Case Study 02 — Amara: The Relationship She Won't Leave

Chapter 4 Application: Cognitive Biases

Background

Before Yusuf, before the nonprofit, before the city she moved to after college, there was Marcus.

Marcus and Amara dated for two and a half years in college. It was, by most measures, not a good relationship. Marcus was charming and inconsistent — warm when he wanted something, cold when he did not. Amara spent a lot of the relationship feeling confused, trying to read him, adjusting herself to stabilize his moods.

She ended it, finally, in the spring of her senior year. But she spent the six months following doing something she recognized was unhealthy: monitoring his social media, analyzing his posts for signs that he was struggling without her, and having extended internal conversations about whether she had made a mistake.

This is the case study of the six months after, and the cognitive biases that made it hard to let go.

The Biases in Operation

Sunk Cost Fallacy (central)

Two and a half years. That is the sunk cost.

When Amara thought about what she had invested — the time, the emotional labor, the compromises she had made with her own standards, the hope she had maintained against mounting evidence — the calculation kept presenting as: That much in, how do I just walk away?

The rational answer, which she knew intellectually, was that none of that investment was recoverable. The question was only: what is the expected future value of continuing vs. ending? And she had ended it, which was correct.

But the sunk cost kept pulling her back. Not to the relationship, exactly, but to the question of whether she had made a mistake. The sunk cost made the breakup feel like a loss — and loss aversion made that loss feel more urgent than the expected gain of emotional freedom.

Availability Heuristic and Selective Memory

When Amara's mind returned to Marcus during those six months, it did not return to an accurate distribution of experiences.

It returned to the best ones: the weekend they drove to the coast; the time he stayed up with her during finals; the way he laughed at something she said, genuinely, like she was the funniest person he'd ever met.

The difficult memories — the months of managing his mood, the things he said that she still had not entirely processed, the feeling of being reduced — were available, but they required deliberate effort to access. The good memories came easily.

The availability heuristic operates on emotional memory as surely as it operates on statistical estimation. What is vivid and accessible shapes our sense of reality. Amara's sense of what the relationship had been was weighted toward the vivid highlights, not the statistical distribution of experience.

Confirmation Bias in the Post-Relationship Audit

Amara spent time analyzing Marcus's social media for signs that he was struggling. She was not wrong that he posted things that could be read that way. But she was also not noticing the things that suggested he was fine — the parties, the new people, the travel.

She was running confirmation for the narrative: He is not okay without me. Which means I mattered. Which means the relationship mattered. Which means it was not a waste.

That narrative served a function. It protected her from the more painful alternative: that he had moved on comfortably, that the relationship had not meant to him what it had meant to her, that the sunk cost had indeed been wasted.

The False Reference Point

In prospect theory terms, Amara was evaluating her current freedom and her future possibilities against a reference point — the relationship — that no longer existed. Every experience that might have been exciting (the new city, the new job, Yusuf's interest) was being evaluated against the absence of Marcus, which framed it as a gain-from-loss rather than a genuine new beginning.

The reference point was keeping her stuck in the frame of the breakup rather than allowing her to reset.

What Helped

Amara had two conversations during those six months that mattered.

The first was with Kemi, who said something direct but not unkind: "You're spending a lot of energy thinking about someone who took a lot and gave inconsistently. What does that suggest about where your energy is going?"

The second was when Amara, in a journaling session, did the consider-the-opposite exercise without knowing that's what it was. She was listing, again, the reasons the relationship might have been salvageable. Then she forced herself to list the reasons it wasn't. The second list was longer, and more specific, and harder to refute.

She did not stop thinking about Marcus overnight. The sunk cost and the availability bias did not dissolve with intellectual insight. But she began to hold the thoughts differently — to notice them as the products of identifiable cognitive processes rather than as truths about the relationship or about herself.

That shift — from "my thoughts about Marcus are accurate" to "my thoughts about Marcus are partly biased constructions" — created small but real loosening.

Discussion Questions

1. Amara knows, intellectually, that the sunk cost should not affect her decision about the future. Yet it does. What does this tell us about the limits of intellectual knowledge as a driver of emotional processing? What would it take for the intellectual understanding to actually change the emotional pull?

2. Amara's memory of the relationship is positively biased — vivid highlights; effortful access to the difficult experiences. This is a known feature of autobiographical memory. Does this tell us anything useful about how to evaluate whether a relationship or situation was actually good for us?

3. The confirmation bias Amara is running — seeking evidence that Marcus is struggling — serves a psychological function (protecting her from a painful alternative). Is it always right to disrupt a protective cognitive process? What is the cost of the protection, and how should that be weighed?

4. Kemi's observation ("a lot of energy toward someone who gave inconsistently") functions as a kind of external review — a perspective unclouded by Amara's investment and motivated reasoning. What makes external review effective in some contexts and ineffective in others? What would have made this intervention fail?