Why and How Couples Leave Relationships: A Twenty-First Century Landscape

Abstract

A multiplicity of reasons account for the departure of couples from adult intimate relationships in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The chapter proposes that the intensification of certain ‘conditions of life’, some established in the final decades of the previous century, forms the social backdrop against which the changing nature of decisions to exit couple relationships takes place. These ‘conditions of life’ include: the ubiquitous use of the mobile telephone; access of individuals to the internet and other information and communications technologies; the necessary mobility of workers as they respond to the requirements of mobile capital within a global economy; the increasing participation of women in the workplace; an increasing number of international and intercultural couple relationships; an increasing acceptance of divorce in many cultures; poverty and inadequate income; and a changing set of power relations between the genders in both domestic and social domains. Against this background the chapter uses three vignettes of separating couples to illustrate how different ‘immediate’ reasons for the cessation of couple life—such as infidelity, domestic violence, addiction, falling out of love—become interposed with personality factors such as attachment styles to determine the processes through which individuals leave relationships. The vignettes also show how the relationship of separating couple members to a shared parenthood has implications for the level and duration of conflict accompanying their separation processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)