A new peer-reviewed study puts hard numbers behind a relationship pattern nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults have lived through: breaking up, getting back together, and sometimes doing it again. The research, published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships by René M. Dailey, Amber Vennum, and J. Kale Monk, tracked more than 1,000 people across four samples to measure what psychologists call “relationship cycling” — and what it costs the people living it. The topic has an unusually public face right now: Kelsea Ballerini and Chase Stokes have gone public, split, and reconciled more than once since confirming their relationship in 2023, without ever staying apart for long.
Key Points
- About two-thirds of adults report at least one on-again/off-again relationship, and at least a quarter say their current or most recent relationship involved a breakup and renewal, according to the study.
- Cyclical couples in the research averaged 1.9 to 2.8 breakup-renewal cycles.
- Partners who cycled reported significantly higher relational stress than those who didn’t — in one sample, cycling status alone explained 12.2% of the difference in stress levels.
- The more times a couple cycled, the higher their stress climbed, a dose-response pattern that held even after researchers controlled for age, gender, and other demographics.
- Cyclical partners were twice as likely to report psychological or physical aggression in the relationship compared with couples who never broke up and got back together.
Why the Stress Compounds
The researchers didn’t set out to explain why couples break up and reconcile — they set out to measure what it does to them once they do. Using four separate datasets and path analysis, they found that relational stress is the mechanism connecting cycling to worse outcomes: couples who cycle experience more chronic stress, and that stress is what predicts the anxiety, irritability, headaches, and physical illness that showed up more often in their self-reports than in stable couples’ reports.
What makes the finding notable is the dose-response piece. The study found stress didn’t plateau after one reconciliation — it kept climbing with each additional cycle, even once demographic differences were accounted for. The researchers frame this through what they call “enduring vulnerabilities”: persistent problematic interaction patterns and unresolved conflict that don’t disappear just because a couple gets back together. The incompatibility that ended things the first time is usually still there the second and third time, which is part of why the stress compounds instead of resetting.
What the Data Doesn’t Say
The study is correlational, and the authors are upfront that it can’t establish which came first — the stress or the instability — and it didn’t track who initiated each breakup or reconciliation. The samples also skewed white and heterosexual, and the underlying survey data predate the analysis by more than a decade, though the model and publication are new. The authors are calling for longitudinal research that tracks couples through their cycles in real time rather than relying on retrospective reports.
None of that changes the headline number: for a pattern this common, the research suggests getting back together isn’t a neutral reset button. Each cycle appears to leave something behind.
