning what could have been or if you made the right choice is also another aspect of why breakups are so hard. I've been known to ride relationships all the way to the end in attempts to give them a fair shot, get clarity and closure. When I cut and run too early in attempts to not get in over my head (or really heart), I'm left with so many "what ifs." I obviously have reasons for calling it quits and following a gut feeling that it won't work in the long run, but in those cases it's probably a given that I'm going to give it another run, if the other person wants to as well, sometime in the future, and go around again... Who knows, perhaps some future permutation of this might actually bear fruit and there will be a reason why I'll have tortured myself like this.
And then there's the feeling/being single again after a breakup. Going back onto the battlefield, back into battle. Dealing with shadchanim and people throwing names at you. Having to look into people and deciding why yes to date them. Networking. Going on awkward first dates. Having to try to build new relationships. All that fun stuff...
Uggh, breaking down, having to start from scratch... (shake it off like an Etch-A-Sketch)
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