The Challenge With A Loss of Relationships Explained Through Extinction

 Have you ever been in a relationship whether platonic or romantic and when that relationship ended, you decided to never contact that person again? I have and both times a relationship ended, it became emotionally difficult to avoid avoid talking to them. There were days that I would have believed that I have moved on, and then I would encounter a novel stimulus that would faintly remind me of the relationship, causing the presumably extinguished response of wanting to seek contact to reignite (Stimulus generalization).

Of these two relationships, one took me 3 months to move one while the other took 9 months. The first relationship was a platonic one that took me 3 months to move on. The friendship ended on bad terms and while I wasn't the one in the wrong who destroyed my trust, me being someone who cares deeply about my friendships felt compelled to fix the relationship even though it wasn't my fault for what happened. While the friendship still existed, we experienced continuous reinforcement. When that relationship ended, I was able to move quicker than my other relationship. 

For the other relationship, I was friends with someone who I had liked for 2 years when I was younger. We were coworkers and I was very shy during this time of my life. Intermittently we would have very long and personal conversations, after these conversations ended I found myself thinking about when the next conversation like this will be because they caused me to feel so happy. After 2 years, she ended up getting fired and the moment I felt like I may never see her again I spewed out some kind of word soup influenced by my shy nature that was meant to be me asking her out, and she matched the energy of giving her own word soup saying yes (after me asking 5 friends to ask to translate because I'm not fluent in SpaghettiO's). We dated for a while and eventually she was the one to end it right before my first year at Stockton. It took me until the Fall of the next academic year to be over her because of the intermittent reinforcement I had received, causing a part of me to continue to hope for reinforcement from her again even though I knew better. 

These condensed stories served to represent some of the side effects of extinction. Extinction can take longer to achieve depending on the schedule of reinforcement, and extinction is not permanent as it can reignite whether through spontaneous recovery or stimulus generalization.