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Relationships
Why Some People Keep Going Back to Their Ex
The science behind the difficulty of making breakups stick.
Updated December 17, 2024 Reviewed by Kaja Perina
Key points
- The dopamine hit of reconnecting with a former lover helps explain the allure of old flames.
- Avoiding the discomfort of loneliness and grieving a lost part of ourselves also drives us back to our exes.
- To stop going back to your ex, you need to stop reinforcing the "craving" pathway.
- Refrain from monitoring them on social media, seeing, and speaking to them.
You may feel ridiculous for resuming relations with someone you swore you’d never speak (or sleep) with again. Especially if you’ve disavowed them several times only to find yourself stalking their instagram late at night and firing off later-regretted texts about how much you miss them. Getting back with an ex isn’t a terribly uncommon experience. There’s even an official term for it in the scientific literature: relationship churning. Though more common among adolescents and younger adults, individuals of all ages are known to engage in the behavior, including married couples.
Rekindling an old flame isn’t an inherently bad decision. But it can complicate things when you’re pretty convinced this person isn’t “the one.” And it may endanger you if a relationship was characterized by physical or emotional abuse, deep betrayal, dishonesty, or manipulation.
Why, then, do we go back to our exes? Moreover, how do we stop if we really want to? Below, a look at the neuroscience and psychology behind relationship churning and the key to upending the pattern.
The Reward of The Familiar
When we fall in love, brain centers involved in detecting reward, feeling motivated, and experiencing pleasure become highly engaged and awash in dopamine (a neurotransmitter implicated in reward seeking, pleasure, and learning). Research in prairie voles (mammals who, like us, tend towards monogamous pair bonding) shows that this “dopaminergic activity” creates a distinct neural imprint activated exclusively by a partner’s presence—not by anyone else.
Dopamine surges serve to alter our neural circuitry, making it easier to repeat behaviors associated with that rush. This is the basis of habit formation. If your neurochemistry has been calibrated to distinctly respond to a former partner, you will (similar to a person craving a substance) yearn for the high of connecting with that person. This can lead you to leap back into a relationship (or a fleeting tryst) with them even after you’ve ended things. Consider it akin to a relapse—that is, if the person genuinely isn’t good for you, or vice versa.
You Can’t Make Sense of Yourself Without Them
When we end a long term romantic relationship, we quite literally lose a part of ourselves. Researchers describe this as the diminishment of “self concept clarity,” and they find that individuals who have an anxious attachment style tend to experience this post-breakup phenomenon especially hard. This is likely because anxiously attached individuals pay far greater attention to (read: monitor) their relationships and are more apt to adopt their partner’s attributes to increase closeness and intimacy. As a result, when they and their partner split, it can feel as if they’re losing a limb. Whether or not you identify with having an anxious attachment style, if you find yourself repeatedly rekindling ties with your ex, the dissolution of your sense of self could have something to do with it. Each time you reconnect with that former love, you feel (transiently) whole again. Even if you may know, deep down, that person may not be the best for you.
Avoidance of Discomfort
Most of us don’t enjoy the emotional pain or discomfort that breakups bring. Not wanting to feel this discomfort can drive us back towards the person who historically alleviated this suffering. Loneliness, too, can be a huge factor in compelling us to call up a former lover, even if we kind of sort of know things weren’t working out with them for a reason.
This phenomenon is especially prominent when you attempt to date again, only to feel that loneliness, pain, and sadness heightened by the process—often, because you’re just not hitting it off with new people and this reality highlights how much harder it is on the other side of a breakup. The solution may seem like reconnecting with the person who took away these feelings for a time—even if you know that in the long term this isn’t the wisest decision.
How to Actually End Things
If you really want to end things with a person and you’re finding it impossible, you may have to commit to a period of time wherein you don’t reinforce the neural pathways associated with connecting to them. This doesn’t just mean not seeing or talking to them. It means not providing your brain with the dopamine hits of stalking their Instagram, Linkedin, or other social media. The ease with which we can pull up past partner’s online presences doesn’t make this…easy. If you’re serious about ending things, though, you must cut yourself off from this input as it only reinforces the cravings you have for your ex. Consider this the romantic analog of detoxing from a substance.
Making a breakup stick requires weathering the pain of loss, allowing grief, and trusting that your heart (and neural circuitry) will heal. If this seems futile, consider again that prairie vole study: heightened activity of dopamine elicited by proximity to long term mates was shown to die off after a substantial period of separation.
Sure, we’ve got a few genetic flourishes that differentiate us from these animals, but this study suggests that enough time and distance can reduce (and possibly eliminate) the pull we experience towards an ex partner. The exact time length will differ depending on the depth of your former relationship. But some (human) studies suggest healing can start within three months.
This doesn’t mean you need to stop thinking of your ex altogether. Some research finds nostalgic memories of your ex can positively influence future relationships by enhancing your belief that you’ve grown and matured. But first you need to weaken the automaticity of reconnecting with that ex by committing to a substantial time period of no reinforcement. Getting adequate social support, finding a breakup support group and/or a trusted therapist, traveling if you can, and reconnecting with creative endeavors can all facilitate this process. So too can understanding the underlying neuroscience behind why breaking the habit of going back to your former partner sometimes feel impossible—even though it’s most certainly not.
Facebook image: YAKOBCHUK VIACHESLAV/Shutterstock
