Why Our Attachment to Ex-Partners Lingers for Years

Romantic relationships are intimate. Partners share their secrets, worries, and hopes. They care for each other, build memories, and get to know each others' friends and family. They sleep together, cry together, buy couches and adopt puppies together. They also break up.

Breakups can be deeply distressing, even if partners are kind to each other. In the aftermath, people might feel heavy with sadness, oscillating between relief, confusion, and vulnerability. They may feel mentally fragmented and exhausted, or anxious and angry. They might know there's more to do before they can really move on, so they're steeling themselves for the next hurdle.

Any emotion might be part of someone's breakup experience, but all breakups have this in common: They become part of people's history.

Once a Breakup Happens, What Happens to the Attachment?

Breakups are difficult in part because they involve breaking an attachment. You might stop seeing someone and have no further interactions, but there's still the mental piece: the attachment.

To be in a relationship is to build an attachment, a mental tether that keeps two people together. More than a feeling, attachment is an interpersonal regulatory system, one that keeps us calm and safe when it's operating well. For instance, someone gets a distressing phone call, they turn to their romantic partner for comfort, and are met with sensitivity and responsiveness. They feel better.

Most people are oriented toward building secure attachments like the one just described, but sometimes attachments are an engine for insecurity. People with anxious attachments, having learned to expect unreliability, require repeated assurances that the attachment figure is, in fact, available and ready to provide help. Other people learn that their best go-to people fail them. Over time, these individuals develop avoidant attachments where they do not seek or expect support from even their closest relationship partners.

As you might imagine, romantic relationships can reflect a person's default attachment style. Critically, romantic partners become etched in our brains as "the attachment figure." At moments throughout the day, particularly in times of worry or distress, people want their romantic partner, the source of support. The brain is trained to quickly bring the partner to mind so you can find them and be (hopefully) comforted. Stressed out? Think of them. Sad? Think of them. Spiraling? Think of them.

When It's Over, It's Not Really Over

Breakups mark the end of relationships that people have sometimes spent years nurturing. This leads to a reasonable question: How long does it take for ex-partners stop thinking about each other? When does the attachment system break?

Anecdotes like "half of the length of your relationship" might offer a benchmark to someone who is just sick of thinking of their ex-partner and wanting to know when they'll stop. But that rule of thumb isn't linked to scientific evidence.

Happily, a new study directly investigates what it means to truly "get over" an ex-partner (Chong and Fraley, 2026). They recognized two possible paths. First, it's possible that attachments simply fade after a breakup, persisting but to a very small degree. They never really go away. Alternatively, the bond that once mattered the most to a person can become utterly ineffective. It may truly end, such that it no longer plays any role in a person's attachment system.

Attachments Can Linger and Linger and Linger

Researchers Chong and Fraley (2026) analyzed the survey responses from 328 participants (university students and MTurk volunteers), all of whom reported having been in a significant romantic relationship that lasted at least 2 years (average duration around 4.5 years) but then ended. People varied in the time since their breakup, with an average lapse of about five years.

Their findings are surprising. While we might have anticipated that attachments fade, they take an impressively long amount of time to decline. By about four years, most people are only about halfway there. Only halfway!

But, eventually, the pull toward an ex dissipates and fades to nothing. Eventually, most people's attachment to a romantic ex-partner is no different from how they relate to a total stranger. As Gotye sang, "now you're just somebody that I used to know."

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The Pace of Detachment Sometimes Varies

What happens to the average person doesn't describe everyone. Whereas most people experience a steady (if protracted) decline in their attachment to an ex, other people let go quickly while still others hold on more tightly. Specifically, people higher in avoidant attachment detach earlier, while people with higher anxiety maintain the attachment much longer. These patterns align with what we know about attachment styles.

Interestingly, gender did not moderate these trends over time. Regardless of gender, attachments persisted for a lengthy period and then declined to nothing. It might take a decade, but eventually it ends.

Starting a new relationship also had no effect on the duration of attachment endurance. This is especially interesting because, presumably, entering a new relationship means building a new attachment. This suggests a new attachment does not easily replace an old one; it is different and the person may come to assume the responsibilities of the earlier attachment figure, but it's not necessarily a clean replacement.

It's Normal to Have a Lingering Attachment

This research pulls back the curtain to reveal that most people mentally hold on to their ex-partner, potentially for years after they break up. It's normal to do this; it doesn't mean you want to reconnect with your ex, nor does it reveal anything about your current or future relationships.

The power of attachments isn't a reflection of your ex or your relationship with them; it's a story about the brain. The human brain is oriented toward attachments and takes time to let go. This may reflect evolutionary pressures to maintain human connection, especially given that our ancestors in relationships may have had to endure lengthy periods of separation (hunting!). Ultimately, the webs that we build during a relationship are difficult to untangle and it takes time.

On the bright side: In the long-run, we detach. Our minds release and we come to see ex-partners no differently than strangers. The fact that this isn't instant (as much as we might think we'd like that in the moment of a breakup) is actually a good thing. It reminds us of the power of love.

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