Lecture 2: Seeking love after divorce

I found Dr. Miller-Otts lecture this week very interesting because for once I could relate from a more personal level as many of my classmates could as well. After hearing the title of the lecture I was honestly expecting a very dry technical presentation of numbers and rough correlations, but instead I was treated to the most enthusiastic of lecturers and a relateable presentation where her research was very well thought out and presented from the human aspect. Several things from this presentation interested me to a fairly good degree, granted I have little to no experience with "social" research but the view points that she presented on her topic were very well put and opened up her ideas to further consideration. The key point that stuck out to me the most was the concept of selective disclosure between former spouses, here you have two people who have spent a considerable amount of time working up the courage to feel comfortable enough to tell one another everything and then that all is cut off very abruptly. The expected issues that would result from this are perhaps feelings of abandonment coupled with vulnerability due to information that you can't take back and followed up with little to no further disclosure. For example during my own parents divorce watching one try to communicate with other was literally like watching a dentist trying to pull teeth  from a patient with lockjaw, and even after it was finalized the amount of information that they were willing to disclose to each other bordered on what you would feel open enough telling the barista at your local Starbucks and what you might chat about with your gas station attendant. Now all of this being said I am not trying to generalize that all former spouses display this level of control over their right to disclose information but I did find that part of her research quite true to life. Social disclosure is something we all deal with regardless of being married at one point in your life, after all this is how we bond with people on a basic level and form meaningful relationships and we have all felt the consequences of learning the levels of appropriate versus inappropriate disclosure the hard way. Putting this all into perspective in terms of my own life makes me wonder how the different forms of love relate to the level of disclosure, considering that the amount of love could hypothetically relate to a "number" level of disclosure and the same could be said for a negative number, or the backlash of what occurs when the love is replaced by hate. On a conceptual level the amount of disclosure the average person is willing to commit to in any given relationship could be associated with a certain magnitude of love where the amount of actual affectionate love would be indicated on the positive side of the scale and the amount of disdain and hate would be on the negative side of the scale with complete indifference falling in the middle at a zero. While there is no true way to measure this kind of thing due to the subjectivity of its nature Dr.Miller-Ott went about her research in a similar fashion; doing the best to narrow down the core feelings of the participants to single out common occurrences in all of them. I guess it would be safe to say that I thoroughly enjoyed her lecture because we had not really had the chance to touch on what happens after love that doesn't end in some tragic suicide.