Getting Back With Your Ex: Can It Work?
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So, can on-again-off-again relationships ever be successful? Or is getting back with your ex hopeless? There is actually some data available about this. And it isn’t exactly promising for anyone considering taking back the ex. Still, sometimes, that rare couple can make it work. Here’s what we know about exes getting back together – why it happens, does it work, and why it works when it does.
Statistics On Getting Back With An Ex
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Many analysts, therapists and researchers have studied the phenomena of the on-again-off-again relationship. Here are some of the important findings:
- There’s a (nearly) 50/50 chance it works. Ex Back Permanently conducted a survey of over 3,000 individuals who’d broken up with an ex and wanted to get them back. Of those who did get back with their ex, about half of them broke up again.
- It probably won’t be a great relationship. According to research from the American Psychological Association, people who get back with an ex are less likely to report positive relationship traits (love, trust, understanding) and more likely to support negative experiences (like communication issues and uncertainty).
- Your chances are better if you’re older. The Ex Back Permanently survey also found that people over the age of 50 had much better success rates when getting back with and staying with an ex compared to younger individuals. Chalk it up to knowing who you are and what you want – and being better at communicating that.
- Self–improvement is key. Here’s another critical piece of the puzzle: of all the factors that could contribute to relationship success in getting back with an ex, self-improvement is the most powerful. (Which would explain why being older correlates with more relationship success with an ex). Time apart and no contact were the next two top factors, which shows that taking some real time to reflect is important.
The Top Reasons Couples Get Back Together
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So now we know how often couples get back together and how successful they are. Now let’s look at the most common reasons couples get back together. One study reported in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found several top reasons people choose to stay in relationships that aren’t going well, or return to relationships that didn’t work out:
- Sunken cost theory. You see this in financial investing and people do it with romantic investments, too. Sunken cost theory is the idea that people will stay in something that isn’t going well because they’ve already put so much into it. In the cited study, many people stayed in bad relationships or returned to them because they’d already dedicated a lot of time to them, and already introduced that partner to their friends and family.
- A hope for change. Another top stated reason people gave for going back to an ex was the hope that their partner would improve. This hope existed even when their partner had made no such promise to improve.
- Codependency. Finally, a common reason people stay in a bad relationship or return to an ex is the dependency they’ve developed on that person and the fear of losing that intimacy in their lives.
The research is a combination of hopeful and…depressing. But, if you pay attention, there is a lot of actionable data in there. It appears that the couples with the greatest chance of staying together after breaking up and getting back together had some things in common. Some themes that show up throughout the research include: self-reflection, self-improvement and communication.
If you want to get back with your ex and believe the relationship has potential, be ready to put in some work. Be real with yourself about how you could do things differently next time. Have an open conversation with your partner in which a plan of action will be discussed. You should both go into this with open eyes about what went wrong last time, and how you’ll remedy that moving forward.
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