Beginnings, what they foretell and what they do not
We reread the first weeks the way we reread a detective novel, looking for clues. Most of them were not clues.
Retrospective rereading
After a break-up, the beginnings are re-examined. Signs are always found there: a sentence, a reaction, a detail that should have raised the alarm. This rereading is a deceptive exercise, because it is carried out knowing the ending.
Knowing what happened, it becomes easy to select the elements that foretold it and ignore those pointing elsewhere. The resulting narrative is coherent, which does not make it accurate.
What beginnings measure badly
Research on initial attraction describes mechanisms that operate in the first minutes or the first weeks: the frequency of encounters, familiarity, similarity of opinions, the context of the meeting. None predicts what follows.
A study conducted in 2020 by Samantha Joel and many colleagues, on more than ten thousand couples, concludes that what is known about people before the relationship explains very little of subsequent satisfaction. Beginnings inform us about attraction, not about the relationship.
Initial intensity
The intensity of the first weeks is often read as a prognosis, one way or the other: proof that this was the right encounter, or the sign of an infatuation that will subside. Elaine Hatfield's work distinguishes passionate love, intense and generally brief, from companionate love, slower and more durable.
What that distinction establishes is that the two do not follow the same curve, not that one foretells the other. A strong initial intensity says nothing about what will replace it, and neither does a moderate one.
What can be observed all the same
Some elements are observable from the start and are not a matter of interpretation. The way the other speaks about their previous relationships. What they do when a disagreement appears, however minor. What they do when they do not get what they want.
These are facts, not omens, and they have the advantage of being verifiable at the time. They predict nothing either, but they describe something more stable than intensity.
The sorting that counts
The usefulness of this distinction is to direct attention to the verifiable rather than the symbolic. A message sent quickly, a present, an early declaration are ambiguous signals, which can be read in every direction.
How someone behaves when things do not go as they wish is a more solid piece of information, and it generally appears early enough to be noted.
Key points
Rereading the beginnings knowing the ending produces a coherent narrative, and not necessarily an accurate one.
The mechanisms of initial attraction do not predict subsequent satisfaction, a result confirmed on very large samples.
What is usefully observed early is not intensity but behaviour in the face of disagreement or frustration.
This article describes documented mechanisms and disagreements. It recommends no position, no party and no vote, and commits to no reading other than that of the work it cites.
And you, where do you stand?
The Civix test situates your convictions on six dimensions and matches you with one of the twelve profiles, without ever telling you what to think.
Start my test