Love ruptures stink. Maybe it was the best decision after months of conflict or maybe it happened because it left you in sight too many times in Whats and you did not want to put up with it. No matter the reasons: cut with a partner and continue with our normal lives is difficult.
Each person has a method to deal with this situation. Among the most common steps is to mourn, listen to sad songs, go for a walk and get priority. You are not going to let us lie when we say that it is very probable that in the process of mourning, breaking the things of our exes is an act of the most common and cathartic.
Destroying photographs, giving away stuffed animals and throwing away that jacket you slept with. Getting rid of the old gifts of the relationship to avoid remembering that person is an obvious tactic to overcome a break. But the way we choose to get those objects out of our life follows a reasoning that you surely did not expect: magical thinking.
What? How? What does magic have to do with it?
Magical thinking does not only cover children who are surprised when an illusionist pulls a rabbit out of the hat or the tribes that dance to let the rain fall. What Matthew Hutson explains in his book The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking is that even the most skeptical resort to magical rituals in their daily lives, even without realizing it.
"When you do some symbolic action or perform some symbolic ritual, you tend to think that it will bring just what it symbolizes," explained the journalist specializing in cognitive neuroscience. The tangible world governed by the laws of physics made us accustomed to each action having a reaction. It is possible that due to this logic we hope that any act, even if it is symbolic, has the same consequences.
Hutson takes as an example an experiment that showed that people sweat more when they break a photograph of a beloved childhood object. The specialist believes that this is due to the difficulty of the brain to separate appearances with reality. So, when you think about who broke your heart while you break your photos, deep down you think that damage is also provoked to him.
In his article Craps and Magic, James M. Henslin presented another example of how human beings resort to magic without realizing it. The sociologist discovered that those who are fanatical of the bets tend to win the dice with more force when they need to get a bigger number. Again, the brain trying to make sense of life.
An important conclusion of Matthew Hutson's book is that magical thinking has been so useful in human evolution that it seems to be impossible to get it out of our brains. In fact, this kind of "irrational" reasoning allows us to live rationally: it helps us to believe that we have a purpose in this world and to continue with life despite the imminence of death.
The next time you burn your old love letters or paint a black tooth on your ex's photo (or whoever you do not like), believe it or not, you will be part of an ancient magical tradition that probably will not leave us Never.