Think of romance as being like a business startup: You have to be prepared for failure, and learn from it, to realize ultimate bliss.
Teaching at a business school, I meet a lot of 20-something aspiring entrepreneurs. They are well trained, smart, ambitious, and energetic. They generally have a good idea and know people who want to help them. But one particular quality distinguishes the ones whom I’m most bullish about: They fully hope, and intend, to succeed, but they understand the significant likelihood of failure and face it in a healthy way. They know that their Big Idea is just the first one; if necessary, they will come up with more ideas, which will be better than the first. These are the entrepreneurs to watch—not their specific start-ups.
This attitude toward failure is the same one that can lead to success in the greatest entrepreneurial venture anyone has in life: romantic love. I have written previously that the most successful relationships closely resemble mature start-ups (as opposed to mergers), in that their success depends on not waiting too long to get committed. But romance also mirrors business creation both in the likelihood of early failure and in the learning benefits that failure delivers, which can improve the chances of a subsequent happy relationship.
If you are suffering from heartbreak this Valentine’s Day, you might be able to take comfort in this idea: Even a failed romance—and the sadness it brings—can help you make this sort of entrepreneurial progress toward true happiness in love.
Read: Valentine’s Day: just another liberal stimulus?
The idea that failure is part of spectacular success is not new. A classic example, from baseball, is the legendary slugger Babe Ruth—who was not just the home-run king but the strikeout king as well. The same year he hit 60 homers, 1927, he was also fanned 89 times; over his career, he had more strikeouts than anyone else in pro baseball at that time. In sports, business, and life, big hits require big swings, which also means plenty of big misses.
In business, failure is even more common than in baseball: More than three in four tech start-ups are calculated never to turn a profit for investors, and some estimates suggest failure rates above 90 percent. A common rule of thumb we often use in business schools is that it takes the average entrepreneur four tries before the odds of success get better than even. However, the likelihood of failure in business is not constant across attempts if entrepreneurs prove able to learn from their mistakes. This has been called a failure-learning orientation, which results in improved performance with successive business attempts. This learning comes in many areas: discovering how to pick partners, understanding the behavior of markets, developing skill in looking for investors.
The essence of business entrepreneurship is taking significant risks to create something wonderful that has potentially explosive rewards. Which, when you think about it, sounds a lot like falling in love. A great deal of personal risk is involved in giving someone your heart. You can be rejected at the outset; even if you aren’t, the relationship is more likely than not to fail—after all, according to one source, on average a person has about five relationships before marrying.
Read: How relationships grow, and how they break
The risk is not trivial. Romantic failures can be incredibly painful, affecting us at a profound level. This pain is especially sharp if your beloved breaks up with you—a common example of social rejection and exclusion. The feeling of exclusion involves the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), a brain region implicated in the experience of both physical and emotional pain. The reason you risk intense misery is twofold: The short-term rewards can be exquisite—that heady feeling of being in love—and when the relationship is permanent, it can be one of the biggest sources of happiness in your life.
As with failed business start-ups, painful breakups are important for learning if you take the opportunity. Indeed, one 2018 study involving 160 daters in their early 20s showed that among those who broke up around age 22 and felt they understood the reasons for the breakup, subsequent relationship satisfaction (from ages 23 to 25) was higher and relationship conflict was lower. Those who didn’t understand their breakup at that age—and thus didn’t learn—did not realize as large a benefit in the next relationship.
The potential learning from failed relationships generally falls into three areas, according to researchers: social cognitive maturity (the ability to balance your needs with your partner’s), romantic agency (coping with the negative emotions that come with a romance), and coherence (understanding that romantic involvement has both positive and negative aspects). Common skills that people who have broken up learn are how to balance their relationships with friends and the relationship they have with their partner, how to trust with caution, and the importance of being a friend, as well as a lover, to their partner.
Read: Love in the time of individualism
Altogether, the research tends to confirm what most of us probably know intuitively: You typically enter early relationships with a lot of unrealistic attitudes and expectations, and so make mistakes that lead to breakups, which can be painful and ugly. But if you carefully take stock and learn from those errors, love will get easier and better, and create the potential for each subsequent relationship to be more successful than the previous—with the proviso that I’m not recommending you constantly quit one romance in favor of another. As I’ve discussed previously, in matters of the heart, lasting friendship trumps fleeting passion. Here are three rules to keep in mind.
1. Don’t get stuck in the doom loop.
Not everyone learns from relationship failures—or any kind of failure, for that matter. Researchers have demonstrated that most people are very good at reframing or denying failures because they are ego-threatening. The easiest thing to do after a nasty split is to try to forget that your ex ever existed. But this is a big mistake because it wastes the information that would improve the odds of greater relationship success later. You have probably met people who appear to be in a doom loop of love, in which they make the same mistakes over and over again, choosing the wrong partner or sabotaging their relationship. That is a sign that they’re not learning from their failures.
2. Study your last breakup like a scientist.
This takes emotional energy to get started, but once they start to analyze their romantic failures through a forensic lens, many people tell me that what was a painful experience becomes less emotionally freighted and more clinically useful. Write down the errors you may have made, according to the three categories of learning listed above. Did you smother your beloved? Were you unable to cope with jealousy? Did you fail to see warning signs that the other person was a bad match for you? After you have done this, make some resolutions that will help you avoid similar mistakes when you meet your next partner. Not only will this wire in the learning; it will also probably make you emotionally easier to understand—which, scholars have shown, can make you more attractive.
3. Don’t give up on love.
If you have had several bad breakups, you can easily get dispirited and conclude that you’re not cut out for the romance game. But remember what business schools like mine teach their students about start-ups: The average hit tends to be preceded by roughly four flops. Here’s a plausible adage: If you haven’t had your heart truly broken once, broken someone else’s, and had at least a couple of relationships fizzle out unceremoniously, you probably don’t have enough experience of love to build the dream romance that you want. Get up, dust yourself off, get back out there, and collect some more data.
Read: Entrepreneurs get better with practice
A side benefit of the entrepreneurial approach to failure in love is that it can help you avoid one of the great pitfalls of a star-crossed romance: hanging on too long. As Silicon Valley people like to say, “Fail fast”—in other words, don’t stick with a losing proposition longer than it takes to learn the valuable lessons of the loss.
Perhaps you have stayed in a doomed, unhappy romance because the prospect of being single scared you. Researchers find that the fear of singlehood may be a very powerful motivation that increases people’s willingness to settle for less in their relationships. This can result in a lot of unnecessary unhappiness.
Remember that you can’t learn from a breakup unless you actually break up. Then you can apply your experience and knowledge to a new relationship in what will most likely be a better situation than the last. You don’t have to fall in love with an entrepreneur, but if you can fall in love like an entrepreneur, true romance awaits you.
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