White paper

The Second Loss: why the relationship after a divorce can hurt more than the divorce

A white paper on the relationship after an unhappy marriage

Summary

Many people who leave an unhappy marriage expect relief. Some get it. Others find that the new relationship they hoped would mark a fresh start ends in a pain that feels worse than the divorce. This paper sets out why that second loss is common, what research says about the forces behind it, and what helps people trust their own judgement again. It draws on published studies on self-expansion, romantic love, idealisation, attachment, rejection and trust, and on anonymised practitioner observations. It is written for people going through this, and for practitioners and journalists who work with them.

1. Introduction

Divorce is usually discussed as a single event. For many people it is the end of a process that began years earlier, in a marriage that had gone quiet, distant or unhappy long before the papers were signed. The ending is often the first loss.

The second loss tends to come later and is less discussed. It happens when a new relationship, formed after the divorce, ends. People in this position often describe the pain as worse than the divorce itself, and they are often confused by that. They left for a reason, and the new relationship felt like a step toward something better. This paper examines why the second loss can hurt more, and what the research suggests about helping people recover.

2. The first loss came earlier

Research on divorce shows that outcomes vary widely. Amato's review of the consequences of divorce for adults and children found that divorce benefits some individuals, causes temporary declines in well-being for others, and sets some on a downward trajectory they may not fully recover from (Amato, 2000). The question is not whether divorce is good or bad, but for whom, and under what conditions.

For people who describe a long unhappy marriage, the emotional ending often came before the legal one. The relationship may have become a set of logistics, with little conversation and a growing sense of being unseen. When the divorce comes, it can feel like relief and loss at the same time. This ambivalence is normal, and it sets up the conditions for the second loss: a person who has been longing to feel seen, and who has just left the place where they did not.

3. Why the new relationship matters so much

3.1 Self-expansion

Aron and Aron's self-expansion model proposes that people are motivated to grow their sense of self, and that close relationships are one of the main ways they do so. Partners include each other's resources, perspectives and identities in their own sense of self (Aron & Aron, 1986; Aron, Lewandowski, Mashek & Aron, 2013). Rapid expansion is associated with excitement and positive feeling. Rapid loss of expansion, such as after a spouse's death, is the reverse.

Applied to the second loss, this suggests the new relationship may have expanded a sense of self that the marriage had narrowed. When it ends, the loss is not only of a partner, but of a version of oneself that the relationship made possible.

3.2 The pain is real

A brain-imaging study led by Kross and colleagues found that the regions associated with social rejection overlap with those associated with physical pain, in 40 people who had recently experienced an unwanted romantic breakup (Kross et al., 2011). A smaller study reported that people who had recently been dumped showed activity in reward and craving systems when they looked at their ex, and that this activity weakened over time (Fisher et al.). The finding is not that heartbreak is physical injury, but that the brain treats the loss in ways that resemble pain.

3.3 Idealisation and what it protects

People in new relationships often idealise their partner. Research by Murray, Holmes and Griffin found that positive illusions about a partner, meaning views more favourable than the partner's behaviour strictly supports, were associated with satisfaction and with feelings of love (Murray, Holmes & Griffin, 1996). A later study of dating and married couples found that relationship illusions predicted greater satisfaction, love and trust, and less conflict (Murray, Holmes & Griffin, 1997).

The useful distinction is between idealisation that leaves room for a partner's real behaviour and idealisation that cannot absorb it. Neff and Karney describe a model in which people hold specific, accurate judgements alongside a generally positive view of the partner (Neff & Karney, 2002). When the partner's behaviour becomes hard to reconcile with the view, the loss can feel like a collapse of the whole picture.

3.4 Passion, commitment and "spark"

Sternberg's triangular theory describes love in terms of three components: intimacy, passion and commitment (Sternberg, 1986). Combinations of these produce different kinds of love. Passion and commitment without intimacy describes an intense but unstable bond. Intimacy and commitment without passion describes companionate love.

Many people describe an unhappy marriage as lacking spark, and a new relationship as full of it. Acevedo and Aron's review of 25 studies with 6,070 participants suggests that romantic love, with intensity, engagement and sexual interest, can exist in long-term relationships without the obsessive component (Acevedo & Aron, 2009). The same review proposes that obsessive love involves uncertainty and anxiety, and that it drives shorter relationships more than longer ones. The spark people feel in a new relationship may therefore include a strong element of uncertainty. When that uncertainty ends, so does the feeling.

This does not mean the marriage had no love in it, nor that the new relationship had none. It means that spark and commitment are different things, and that people can mistake one for the other when they are deciding what to hope for.

4. Attachment, security and the "I was secure until" story

Many people who come to practitioners describe themselves as secure until they began a particular relationship. The research gives this story partial support, and complicates it.

Fraley, Gillath and Deboeck analysed 25 life events in a naturalistic longitudinal study. About half were associated with immediate changes in attachment, and about a quarter with enduring change. On average, people tended to return to levels of security expected from their prior trajectories, though some people changed in lasting ways, and how people construed the events affected whether they changed (Fraley, Gillath & Deboeck, 2021)

Attachment security can also vary by relationship. Fraley and colleagues developed a measure to assess attachment across different relationships, on the premise that people hold relationship-specific working models (Fraley, Heffernan, Vicary & Brumbaugh, 2011). Within-person fluctuations in relationship-specific security have been studied in longitudinal designs, with some evidence that greater fluctuations predict declines in satisfaction (Girme et al., 2018). In a study of 172 couples followed over a year, changes in attachment security were coordinated within couples, after taking into account each person's typical level (Hudson, Fraley, Brumbaugh & Vicary, 2014).

What the story gets right is that relationships shape how safe a person feels. What it can miss is the history a person brings into the relationship, and the way both partners contribute to what happens. A useful framing is that security is shaped by relationships and events, and that both partners influence each other.

5. Trust, and trusting yourself

5.1 Trust before evidence

Rempel, Holmes and Zanna's model describes trust in close relationships as having three parts: predictability, based on past behaviour; dependability, based on the partner's qualities; and faith, based on confidence in the partner's responsiveness in an uncertain future (Rempel, Holmes & Zanna, 1985). People in new relationships often report high trust before much evidence has accumulated.

This matters for the second loss. Trust that rests on faith rather than evidence can feel secure and then collapse. The person who lost the relationship may conclude that they cannot trust their own judgement, when what happened is that faith ran ahead of evidence.

5.2 Impulsive trust

Murray and colleagues describe trust as partly impulsive, based on automatic positive associations with a partner, and partly reflective, based on deliberate expectations of care. Impulsive trust reduced the automatic inclination to distance in response to doubts about a partner's trustworthiness. This helps explain why self-protection can be hard to switch on in the early weeks of a relationship, and why it can feel very loud after a loss.

5.3 What self-trust might involve

Self-trust is not directly measured in this literature. As a working concept, it can be described as confidence in one's own reading of situations, and in one's ability to respond to them. A practical starting point, drawn from the principles above, is to name what one was looking for from a relationship, to track evidence over time rather than relying on how a single conversation felt, and to slow down significant decisions when feelings are strong.

6. Implications

6.1 For people going through a second loss

• The pain can be real and proportionate, even when the relationship was short.
• The new relationship may have been asked to do a job that no relationship can do alone: to prove the marriage was the problem, to restore a sense of self, or to provide safety.
• Speed of a new relationship is not, by itself, a warning sign. Brumbaugh and Fraley (2015) found that people who started new relationships more quickly reported greater psychological and relational health. The more useful question is what the new relationship is being asked to provide.
• Grief can change how the marriage is remembered. Intense or prolonged grief has been associated with memory biased toward negative features of a lost relationship (Bonanno et al., 1998). Remembering the marriage as wholly hopeless may make a new person seem like the only way out.
• Recovery takes time and varies by person. A Swiss longitudinal study of people divorcing after long marriages found distinct groups of adjustment, with personality, time since separation, a new relationship and financial situation among the differences (Perrig-Chiello et al.). A later follow-up suggested that upward change is possible, with personal resources among the most consistent predictors (Perrig-Chiello, Morselli & Hutchison, 2015; conference poster).

6.2 For practitioners

• Treat the second loss as its own experience, not as a continuation of the divorce.
• Attachment labels can help people understand a pattern, but they are a tool for understanding, not a fixed identity.
• Be cautious with language that frames one partner as the cause. The research describes mutual influence and relationship-specific patterns.
• Refer people to medical, bereavement or divorce support when distress is severe. Practitioner coaching is not a substitute for clinical care.

6.3 For the wider conversation

• Ambiguous loss (Boss, 1999) describes losses without clear closure. Divorce is one example. Few social rituals mark it, which can make it harder to grieve.
• Gray divorce, meaning divorce after age 50, has become more common. US data suggest that a meaningful share of people who separate after 50 form new unions within a decade, and that some reconcile with their former spouse (Health and Retirement Study analyses).

7. Limitations

• Most studies cited here involve adults in general rather than people who have specifically experienced a second loss after an unhappy marriage.
• Many samples are small, particularly the neuroimaging studies.
• Limerence (Tennov, 1979) is a descriptive concept, not a clinical diagnosis, and its study is still developing. It is not used as an explanatory framework here.
• Practitioner observations are not systematic data. They are presented as illustrations only.
• Much of the older-adult relationship research is from the United States. UK comparisons are needed.

8. Conclusion

The second loss is a common and under-discussed experience. The research points to several forces behind it: the expansion of the self that a new relationship provides, the way idealisation and passion can outrun evidence, the pull and push of attachment under stress, and the gap between faith and evidence in trust. None of these makes the pain imagined. Together they suggest that recovery depends less on finding the right partner than on rebuilding trust in one's own judgement, slowly and through repeated, observable action.

References

• Acevedo, B. P., & Aron, A. (2009). Does a long-term relationship kill romantic love? Review of General Psychology, 13(1), 59–65.
• Amato, P. R. (2000). The consequences of divorce for adults and children. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62(4), 1269–1287.
• Aron, A., & Aron, E. N. (1986). Love and the expansion of self: Understanding attraction and satisfaction. Hemisphere.
• Aron, A., Lewandowski, G. W., Mashek, D., & Aron, E. N. (2013). The self-expansion model of motivation and cognition in close relationships. In J. A. Simpson & L. Campbell (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of close relationships. Oxford University Press.
• Bonanno, G. A., et al. (1998). Ambivalence and grief.
• Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
• Brumbaugh, C. C., & Fraley, R. C. (2015). Too fast, too soon? An empirical investigation into rebound relationships. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 32(1), 99–118.
• Fisher, H., et al. Neural correlates of romantic rejection.
• Fraley, R. C., Gillath, O., & Deboeck, P. R. (2021). Do life events lead to enduring changes in adult attachment styles? A naturalistic longitudinal investigation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(6), 1567–1606.
• Fraley, R. C., Heffernan, M. E., Vicary, A. M., & Brumbaugh, C. C. (2011). The Experiences in Close Relationships–Relationship Structures questionnaire. Psychological Assessment.
• Girme, Y. U., Agnew, C. R., VanderDrift, L. E., Harvey, S. M., Rholes, W. S., & Simpson, J. A. (2018). Within-person variation in attachment security. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Hudson, N. W., Fraley, R. C., Brumbaugh, C. C., & Vicary, A. M. (2014). Coregulation in romantic partners' attachment styles: A longitudinal investigation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40. DOI: 10.1177/0146167214528989.
• Kross, E., Berman, M. G., Mischel, W., Smith, E. E., & Wager, T. D. (2011). Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain. PNAS, 108(15), 6270–6275.
• Mikulincer, M., Dolev, T., & Shaver, P. R. (2004). Attachment-related strategies during thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
• Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Griffin, D. W. (1996). The benefits of positive illusions: Idealization and the construction of satisfaction in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(1), 79–98.
• Murray, S. L., Holmes, J. G., & Griffin, D. W. (1997). A leap of faith? Positive illusions in romantic relationships. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
• Murray, S. L., et al. (2011). Impulsive and reflective trust in close relationships.
• Neff, L. A., & Karney, B. R. (2002). Judgments of a relationship partner: Specific accuracy but global enhancement. Journal of Personality, 70(6), 1079–1112.
• Perrig-Chiello, P., Morselli, D., & Hutchison, S. (2015). Psychological adaptation to divorce after a long-term marriage.
• Rempel, J. K., Holmes, J. G., & Zanna, M. P. (1985). Trust in close relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(1), 95–112.
• Sternberg, R. J. (1986). A triangular theory of love. Psychological Review, 93(2), 119–135.
• Tennov, D. (1979). Love and limerence: The experience of being in love. Stein and Day.
• Wolfinger, N. H. (2007). Cited in Brumbaugh & Fraley (2015).