Long-term relationships inevitably must end, as was ironically pointed out in the television show, Shrinking. Jimmy, played by Jason Segal, is reluctant to enter a new relationship after the death of his wife, ,due to this very fact.

Loss is indeed a part of life and an inevitable feature of relationships. Fortunately, Jimmy was able to set his fears aside, and we see him starting to date again. However, viewers never get the sense that he’s thrust aside his feelings for his deceased partner.

The Old and New Views of Loss

In a new paper, University of Haifa’s Simon Rubin and colleagues (2026) apply principles of attachment theory to a new understanding of the psychology of loss. To appreciate their approach, it’s necessary to take a step back and see how this new view differs from the predominant view in psychology held for many decades.

The old view, known as the “detachment” view of bereavement, was based on Freud’s idea that people who lost someone close to them needed to withdraw their emotional investment from the deceased. As applied to married people, this meant that despite having spent years or decades together, healthy adaptation required the widowed individual to accept reality and end the emotional connection. In the words of the authors, this “effectively pathologized” people who held onto their memories and feelings toward their departed spouse.

Enter in the “new view,” with a counterproposal based on attachment theory—that people never can, much less do, excise the partner from their hearts or minds. Attachment theory is an approach to understanding personality that emphasizes the bonds between individuals and those close to them. The very core of the self, this theory proposes, is based on mental representations of those close others. As suggested by the University of Haifa authors, people eventually do adjust to the reality of life without the deceased, while still retaining their emotional connection.

Relationships End, but the Bonds Remain

The continuing bonds between the surviving spouse and the deceased take the form of “mental representations and emotional connections” that “remain viable and accessible after death” (p. 2288). You have thoughts and feelings toward the living, and there’s no reason for them to end after death.

In many ways, Simon et al. suggest, the ending of a relationship through divorce is radically different than through loss, for perhaps obvious reasons. The partner is still there to have an emotional (and maybe not so good) relationship with, especially if there are children or financial ties between them that require the parties to interact.

Further, the ending of a relationship through divorce occurs because the dyad can no longer continue to exist as such. In the loss of a spouse through death, the sense of how well or poorly the dyad functioned recedes into memory.

Another key difference is that divorce comes about through a gradual process in which the dyad gradually falls apart. Longstanding marital couples, even the happiest ones, also evolve gradually from courtship to companionship. When one spouse dies, this all comes to a head; turbulent feelings erupt that “activate” a “matrix of memories, emotions, and representations of the other, of the marital dyad, and of the self” (p. 2292). They represent a mixture of the positive feelings of closeness (which produces longing) and the negative associated with knowledge that one is now alone.

Moving onto Two Tracks

Putting the ideas together into a cohesive model, the Haifa authors suggest the value of looking at the ending of a relationship as a two-track model (TTMB, with “B” standing for “bereavement”). Track number one refers to the biopsychosocial changes that take place in the bereaved individual. As a major stressor, bereavement affects all aspects of an individual’s functioning.

Track two incorporates the continuing bonds with the deceased partner as well as the “death story,” meaning the individual’s recollection of how the death occurred. In Jimmy’s case from Shrinking, this story was the death of his wife at the hands of an alcoholically-impaired driver. The story became an important feature of Jimmy’s reaction, because the unfairness of it all plus the suddenness of the loss is one he continues to replay. Clinically, Rubin et al. suggest, this process can have value as bereaved individuals explore the narrative of their spouse’s death.

Relationships Essential Reads

From the continuing-bonds perspective, which might also be true in divorce as well as death, the TTMB replaces the very unhelpful and probably untrue “old view” of bereavement. Whether it pertains to you or to someone you know, this means that you recognize and accept the fact that people who are close to you create indelible marks on who you are as a person.

Even if you’ve not lost a close romantic partner, you may have experienced the death of a parent or other relative whose memory you still carry with you. It’s also quite likely that you still have some of their possessions, and that would be fine according to the attachment theory perspective. You clearly can’t hold onto everything they ever owned, but it can be therapeutic to keep those that have particular meaning.

To sum up, emotional ties do remain when relationship bonds are broken. By appreciating this idea, you’ll be able to derive comfort from your memories while you continue to move onto your next steps in the future.