Kelsea Ballerini and Chase Stokes have broken up for a third time in less than a year, according to NBC News. The two first split in September 2025 after nearly three years together, reconciled within a few months, broke up again just weeks later, got back together a second time, and have now parted ways again.
The back-and-forth has made headlines with every turn, but the pattern itself is not rare, and it is not new to relationship science. Researchers have been studying it for more than a decade under a specific name: relationship cycling.
A 2026 study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, led by communication researcher René Dailey alongside Kansas State University’s Amber Vennum and the University of Missouri’s J. Kale Monk, found that roughly two-thirds of adults have been in a relationship that broke up and got back together at least once. At least a quarter say their current or most recent relationship has that exact history — a breakup followed by a renewal. Measured against that baseline, the on-again, off-again dynamic playing out in public between two celebrities is closer to statistically ordinary than it might look from the outside.
That does not mean the pattern is harmless. The same study found that partners in cyclical relationships report significantly more relational stress than people in stable, uninterrupted ones, and that the stress carries measurable costs — more psychological symptoms, more strain on physical health. Critically, the researchers found the effect is cumulative: the more breakup-renewal cycles a couple goes through, the more the stress and its downstream symptoms compound. A third split is not simply a repeat of the first one. It tends to land harder.
Vennum has spent much of her career at Kansas State University’s Institute for the Study of Couple and Family Relationships studying this exact dynamic, including how cycling before marriage shapes a couple’s odds once they do commit. Her broader body of work, echoed across the field, does not treat an on-off history as an automatic red flag. Plenty of couples cycle once or twice while sorting out a real incompatibility or working through a rough patch, and some come out the other side stronger for it. What researchers watch for instead is whether anything about how a couple fights, communicates, or handles the thing that split them up actually changes between rounds. A breakup that repeats the same unresolved argument is a different animal than one that leads somewhere new.
Neither Ballerini nor Stokes has addressed this latest split in a first-party statement, and nothing here should be read as confirming what caused it. What the research does offer is context: the “will they, won’t they” arc following two public figures is a heightened, closely watched version of something a large share of ordinary couples live through privately, usually without headlines attached to every step.
