Have you ever felt upset about a breakup you knew, two years or more earlier, was coming? In other words, you suspected for a long time that your love had faded, but you just didn’t want to admit it.
“To better understand relationships that were falling apart, we examined them in the time leading up to the breakup. For that, we applied a concept widely used in other areas of psychology,” said Janina Bühler, professor of personality psychology and diagnostics at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the study’s lead researcher.
Using four datasets—one each from Germany, the Netherlands, Australia, and the United Kingdom—covering 11,000 individuals, the researchers analyzed people’s satisfaction with their relationships over time, right up to the breakups. They found a fairly consistent pattern: couples often start out happy, but over the next eight years they report steadily declining satisfaction, which leads to a critical “turning point.”
“From this turning point, there is a rapid decline in relationship satisfaction. Couples then move toward separation,” Professor Bühler said. “Once this final phase is reached, the relationship is doomed to end.” Partners have as little as seven months—or as much as 28 months—before the final breakup. On average, it’s between one and two years after the boiling point, according to IFLScience.
Are there exceptions to the rule? Yes. Only a few couples manage to bypass this turning point.
But can a broken relationship be mended? The team believes that after this critical point, desperate attempts to reignite the spark are often futile. To keep a relationship going, partners need to work on it together long before the destructive phase sets in.
“Take action at the ‘pre-terminal’ stage—before the relationship starts to spiral downward. That can be effective and help preserve the partnership,” Professor Bühler said, offering a glimmer of hope.
The study’s findings were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
