The path out of love is rarely straightforward. This is true whether we’re ending a marriage or saying goodbye to an entirely different relationship—the one we have with our career.
Relationship scientists have spent decades documenting the process of falling out of love: what the emotional roller coaster feels like, how psychological biases keep us from understanding our breakup behaviors, how we fail to prepare for our next relationship. But despite the similarities between breaking up with a lover and breaking up with a career, we rarely see the parallels.
Tessa West is a professor of psychology at New York University and the author of “Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You.”