Feel the Love: Making Up and Breaking Up

As the article states, “it’s no secret that celebrities have a habit to marry and divorce at least a few times.” The article goes on to talk about the top ten most expensive celebrity divorce settlements. That may be interesting and everything, but the more important and interesting question of all is this: what’s to blame for the high divorce rate?
There are a number of possible explanations. One possible explanation is that there is too much self-love in the relationship. Social psychologists refute the strongly-held belief that “you must love yourself before you can love someone else.” They give narcissists as an example of too much self-love. Narcissism is defined as a condition in which a person has an extreme level of self-love and selfishness. Furthermore, narcissists take all of the credit for things that go right, and blame blame blame when things go wrong. Many celebrities are probably narcissists; that would be the least surprising finding. However, that can’t account for all divorces. So let’s look at some other options.
We could be seeing the results of the Coolidge effect, which refers to the sexually arousing power of a new partner. This power is greater than the appeal of a familiar partner. At first, the marriage is fresh, wonderful, and new. However, the couple becomes too acclimated to the other, and they search for that new, wonderful, and fresh feeling from someone else—resulting in cheating. Soon, the cheating leads to a divorce.
A third reason could be due to the distress-maintaining style of attribution, which is the tendency of unhappy couples to attribute their partner’s good acts to external factors and bad acts to internal factors. Lionel Richie could very well have been bringing his wife flowers because he’s in love with her, but she would probably attribute it to his wanting something of her. See? Situational versus disposition.
All in all, these couples—celebrities or not—are in for the downward spiral. And we all know what that means. Unlike another strongly held belief, once you hit rock bottom, you don’t spring back up—in fact, you take a shovel and start digging deeper.