Getting Back With Your Ex: Can It Work?
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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