In-pair divestment

How do in-pair obstacles and difficulties affect the intensity of love? Why do people at some point in their romantic relationships emotionally disinvest? Does a reduction in the intensity of romantic feelings always result in relationship breakup? Core assumptions of emotional intensity theory suggest that feelings of love vary in strength according to an adaptive “energy conservation” principle. To save energy, romantic partners automatically adapt the intensity of their feelings to the minimum level needed to overcome the obstacles and difficulties the couple encounters daily (e.g., reciprocal partners’ flaws, relational stress, and perceived risk of breakup), because small relationship obstacles and difficulties only demand the investment of correspondingly small quantities of motivational/emotional resources to be surmounted. Thus, romantic feelings appear to diminish when obstacles are almost absent and, by contrast, to augment when obstacles grow stronger—with emotional strength reflecting the magnitude of what challenges the stability of the relationship. This specific fine-tuning of emotion intensity holds up, however, only to the point where maintaining the relationship is still worth the effort. Beyond this point, actual in-pair divestment occurs, because any further investment of energy would represent a useless (i.e., nonfunctional) waste of energy. In adopting the perspective of emotional intensity theory, this chapter reviews the most relevant empirical evidence on romantic relationships in light of a unitary, single-process explanation that reconciles past conflicting findings while also addressing new theoretical and practical implications for contemporary romantic partnerships.