Getting back together…again
By Kristin Turney & Sarah Halpern-Meekin
Depending on your generation, you have your own quintessential examples of relationship churning. Gen Xers asked whether Friends’ Ross and Rachel were really on a break. Millennials sang along to Taylor Swift’s “We are never, ever getting back together” and parsed whether Khloe Kardashian had gotten back together with Tristan Thompson (she did, but they broke up again). Yet, research on romantic relationships all-too-often treats couples as easily categorized as together or separated. This ignores what we all know from real life and the headlines of People magazine. There’s a reason Facebook offers the relationship status option “It’s complicated.”
Our research explores the frequency, characteristics, and associated family dynamics of relationship churning—that is, having an on-again/off-again relationship. We find that, among young adults, nearly half report having broken up and gotten back together with a partner in their current or most recent relationship, with an average of 2.5 churning episodes in the relationship. We also find churning doesn’t just occur among young people who are dating. We have learned that churning can happen in dating, cohabiting, and marital relationships, and that partners do not always agree that they had broken up and gotten back together (that was Ross and Rachel’s whole problem!). Our analysis of new parents shows that although more than 40% of couples were in stable romantic relationships by their child’s fifth birthday, about one in six couples endured at least one churning episode.
One might hope that getting back together after a breakup would signal a positive union moving forward, research shows this is not often the case. Those in churning relationships report high levels of psychological distress, low relationship satisfaction, low commitment, communication challenges, and conflict. We find that mothers in churning relationships, compared to their counterparts in stably together relationships, have worse mental health outcomes (such as depression or heavy drinking) over time. We checked to see whether mental health challenges preceded or followed churning—that is, did mental health issues seem to be rocking the partnership, or was the relationship churning before mental health symptoms appeared? We found evidence that relationship churning came first, then the mental health challenges followed. However, churners also report higher levels of what researchers term “intimate self-disclosure,” that is, vulnerably sharing your thoughts and feelings with one another—a possible hint about what might motivate exes to reunite.
Among parents, we find that fathers in churning relationships are more involved with their children than are fathers when parents stably broke up (i.e., broke up without churning). However, those in churning relationships report higher levels of parenting stress—feeling overwhelmed by the tasks of parenting—than do stably together or stably broken-up parents. These differences hold even after controlling for a wide array of individual and family characteristics, suggesting the possibility that churning might shape parenting engagement and experiences.
We also explored the possibility that these features of parents’ romantic relationships could be associated with differences in children’s outcomes, like their internalizing (e.g., anxiety) and externalizing (e.g., acting out), as well as their romantic relationship behaviors in adolescence. However, once we control for demographic and economic characteristics, differences in children’s outcomes generally disappear. That means that it is not parental churning, but instead demographic and economic characteristics associated with parental churning, that explain their outcomes.
Structural factors put couples at risk for experiencing churning. For example, we see higher rates of churning among those facing economic distress, a partner’s incarceration, a less stable relationship history among their own parents, or the strains of systemic racism and discrimination. This is a reminder of how relationship outcomes are more than the product of the two individuals in it—a context of stressors buffets relationships, with some relationships more likely to have to struggle against stressors due to inequities in opportunities, resources, and treatment by government and social institutions.
So, on Valentine’s Day, let’s remember that churning relationships happen often. Don’t bad-mouth a friend’s ex—that could be their future partner, too! If you’re in a churning relationship, remember to decide, not slide—it can be easy to fall back into old patterns, so make sure you’re consciously choosing how you want to move forward in a partnership (or not!). Love and attachment don’t always permanently end when a breakup happens. In addition to fueling sitcom storylines, pop songs, and celebrity gossip, we need to be aware that churning is a common and distinct form of relationship instability.
Article Details
Romantic Unions and Mental Health: The Role of Relationship Churning
Sarah Halpern-Meekin and Kristin Turney
First Published Online October 19, 2022
DOI: 10.1177/00221465221126091
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
About the Authors
