Stronger Marriage Connection

Relationship Churning: The On-Again, Off-Again Cycle | Sarah Halpern-Meekin | #128

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Relationship churning—the pattern of breaking up and getting back together with the same partner—affects nearly half of young adults and creates emotional whiplash for couples, children, and their support networks. Dr. Sarah Halpern-Meekin shares her groundbreaking research on this common relationship phenomenon, explaining why couples fall into these patterns and what it means for their wellbeing.

• Relationship churning comes in two main forms: breaking up and getting back together, and having sex with an ex
• Nearly half of young adults report churning in their current or most recent relationship
• Churning relationships show higher psychological distress, lower satisfaction, and worse communication, but surprisingly higher intimate self-disclosure
• Fathers in churning relationships stay more involved with their children than those who permanently break up
• Economic distress, incarceration history, and one-sided breakups increase likelihood of churning
• The key to healthy relationships includes investing time in connection, developing conflict management skills, and setting clear expectations
• Before reconciling after a breakup, ask if what caused the original breakup has actually changed

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Speaker 1:

Chances are you or a loved one has experienced a relationship churning in your lifetime. You're in a relationship, then break it off, then back in the same relationship, then take a break again. Well, on today's episode, dr Liz and I dive into this relationship pattern with Dr Sarah Halpern-Meekin and we talk about how common it is, characteristics of those who relationship churn and why some people have struggles in it. Dr Sarah Halpern Meekin is a professor of public affairs and human development and family studies at the University of Wisconsin, madison, who researches romantic relationships, including on-again, off-again patterns, social poverty and low-income families through mixed methods. Her work examines how relationship instability affects parents and children, labor force participation among working-age men and the impact of unconditional cash assistance on poor families. She received her PhD in sociology and social policy from Harvard University. We hope you enjoy the show.

Speaker 1:

Hey friends, welcome to Stronger Marriage Connection. I'm Dr Dave here at Utah State University, alongside Dr Liz Hale, our licensed clinical psychologist and therapist. We are aiming to bring you the very best we have in valid research and resources, along with some tips and tools to help you create the marriage of your dreams. Well, have you ever known a couple who seem to break up and get back together like clockwork. Maybe you've experienced it yourself, that cycle of splitting up and getting back together, only to split up again in days or weeks or maybe even months later. This pattern is called relationship churning and it affects millions of couples and can create emotional whiplash, not just for the partners involved, but for their children, for their friends and family members too. Well, today we're joined by Dr Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a sociologist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studied this fascinating phenomenon to understand why couples fall into this pattern, what it means for their well-being and how to build more stable relationships. Welcome, dr Halpern-Meekin, to the show.

Speaker 2:

Thanks so much for having me.

Speaker 1:

Okay, now I have to admit right up front, liz and Sarah, I hadn't really heard of this concept. I mean, I know people who've been in and out of relationships, but I haven't actually heard of relationship churning and it had this little image in my head, almost like a washing machine or something that's churning To start things off. Can you tell us a little bit about relationship churning?

Speaker 2:

Sure. So some people use the term on again, off again, relationships. Other people talk about relationship cyclicality. I use the term relationship churning to refer to two forms Primarily. The first is having sex with an ex. The more commonly studied form is breaking up and getting back together with the same person, and so for my generation, that classic example is Ross and Rachel on Friends being on a break. And what does that mean? You know, in more recent decades, we have Khloe Kardashian and Tristan Thompson breaking up and getting back together. We have Taylor Swift singing, singing. We're never, ever getting back together. So you know, this idea of churning really pervades our, our popular culture. This will, they won't, they are, they aren't they, um, I think, really captures our attention yeah, yeah, it really does.

Speaker 1:

I, I know I've seen couples of churning um on again, off again, and then they're like, oh man, they're just, they've been away, but now they're just driven and they right, stay night over or whatever at this other person's place and I think, ah man, this is. I'm not sure how healthy some of this is, so I can't wait to dive into this.

Speaker 3:

Sex with the ex. That's pretty clever. As far as pointing that term, even after divorce, I understand. Is that right, sarah, that couples getting back together maybe for the sake of sex or closeness or warmth? Is that true as well?

Speaker 2:

I have not seen data on sex with an ex among formerly married couples, but we looked at it among cohabitors and young adult relationships. We looked at it among cohabitors and we saw in young adult relationships and we saw quite high rates among young adults. Over half who broke up continued some kind of sexual relationship. Nearly nine in 10 exes who had sex attempted to reconcile so that on again, off again, relationship and sex with an ex can really kind of go hand in hand.

Speaker 3:

So interesting. You know this really has kind of a negative connotation to me professionally, even personally, so I really appreciate you are here to set the record straight that it is not necessarily hopeless. It's really based just on a poor pattern, right that people get stuck in. That's the best way to describe it.

Speaker 2:

I think it looks different for different couples and we just want to understand. You know, as researchers, we're interested in understanding some of the correlates of um, of churning relationships are there?

Speaker 3:

okay, I get it. I you're just a perfect researcher, like not necessarily across the board everything, but it's based on the individual couple. How common is relationship churning, please, and why is it so common?

Speaker 2:

So the data is kind of limited so we don't have good national estimates of this. But using a data set of young adults in the Midwest, we see that nearly half report churning in their present or most recent relationship, so that doesn't mean ever in their lives. That means in their current relationship or in the one they just left. About half had broken up and gotten back together at least once and the average number of churning episodes was two and a half, which means that for people who do churn, doing it more than once is the modal experience among these young adults.

Speaker 2:

We've also used data from a study called the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing. That's a study that's of parents and it's nationally representative of people living in the largest 20 metropolitan areas in the United States. Some of these parents were married and some of them were not married when they welcomed a child and the survey has followed these families over time. So me and Kristen Turney, my co-author, looked at what happened in couples' relationships through the child's fifth birthday and we saw that by the child's fifth birthday, 42% of couples were still together. 14% were what we termed stably broken up and single, so they split from their original partner and didn't repartner. Another 27% had stably broken up and repartnered, and by stably broken up here we mean they broke up just that one time and didn't churn, and 16% had churned at least once, and so that means that churning among these parents was actually more common than being stably broken up and single.

Speaker 3:

Wow, well, ok, there's got to be psychological, emotional impacts of repeatedly breaking up and getting back together. I like that emotional whiplash you were talking about, dave. It's got to take a toll on the well-being and even the ability to trust. No, does it set this precedence.

Speaker 2:

So when I look at the research I've done and work by others in the field, you know we really can't say anything causal because we don't have the kind of data that allows us to draw causal conclusions like does churning cause people to feel a certain way?

Speaker 2:

Or is churning caused by certain dynamics or, you know, personality, temperaments, things like that, or do they just co-occur because of some other underlying factor? So we don't know that, but we do know for individuals, having one episode of churning is predictive of having future episodes of churning, and that includes after beginning to cohabit or marrying. So this is not just something that happens among people who are in more casual relationships. We know that churning is associated with higher levels of psychological distress, lower relationship satisfaction, lower dedication and commitment and worse communication. But and we were surprised to find this it was associated with higher intimate self-disclosure and that's a term that I'm sure, dr Liz, you're better at describing this as a therapist, but my understanding is you know that's about partners sharing their intimate thoughts and feelings with each other, feeling like this other person really understands them and they can share about themselves. More concerning, we see that churners are more likely to report conflict and intimate abuse and desistance. So stopping abuse patterns is more likely among couples that stably separate than those who churn.

Speaker 3:

Wow. And then we looked at the effects of children on those that have children and churning couples.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, we have looked at those dynamics and we see, you know perhaps a hopeful note that churning fathers are more involved with their children than stably broken up fathers. So we see, you know, that connection between the parents translating over into a more ongoing connection between fathers and children. We do see that parents who are churning report higher levels of parenting stress than parents who are stably broken up or who are stably together. And so some of those dynamics that challenge the relationship as romantic partners may also challenge their parenting or their co-parenting relationship. We do see some differences in children's outcomes between those who are growing up in churning families and those in other families. But those are largely explained by differences in demographic and economic characteristics between families. So you know, any differences we see in children's internalizing or externalizing behavior. So, like behavior patterns or mental health challenges, differences in teenagers romantic relationship behaviors, teenagers romantic relationship behaviors, those tend to be accounted for by those other factors as opposed to seeming to be caused by their parents' romantic relationship dynamics.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's interesting. And, sarah, I mean obviously we don't have records that probably go back centuries or whatever to see, but I'm assuming that this has always been around. Any kind of like spikes in any of this, or is it more common in young adult relationships, and what does that mean? You know different demographic trends.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so we could speculate. You know that some of the higher rates of turning that we see among younger adults compared to parents, for example, could be in part due to life stage, like maybe people are just having less committed relationships in the first place, for example. Or it could also be due to the need that you need to develop skills at navigating relationships. Like that can include knowing what kind of conflict is normal. It can include knowing how to manage conflict in a healthy way, and you know we also sometimes are having really big emotions in our younger years, and sometimes those even out as we get older. So all of those things could make these churning episodes particularly likely during the early years. But, like you were saying, you know we would need much more extensive data in order to be able to speak to that over time.

Speaker 1:

Interesting.

Speaker 3:

When parents have children, do they try a little harder? Is there less churning, more churning? I'm curious about the parents who have children. We've talked about the effects on children. That's pretty tough, understandably right, but what about those parents who have children?

Speaker 2:

Well, so I can't exactly speak to that, because often surveys follow people starting when they have the kid, and so we don't get to observe what happened before they had the child. But when we use the data that we have on young adults and then when you use the data that we have on parents who are, you know, on average a few years older, we see much higher rates of churning among those young adults than we do among parents. Whether that's due to becoming parents or whether that's due to the fact that they are older or that they are in a relationship with a person who they feel a little bit more committed to and that's why they've gone ahead and had a child together. We can't really say for sure, but it certainly suggests that we don't see a similarly high level of churning across the board.

Speaker 1:

We'll be right back after this brief message. And we're back, let's dive right in. And we're back, let's dive right in. I can't help but think, sarah, that this also affects the kind of the spillover effect into friends and family that you know that we start kind of getting attached. Or you go to a family party and you know people start to get to know this person and then it's off and then people are like, oh my goodness, or you know what a jerk or whatever it is, and then the next party they're back, you know, then they're gone. How does this affect friends and family, loved ones of this, this journey?

Speaker 2:

see, you know what I can learn, but I'm not aware of anything that tells us about that spillover effect outside of the nuclear family.

Speaker 2:

You know, we've certainly all heard that advice don't bad mouth your friend's ex, since they can come back to hurt your friendship when they get back together.

Speaker 2:

So you know, I think that that advice exists for a reason because it's come back to bite too many people when they've been like it's good you're rid of him and then he shows back up.

Speaker 2:

But I also think you know what you're speaking to can make us think about some of the rituals we have around supporting relationships. You know, as a community it's not uncommon at wedding ceremonies, for example, for the officiant to ask those gathered to make a show of commitment to the couple, right to supporting the couple. And we can imagine that turning could make it more difficult for a community to commit to supporting a relationship or that they could have seen a couple travel through those challenges and emerge on the other side stronger for them and could feel very supportive of them for that reason. But there's a reason that we ask family and friends to commit to supporting couples in our rituals and it's because those are meaningful things to do right that a relationship doesn't just survive or fail on its own. It does so in the setting of a community and so that the way that a relationship is received and supported or not by those around us matters.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I can see the flip side of this, sarah, as well, in instances of abuse or violence or something. And then they keep going back and the friends and family are thinking why are you turning? You know what's what's going on. So I can see both sides of of this. I don't know if there's any again research on that, but I'm sure his friends and family would be so, uh, devastated, heartbroken with the churning that's going on, an unhealthy situation.

Speaker 2:

Yes, and often it does take some time before people are able to leave abusive or unsafe situations, and so that's obviously difficult, both for the person in the situation as well as for the family and friends who are trying to support them.

Speaker 3:

Do you have any advice in those situations? Sarah, I know you're a researcher, but do you have any suggestions for those that's watching a loved one who's churning, or even maybe there is some abuse?

Speaker 2:

So I wouldn't speak to what to do to help somebody who's in an abusive relationship, because that takes a level of expertise that is outside my area. When it comes to somebody seeing churning going on, I think we can look to the research to understand why we see people breaking up and getting back together, and we see a set of relationship factors that are associated with that churning. So when breakups are one-sided as opposed to mutual, we're more likely to see churning because there was one person who didn't want to break up. When there are higher rates of intimate self-disclosure, like I mentioned before, and so that means there's some kind of connection between the couple that they might be reluctant to leave behind. When partners express uncertainty about why they broke up in the first place, we see higher rates of churning. When there's lingering attachments or feelings after a breakup, we see higher rates of churning. When people assess the breakup as having improved the relationship in some way maybe it allowed them to resolve an issue or gave them the space to do so and when people are living together, we see higher rates of churning. And when people are living together, we see higher rates of churning. So those are those sort of individual level or couple level factors that we can look at.

Speaker 2:

We also see some more structural or situational factors that are associated with churning. So the couple experiencing economic distress, having history of incarceration, or experiencing a partner's incarceration, a parent's relationship history, so parents having more breakups, for example. And when structural or situational factors are what are undermining the relationship as opposed to qualities within the relationship, we could imagine that couples who weather those stressors might be drawn back together because it wasn't really a problem in the relationship per se that caused the breakup in the first place, so they might be more likely to turn. It's obviously much less than someone's control to affect their structural position, right, you can't affect your parents' relationship history, for example.

Speaker 2:

Those are think about whether there's a good reason to believe that the relationship is going to proceed in a healthy way before getting back together. Like, has whatever caused the breakup in the first place actually changed? Changed? And I think about the advice of Scott Stanley and Howard Markman, who are psychologists who have encouraged people to decide not slide in their relationships. Right, and so we don't want to just get back together because it hurts so much to be broken up. We want to kind of push the brakes and think about. Are things really different now? Is there a good reason to believe that this is going to be a healthy dynamic for us, moving forward, or that the challenges we addressed in the past, um, we have figured out a way to deal with together moving forward?

Speaker 1:

and that could be challenging, right, sir? Because it's you're talking about this rational thought okay, really thinking that rather than the emotional like oh, but we've shared so much and we have this and they really get me, type of a thing. So being able to step out of that emotional reasoning to that logical, rational, you know, prefrontal cortex type of reasoning, is probably not easy because a lot of the I don't know if some of these decisions are made from the back part, right, the limbic system, this emotional type of brain. Any thoughts there?

Speaker 2:

I mean certainly when we see that having sex with an ex increases your likelihood of trying to get back together. I think that speaks to that sort of emotional or connective drive being in the driver's seat as opposed to the, you know, more rational brain. I don't know that we always want, we don't want to always just make decisions, you know, up here and not back here, but we want to allow space for those considerations too. And so some of that means trying to sit with the discomfort of the breakup and having enough distance from it that we're not doing what immediately addresses that emotional pain. Right, because the thing that most immediately will make that pain feel like it goes away is to get back together. And that might be the right decision and it might not be. But we might not be in a position to say that if we're sort of reacting as opposed to assessing and then acting.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's good.

Speaker 3:

Two people really kind of doing their own work, I suppose. Right, maybe it belongs to both partners. Absolutely, it's a churning pattern, absolutely. So we'd recommend individual therapy, hopefully, or just a real honest look in the mirror.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think it depends on what kind of issues partners are managing and what kind of resources they have. You know, unfortunately for couples with more limited resources, for example, Medicaid does not pay for marriage therapy and those kinds of things, right? So not everyone has access to those sorts of resources. But trying to do some of the self-assessment, some of the self-reflection, as best we can with the resources we have, yeah, that's beautiful.

Speaker 3:

Is there a point, sarah, do you think of no return, this point of no return, where relationship churning, reconciliation, just becomes more harmful than helpful or healthy?

Speaker 2:

I would guess there is. You know, when we were doing this relationship churning research using the data from young adults, we top coded the number of churning episodes at 10. So that means that anybody who was reporting that they had churned more than 10 times we only counted as having churned 10 times. Because there were some outliers who reported very high levels of churning episodes, even though they were, you know, maybe in their late teens or early 20s, and I can't, you know. I don't know what dynamics they were dealing with, but I'd imagine those were pretty complex and probably not super, super healthy. But we unfortunately don't have the data to follow relationships over time to make that kind of determination that you're speaking to. So I think that really speaks to why having robust data infrastructure is so important, because knowing the answer to that question could really help psychologists and family therapists and others to support people in discerning a healthy path forward with their relationships.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, wouldn't that just be wonderful to have that magic bullet answer.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. Which then speaks. I don't know if you have the answer then to this one, sarah, but as a, as an extension, specialist right, and here at with Utah Marriage Commission, we produce all kinds of resources. If it was you and you're teaching a relationship education class, you come upon churning. Do you just provide information or any kind of guidance, or be careful, or do you just what would you say? I guess what would you offer if you're talking about premarital education or marriage education course, what do you suggest? Or to help?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I would come back to some of the skills that are fundamental to the relationship education curricula that I've seen. So those things around you know how to do communication in a way that's effective, how to have conflict in a healthy way, how to set up expectations appropriately. So if churning is something that is born of conflict that is not being managed well, then all of those skills that we try to work with couples on and partners on are hopefully going to help them to not experience churning or to do some discernment and communication in that period of breakup so that it can be that they move ahead with clarity, either out of the relationship or moving ahead with clarity, committed to the relationship.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, maybe mine. I don't know if this is a term, but mindful churning right, being able to really think, I think this through, yeah, mindfully, intentionally, purposefully. Yeah, okay, that's great. Well, sarah, this has been fascinating for us here. Before we let you go, we have a couple of questions we like to ask all of our guests, really. The first one is in honor of our podcast name Stronger Marriage Connection. In your mind, what do you feel like is a key to a stronger marriage connection?

Speaker 2:

So I think what counts as a strong marriage connection probably looks different across lots of partners and couples. Marriage connection probably looks different across lots of partners and couples. Some of the research findings that I see that seem to stretch across. Lots of people are investing time and connecting, so that can mean putting down devices, taking time together, and that doesn't have to be serious time. It can be fun time just investing in the relationship and in the feelings of connection. Like I was speaking to earlier, having healthy communication and healthy ways of managing conflict, because a good relationship doesn't mean never disagreeing, but it means knowing how to manage the disagreements in ways that aren't destructive and then also having clear and reasonable expectations of your partner. They're not mind readers. They don't know what you want and need. So finding good ways to talk about those expectations with each other so that you can be there for each other in the ways that you each need.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, love it. Great tips, Thank you.

Speaker 3:

And Sarah. What can our listeners find out more about you, this topic and any of the great resources you have created?

Speaker 2:

So the research that I've talked about today, that I've done and I spoke about some other colleagues research, but that I've done is published in academic journal articles, which is not a super accessible place for information. I did do a webinar for the Dibble Institute, which puts out relationship education resources, a couple years ago and that's on their website. So if folks want to see a little bit more discussion about these things, that's available there, and if anybody really has a hankering for reading some academic articles, those are out there too.

Speaker 1:

That's great Thanks. We'll be sure to put those links in our show notes for our listeners, so go check those out if you want to learn more about relationship churning. All right, Sarah. As we wrap up, we like to ask our guests for their takeaway. We call it a takeaway of the day. Is there a piece of information that you hope that our listeners will remember from our discussion today?

Speaker 2:

So I hope that they now feel like they know what churning is and that it's fairly common, but that we should be thoughtful about whether or not it's going to work for us as a way to figure out the right way forward in a relationship.

Speaker 1:

That's great, Liz. What about you? What's your takeaway today?

Speaker 3:

Well, I think just Sarah has instilled some hope that it isn't just an automatic. Oh no, this is a a red red flag on your relationship. Um, sometimes we just get stuck, I guess. I guess we just do what we know how to do, right, which is breakup and makeup. Um, that doesn't necessarily need to um, define the relationship, not just off the bat, anyway, like I thought when we first started talking about this, sarah. So thank you for your insights. What about you, Dave? Is there a gold nugget here in our visit today with Dr Sarah Halpern-Meekin?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, you've really expanded my thought processes really about this phenomenon. It's it's not necessarily unhealthy or healthy, because each situation, ranging from, you know, abuse and violence um churning to, you know, high school students who are in this, you know, popular, I've got some right now. Right, that it's kind of off again sometimes. Okay, now we're back and, uh, but there's just such a range of this and the reasons, right, that the reasons behind this are varied. It's not like, oh man, if you just wake up. No, it's not like that. There's all kinds of reasons for the why. So really understanding each individual person's why in their situation, and not just a big blanket statement like, oh, relationship, journey, you, you got to get out of this mess. No, it's very nuanced, very, very personal. So, thank you, sarah.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1:

All right, friends. That is all for us. We will see you next time in another episode of the Stronger Marriage Connection podcast.

Speaker 3:

And remember it's the small and simple things that create a stronger marriage connection. Take good care now small and simple things that create a stronger marriage connection.

Speaker 1:

Take good care now. Thanks for joining us today. Hey, do us a favor and take a second to subscribe to our podcast and the Utah Marriage Commission YouTube channel at Utah Marriage Commission, where you can watch this and every episode of the show. Be sure to smash the like button, leave a comment and share this episode with a friend. You can also follow and interact with us on Instagram at Stronger Marriage Life and Facebook at Stronger Marriage, so be sure to share with us which topics you loved or which guests we should have on the show. Next, If you want even more resources to improve your marriage or relationship connection, visit StrongerMarriageorg, where you'll find free workshops, e-courses, in-depth webinars, relationship surveys and more. Each episode of Stronger Marriage Connection is hosted and sponsored by the Utah Marriage Commission at Utah State University. And finally, a big thanks to our producer, Rex Polanis, and the team at Utah State University and you, our audience. You make this show possible. The opinions, findings, conclusions and recommendations expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect the views of the Utah Marriage Commission.