Reasons For Breaking Up

The end of love culture is a profound social culture.As the last process of the practice of breaking up,the given reason of breaking up has rich sociological significance.According to the "cultural toolbox" theory,culture is not used as a value to guide people’s choices,but as a "toolbox" to provide action strategies for actors.Based on the theory of "cultural toolbox",this study intends to use the research methods of semi-structured interview and discourse analysis to conduct in-depth interviews with people who have broken up with each other.The main research results include:First of all,the types of common reasons people give in everyday life that Charles Tilly gives in Why also apply to the process of giving reasons for breaking up.Based on this,the author makes a typology construction of the reasons for breaking up,and divides the specific reasons for breaking up into three given types: convention,criterion and story.In the practice of giving the reasons for breaking up,convention is often reflected as the reason that the other party is hard to refutable and both parties feel helpless.Meanwhile,convention is also the most common and simplest way of giving the reasons for breaking up.While these reasons may seem unexpected,outlandish,or even a simple sentence or two,they fit in with the common perception of the relationship;Norms,like conventions,do not provide adequate causal explanations and are intended only to allow the other party to identify the objective reasons behind the end of the relationship;A story is a narrative with a causal explanation.Storytelling is a form of conscious decision making,so it has a narrative structure.Actors usually try to explain their own decisions or those of the other party in retrospect.Secondly,this study analyzes the phenomenon of people’s reasons for breaking up at the end of romantic relationships with the help of the "cultural toolbox" theory,and finds that the given process of breaking up reasons is actually a compilation process of actors’ cultural significance to the reasons,which is exactly in line with the internal and external cultural resources from the perspective of the "cultural toolbox".In the breakup practice,People often use two cultural levels to justify the behavior of giving reasons for breaking up.The first level is from the inside out culture,which interprets the meaning of breaking up mainly through three dimensions: the supremacy of individual value,the rationalization of emotional view and the prudence of emotional expression and experience.The second aspect is embodied in the culture from the outside in.Structural factors such as the uncertainty of romantic love,the arrangement of cultural institutional system and the noise of consumerism trend of thought become the important sources of constructing the meaning of breaking up discourse for those given the reason for breaking up.