Two volunteer participants of similar educational background, ages 34 and 35 years, were recruited and found to share a long-term, committed, mutual attraction. They identified as male and female, although the female participant admitted to earlier phases of gender identity confusion (College Roommate Road Trip to Lilith Fair Effect). This gender confusion had been resolved for a decade but resurfaced during within-couple altercation interactions as a form of guilt-compliance strategy, creating emotional-power imbalance and threatening the couple domain. The female participant also experienced work-family conflict and dissatisfaction as a result of three key factors. First, financial inequalities enabled the female participant to develop greater income confidence in a chosen profession and to pay the rent/utilities while the male participant sat around flatulating at home in pajamas re-watching episodes of Breaking Bad, ordering takeout Pad Thai on a joint credit card, working on “that brilliant film script” he had obsessed about since college instead of cultivating within-couple salary equity. Second, emotional labor performed in the domestic sphere by the female participant exceeded her intended emotional investment (measured using data from the U.S. Love & Patience Inventory, 2015). The male participant was observed taking advantage of coping systems in the domestic environment, despite hard days at the office when the female participant returned home from the workplace to find no dinner and the male participant still in boxers, brooding, because of losing 2.1% of his Instagram followers, thereby lowering confidence intervals and increasing awareness of his narcissistic tendencies. Finally, stress acceleration accompanied by hormonal cascades (biological clock) of the aging female participant necessitated the acquisition of new pathways toward achieving life satisfaction. These were fostered by repeated, voluntary interventions of a new, gainfully employed male survey recruit to whom she had been randomly introduced at the office of the American Community Survey (ACS). Ensuing clandestine between-person interactions external to the primary couple led to the formation of a new, dual-earner couple system, resulting in positive within-person changes in the female participant’s well-being over time. Statistical data demonstrate robust findings about underlying factors leading to what is known as ‘dumping you’ in the literature.
Keywords:
emotional dissatisfaction, my-mother-warned-me-that-you-were-a-ne’er-do-well, slacker boyfriends, work-family conflict, meeting-someone-else-effect