Heavy Groceries

TThe first sign that a relationship has colonized your life is usually something stupid.

You are standing in CVS trying to remember the name of a medication you have taken before. You know what it looks like. You know why you took it. What you do not know is what it is called, because for the last four years the answer to that question has been, "Ask him." Or you are booking a flight and discover that you do not know your own Known Traveler Number. Somewhere along the way, another adult became the location where you stored a small piece of yourself.

Nobody puts this in the vows.

Psychologist Daniel Wegner had a name for part of the arrangement: transactive memory. In a 1991 experiment, Wegner, Ralph Erber and Paula Raymond studied 118 people who had been in close dating relationships for at least three months. Natural couples performed better than improvised pairs on a memory task when they were left to their existing way of dividing information. When researchers imposed a new scheme for deciding who should remember what, that advantage disappeared and reversed. The useful thing about the couple, cognitively speaking, was not that both people knew the same things. It was that they had learned who knew what. [\[1\]](#sources)

This is an excellent system until you need to divide the assets.

Nobody knows the Wi-Fi password

A close relationship slowly fills with tiny jurisdictions. One person knows the airport route. One remembers birthdays. One can identify the noise the dishwasher makes before it floods the kitchen. There is usually a minister of passwords, a secretary of grudges, somebody in charge of remembering which friend is no longer invited and why. The assignments are rarely discussed because discussion would defeat the point. You learn what the other person reliably knows and stop spending quite so much effort knowing it yourself.

Forgetting, in this context, can be efficient. That is mildly offensive because we usually describe intimacy as an addition. Another person expands your world, supports you, teaches you things, makes you stronger. All true. But two people can also become more capable together while each becomes, in small and highly specific ways, less self-contained. You don't become stupid. You stop maintaining duplicate records.

Then the relationship ends and everyone wants to know how you feel. Meanwhile, nobody knows the Wi-Fi password.

The practical vacancies can be ridiculous. The hotel you both loved is suddenly difficult to find because she always booked it. A story from 2017 develops a factual dispute and its only other witness is now somebody you absolutely will not text about whether the bartender's name was Mike. You discover that a person can leave your life while continuing to hold several minor public offices inside it.

The price of Tuesday

There may be more going on than shared memory. Social Baseline Theory, developed by psychologists James Coan and David Sbarra, starts with a premise that runs against a lot of modern self-help: being alone may not be the neutral condition from which relationships are added.

Humans evolved in social environments. Familiar people can share vigilance, effort, risk and emotional regulation, and the theory proposes that the brain expects access to social relationships as part of the ordinary resources available for dealing with the world. Decreased access to those relationships, in the theory, increases cognitive and physiological effort. [\[2\]](#sources)

The theory does not establish that heartbreak literally changes the weight of a grocery bag, and transactive memory is a separate line of research. Put beside each other, though, they make a familiar experience look different. After someone leaves, the world can contain exactly the same errands, doors, bills, forms and bags as before. What changed is how much of that world had quietly become a group project.

This is where the usual language gets strange. We say somebody became "too dependent," or congratulate her later for becoming independent again, as though independence were a substance the relationship depleted and the breakup restored. But the person afterward may know things the person before never knew.

New position available

Research on romantic breakup complicates the idea of simply returning to an old self. Across three studies, Erica Slotter, Wendi Gardner and Eli Finkel found changes in the content of people's self-concepts after breakup and reduced self-concept clarity---how clearly and consistently people understood who they were. Reduced clarity was associated with greater emotional distress. [\[3\]](#sources)

Coan and Sbarra, drawing on research about close relationships and the self, use the wonderfully unpleasant word ungrafting for part of what may have to happen after a relationship ends: separating self and other after they have become intertwined. [\[2\]](#sources)

"Getting yourself back" sounds nicer. It is also suspiciously neat. The old self did not know the new passwords. She did not make these reservations, handle this particular family problem, remember this set of birthdays or know how to fix whatever keeps happening under the sink. Some of the competence that appears after a loss is not recovered from storage. It gets built because there is suddenly nobody else doing the job.

This does not make loss secretly good for you. Plenty of vacancies are simply losses. Some things another person knew disappear with them; some versions of you existed only in that relationship; some shared jokes become unusable because explaining them would take longer than the joke deserved. The smaller, stranger point is that the person who comes out the other side may be more self-sufficient partly because the relationship allowed her to be less so.

That makes independence look less like a permanent quality and more like a description of the current arrangement.

The self-contained adult

There is a fashionable fantasy of adulthood in which a healthy person is internally complete. She regulates herself, knows herself, remembers her own passwords and enters relationships because she wants people but never really needs them. Reliance is permitted as long as everyone understands it could be revoked without affecting normal operations.

This would be a bizarre way to run almost anything else.

We admire systems that distribute work intelligently. Families do it. Companies do it. Humans have apparently been doing it to one another long enough for psychologists to study the resulting memory system. Yet when the subject is the self, redundancy suddenly starts to look like virtue. You should carry every function personally or risk discovering that another person mattered in ways more embarrassing than love.

Maybe that is what makes the grocery-store version of grief so irritating. Missing somebody is respectable. Standing under fluorescent lights because you cannot remember which coffee you buy is beneath the dignity of heartbreak. And yet there it is: a tiny piece of evidence that a relationship had made itself useful.

Months later, you know the medication. You know the password. You make the reservation without thinking about who used to make it. Some jobs migrated to friends, some disappeared, and some became yours so gradually that you stopped remembering they once belonged to someone else.

This is usually the point where people say you got your independence back. But you didn't go back. You learned things you previously had no reason to know, took over things you previously had no reason to do, and became competent in places where the relationship had made competence unnecessary.

Which leaves independence in a slightly awkward position. We talk about it as though it describes how little we need other people. In practice, it may describe something much less glamorous: how many things we happen to be doing ourselves right now.

Tomorrow you might fall in love and forget the Wi-Fi password all over again.

Sources

Wegner, D. M., Erber, R., & Raymond, P. (1991). "Transactive Memory in Close Relationships." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61(6), 923--929. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.61.6.923

Coan, J. A., & Sbarra, D. A. (2015). "Social Baseline Theory: The Social Regulation of Risk and Effort." Current Opinion in Psychology, 1, 87--91. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2014.12.021

Slotter, E. B., Gardner, W. L., & Finkel, E. J. (2010). "Who Am I Without You? The Influence of Romantic Breakup on the Self-Concept." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 36(2), 147--160. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167209352250