Getting back together with an ex isn’t the exception in modern relationships — it’s closer to the rule. Roughly two-thirds of people have been in what researchers call an “on-again, off-again” relationship at some point, and those relationships typically go through two to three renewals, on average, before they end for good, according to research compiled by communication scholar René M. Dailey in the Cambridge University Press volume “On-Again, Off-Again Relationships.” Far from a modern dating-app quirk, cycling in and out of the same relationship shows up across college students, working adults, and every group researchers have studied — which raises the question of what’s actually happening in a relationship that keeps ending and starting again.
Two to Three Renewals, on Average, Before It’s Really Over
Dailey’s synthesis of the research field found that on-off relationships aren’t necessarily shorter or lower-quality than relationships that never break up — cyclical relationships tend to last just as long, or longer, than ones that never cycle at all. About half of all reconciliations are mutual rather than one partner talking the other back in, even though the breakups themselves are usually initiated by a single person. Few sex or sexual-orientation differences have shown up in this pattern so far, according to the same research. What seems to distinguish couples who eventually make it from couples who cycle indefinitely often comes down to whether each “off again” period actually resolves the problem that caused it, or simply pauses it until it resurfaces.
A Closer Look at Why Some Couples Keep Cycling
A study of 299 people currently or previously in on-off relationships, led by Dailey along with Borae Jin, Nicholas Brody, and Andrea McCracken, found that the couples who fared best were the ones whose relationship was trending upward overall — more attraction, more investment, fewer unresolved issues — even if they had broken up and reconciled before, according to the study published in Interpersona: An International Journal on Personal Relationships. Couples whose relationship mixed genuine improvement with lingering negativity had a harder time: they were more likely to describe waning interest and more difficulty negotiating the breakup-and-renewal cycle itself, even in the moments when parts of the relationship were visibly getting better.
Not every instance of cycling is harmless, either. Research from University of Missouri professor Kale Monk found that more than 40% of young adults are currently in a relationship with someone they’ve broken up with before, and that on-off relationships are linked to lower relationship satisfaction, weaker communication, less commitment, and a higher rate of intimate partner violence, along with more symptoms of depression and anxiety, according to the University of Missouri’s summary of his work. Monk has pointed out that movies and television tend to romanticize the reunion, which can make going back to an ex feel like a happy ending in the moment, even when the underlying issue that caused the breakup was never actually addressed.
What the Cycling Itself Might Be Telling You
Put the research together and a near-breakup starts to look less like a red flag by itself and more like a piece of information. A couple who breaks up over a specific, fixable problem and comes back together only once that problem has actually been dealt with looks, statistically, a lot like couples who never broke up at all. A couple who breaks up and reconciles again and again without much changing in between looks like the pattern Monk’s research flags as genuinely risky, both for the relationship and for each partner’s wellbeing.
None of the data suggests there’s a magic number of near-breakups after which a couple is doomed, or a number below which they’re automatically fine — two or three renewals, per Dailey’s research, is simply the average, not a ceiling or a floor. What the research does suggest is that the more useful question isn’t how many times you’ve broken up, but what was different the last time you got back together. A relationship that keeps circling the same unresolved issue is telling you something different than one where each return genuinely resolved what drove the split — even if, from the outside, both couples would show up in survey data as “on-again, off-again” in exactly the same way.
It’s also worth remembering that the research pulls from a wide range of relationship stages, from college dating to long-term partnerships, so your own history of near-breakups won’t map perfectly onto any single number. What tends to hold across the studies is the underlying logic: reconciliation itself isn’t the problem, and neither is having broken up before. The relationships that struggle are the ones where the same fight keeps happening in slightly different clothes, breakup after breakup, without either partner changing what they’re willing to do differently.
