The Break-Up-Get-Back-Together Cycle

One of the cycles familiar to lots and lots of people is the break-up-get-back-together cycle.

If you’ve been dating before, odds are you’ve gone through this once or twice (or thrice, or more) yourself.

Here’s how it works: you and a girlfriend break up. Then after a while, you realize how perfect she’d been for you, and reach out to her to get back together. Or, you’re plugging along in your single life, when she reaches out to you and wants to see you again.

Then pretty soon, you’re back together. For a few days or a few weeks, it’s as great as ever!

Then things go back to the way they were before the first time you broke up. If you initiated the breakup before, you may start wishing you’d stayed broken up. If she’d initiated the breakup before, you may notice she’s become annoyed with those same things about you that precipitated the initial breakup in the first place.

So you break up again. A little time goes by, and maybe you get back together again. Then maybe you break up again later.

Here’s a question you may not have asked yourself, though: why do you do this? And why does she do it?

Obviously it’s kind of a silly nonsense dance, isn’t it?

Either stay together, or stay broken up, right?

Yet you aren’t doing that. But why?