I, the Dove in Love
Skinner’s experiments with pigeons on the impact of intermittent reinforcement helped me understand how someone like me can live on crumbs of love.
Whenever I reflect on my life, I tend to feel proud of the relationships that have withstood the test of time. There are few of them, but they’re enough to ease that sense of impermanence that plagues the soul.
Uma mulher recolhe migalhas pela fresta da porta (by chatGPT)
I’m the kind of person who goes through life as if moving through the hold of a ship: when a period ends, I say goodbye to it and seal the door, creating yet another watertight compartment. It seems a bit drastic, doesn’t it? I agree with you. But what can I do? It must be trauma!
I’d rather not lose myself in reminiscences, nor cry over memories of a past that will never return. I think it’s better to look to the future and see what possibilities life brings me.
Despite this, when I returned to my hometown after retirement, I sought out some old friends from my school days, with whom I hadn’t been in touch for many years. But the glue of the affinities that bound us had dried up. The unstoppable march of life had wrought profound changes in us. The few relationships I maintained were with people whose life stories resembled my own.
Among these people, one stands out: an ex-boyfriend.
I spent a long time not understanding why. After all, he was a terrible boyfriend. While others—much better ones—fell by the wayside, he stayed in touch, and we became friends. This was despite countless disappointments and a few sordid stories that are best left untold.
But whenever people asked me how we’d managed to stay friends after breaking up, I’d respond with the air of a “relationship influencer”:
— How can you ever truly part ways with someone with whom you’ve shared so much affection and intimacy?
However, while scrolling through Instagram this morning, I came across a description of experiments with pigeons and immediately recognized myself in it.
In Skinner’s studies on reinforcement, pigeons learned to peck a button to receive food. When they received food with every peck, they tended to give up more quickly once the rewards stopped. On the other hand, those that had been rewarded only on a few attempts could keep pecking for much longer, even when the food stopped appearing.
Accustomed to not always receiving a reward, they persisted despite their failed attempts.
Have I finally understood why I spent so much time in this dead-end situation? Conditioned, just like a pigeon, waiting for crumbs of love...
And here I was, thinking I was so good at closing doors! All it took was for him to toss a crumb every now and then for me to keep leaving a door ajar.
May Lygia Telles forgive me for partially borrowing the title of one of her short stories! To make amends, here’s the link to the YouTube video where Julia Lemmertz reads her short story “Pomba Enamorada.” Enjoy!
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