Why we go back to exes, and when going back is a pattern rather than love

The third time in two years. The first time they split up in the summer and were back together by autumn. The second time in February, and by April he was sleeping at home again. Now it is September and she is sitting on the sofa again with her phone in her hand, wondering whether to reply to that message that began with “just so I know you’re all right”.

If you recognise yourself in this, you are not unusual and you are not weak. On-again, off-again relationships — the ones that end and begin several times with the same person — are one of the most widespread and least discussed forms of relationship. American studies among young adults suggest that roughly half or more of those surveyed had experienced getting back together with a former partner; among couples who live together or are married, about a third had been through a break-up and a reunion.

So the question is not whether this is normal. The question is a different one: when is going back a decision that builds something, and when is it just the next lap of the same circuit. In this piece I write about what pulls us towards an ex, what the cycle does to a relationship and to us over time, the concrete signs that distinguish the two — and how to break the cycle if it keeps repeating.

Going back is more common than we think

The researcher René Dailey and colleagues (2009) systematically studied on-again, off-again relationships and compared them with relationships without such interruptions. The findings were consistent: couples in cyclical relationships reported lower satisfaction, poorer communication, less trust and — most importantly — considerably more uncertainty about the future of the relationship. Not less love. Less certainty.

That distinction is worth holding on to, because it explains why people in cyclical relationships often defend themselves with the argument “but we love each other very much”. Very probably true. A cyclical dynamic doesn’t mean an absence of feeling; it means the absence of a structure in which those feelings could hold.

Later research sharpened the picture further. Sarah Halpern-Meekin and colleagues (2013) showed that relationships with repeated break-ups and reunions are more often associated with conflict, and with verbal and physical violence, than stable relationships are. Amber Vennum and colleagues (2014) found that among couples living together or married, those with break-ups and reunions reported more uncertainty and lower satisfaction — and that the pattern often carries forward: someone who has been in a cyclical relationship once is more likely to be in one again, even with a different partner.

That last finding is key to understanding this. The cycle, then, is not a property of one relationship, but often a pattern a person carries with them.

Why we are pulled back

Going back to an ex is not a lack of character. Behind it stand six entirely understandable forces working at once.

• Attachment. Over the course of the relationship your partner became what attachment theory calls a secure base — the person whose presence settles your nervous system. When they are gone, the body doesn’t register freedom, it registers threat. This is not a metaphor: studies of brain activity in people who have just been rejected in love (Fisher et al., 2010) showed activation in regions linked to reward and craving — similar to those that respond in substance withdrawal. More on this mechanism in the piece on an ex-partner and the brain.
• The familiar is safer than the unknown. Even when the familiar hurts. The human brain rates the predictable as less risky — and an ex-partner is highly predictable, including in how they will let you down.
• Loneliness. The most honest reason and the hardest to admit. Many a reunion happens on a Sunday evening, not after careful reflection.
• Hope for a changed partner. Not the one who exists, but the one who could exist — and who, in the period after a break-up, often really does appear for a few weeks.
• Practical reasons. The flat, money, the dog you share, mutual friends, embarrassment in front of other people. These reasons are real, but dangerous, because we mistake them for feelings.
• Children. The most honourable and the most complicated reason. I write about what the research says on staying for the children in the piece separation is not a defeat.

And there is one more thing: people with a history of insecure attachment in childhood are more susceptible to cyclicality. For an anxiously attached person a partner’s departure is so unbearable that going back becomes the only route to peace; for an avoidant one, closeness is unbearable until the partner leaves — and only then does it become appealing. Together they make up the most classic cycle of “I can’t be with you, I can’t be without you”. More on these patterns in the piece on attachment.

What the circuit looks like from inside

The cycle has a surprisingly constant shape. Almost anyone who has been round it once will recognise it:

First comes the break-up, often in the heat of the moment, after an argument or after the drop that overflowed the glass. Then a few days of relief — calm, sleep, a sense that the decision was right. Then, usually in the second or third week, comes loneliness and with it idealising: memory erases the arguments and keeps the holidays, the laughter, his hand on your shoulder. Next comes the first contact, almost always under an innocent pretext — things to return, a photo to send, advice to ask for. Out of the contact comes the reunion, as a rule without a single concrete agreement about what will be different. And within a few weeks the same pattern appears — because nothing has changed except the distance.

Why does it repeat, even though both people know how it ends? Because every lap delivers a powerful moment of relief on returning. That moment is so emotionally intense that it acts as a reward — and unpredictable, intermittent rewards are, in the psychology of learning, the most stubborn way of entrenching a behaviour. That is why cyclical relationships are often not the happiest, but can be among the most tenacious.

What the cycle does to a person

Most of the discussion of cyclical relationships takes the relationship’s point of view. Much less is said about what each lap costs the person walking it.

Self-trust. Every return that a person privately condemns leaves the same thought: “I have no backbone.” Over time that grows into a belief about yourself that migrates elsewhere — into work, into friendships, into decisions. It isn’t true that you have no backbone; what is true is that you are in a relationship that rewards unpredictably, which is the hardest possible schedule for a human being.

The body. The cycle means repeated stress with no resolution: each time a new break-up, each time a new activation. The nervous system never manages to settle between laps — it is often precisely these people who say they have slept badly for a year or two, that they are irritable and cannot concentrate. I’ve described what a separation does to the body in the piece divorce and the nervous system.

The people around you. After the third lap, friends stop asking. Not because they don’t care, but because they no longer know how to respond — and because they are afraid that what they said about him will have to be explained to him a month later. The result is loneliness at exactly the moment when support is most needed.

Time. The quietest price of all. The cycle eats years, not months, and for all that time a person is trapped in the same question. Many people only notice in retrospect, in therapy, how many other decisions they postponed during it — moving house, children, a career change — because they were waiting for this thing to resolve.

None of this is a reason for self-reproach. It is a reason to take the question more seriously than “let’s see how it goes”.

When going back genuinely has a foundation

I am certainly not claiming that every reunion is a mistake. I know relationships that genuinely rebuilt themselves after an interruption — and in them something very concrete happened. Going back has a foundation when roughly these conditions are met:

• The cause and each person’s share are known. Not “we grew apart”, but concretely: what each of you did that was breaking the relationship. If one or both of you cannot say that in three sentences, nothing has changed.
• The change is visible in behaviour, not in promises. Not “I won’t drink any more” — but “I’ve been going to meetings for four months and I’m not drinking”. Not “I’ll listen to you more” — but “I’m in therapy and here is what I’ve worked out about myself”.
• The change lasted long enough without you. Behaviour that appears only once you leave and vanishes once you return is not change, it is a response to the fear of loss. A reliable measure is a few months, not a few weeks.
• There was no violence or control. With these patterns, going back is at its most dangerous; periods of calm and remorse are part of the pattern itself, not an exception to it.
• You both want the same relationship back. Not one of you a relationship and the other some peace. Not one of you a partnership and the other a family. You test this by asking what each of you concretely pictures a year from now.
• Going back isn’t a solution to something else. To loneliness, to money, to embarrassment, to a sense of failure. If at least half the motivation lies there, this is a practical decision — and that is allowed, but it should be made with your eyes open.

And one measure that is more emotional than logical, but proves reliable: if the thought of going back is dominated by relief that the discomfort will end, that is flight. If it is dominated by a calm gladness that is still there the next morning, it is probably a decision.

A checklist before going back

I suggest that before you answer that message, you answer six questions — in writing, not in your head:

• What concretely was unbearable for me in this relationship? (Write down three things.)
• Which of those three is different today, and how do I know — by what action, not by what promise?
• What was my share in it, and what have I done about that since last time?
• If there were no loneliness, no flat and no opinions from other people — would I choose him again?
• What concretely are we going to do differently, and when will we check whether it is holding?
• What will it mean if in three months nothing is different? (Write down what you will do then.)

The last question is the most important and the most neglected. Going back without a limit set in advance is going back with no way out — and that is exactly the kind that most often ends in the next lap.

How to break the cycle if it keeps repeating

If you have been round the circuit two or three times already, sheer resolve usually isn’t enough. What helps:

• Set a period of no contact and define it in advance. Not forever — for a set time, three months for example. A defined end is psychologically far easier to sustain than “never again”. If you have children, no contact isn’t possible; then the rule is to limit contact to the parental (I write about how in the piece on co-parenting).
• Remove the triggers. Hide the profiles, don’t read old messages, put the photos in a folder you don’t open. Every look is a small renewed contact that resets the counter.
• Make a list to read at three in the morning. Write down what it was like in the worst weeks, as concretely as you can. Idealising is stronger than memory — you need it written, because memory cannot be trusted in this period.
• Name what you get out of the cycle. Every pattern gives something: the feeling of being chosen; validation; the calm after the battle. Until you know what it is, you will keep seeking it without noticing.
• Examine the pattern, not just the relationship. If something similar happened before, with other people, that is the strongest argument that the question isn’t “is it him” — the question is what leads me into this dynamic. That is work most easily done in therapy.
• Don’t fill the emptiness straight away with someone new. I write about how long it makes sense to wait and what we bring with us into the next relationship in the piece on a new relationship after divorce.

When it isn’t a decision but a pattern

In the therapy room, cyclical relationships almost never present as the question “should I go back”. They present as exhaustion. Someone comes because they cannot face a third lap, and we discover that the question isn’t about the partner at all — but about how unbearable a particular kind of emptiness is for them and what they are prepared to accept in order not to feel it.

And that is exactly the work that actually breaks the cycle: not convincing yourself that your ex is a bad person, but understanding what it is in you that ignites the force pulling you back each time. For one person it is the fear of being alone, for another the conviction that they must rescue the relationship, for a third a story from their family of origin in which love was always uncertain and always conditional.

If it feels as though you have been in this circuit too long, support through separation is meant for this too — not only for final break-ups, but also for the ones that never quite reach an ending. Sometimes what is most useful is a space where you can think both possibilities through out loud, without anyone arguing you into either. I’ve described what such support looks like in the piece on therapy through separation, and we can arrange something through the contact page.

And if you do decide to go back — which is entirely legitimate — let it be a decision, not an escape. The difference between them is simple and can be checked: a decision has a name, a date and an agreement. An escape has only a message sent at eleven at night.