“Neither with you nor without you” seems to be the motto of some couples who give themselves a second, third and even fourth chance. They confuse fighting with passion and mistakenly think that love and sex have superpowers capable of changing people and circumstances. They are the so-called “yo-yo couples” who come and go, as if there were no other candidates and they were the only survivors on the face of the Earth of an apocalyptic catastrophe. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are the latest example of this type of union; but history records many others. Surely, the most famous was that of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Despite the fact that they only married twice, the tumultuous relationship was widely covered in the press and even on the big screen with the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1968), which narrated the battles of a marriage permanently on a war footing, in which the actors knew the script by heart, even before having read it.
Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson also married twice; and the unions of Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth or Gigi Hadid and Zayn Malik were extinguished and reset so many times that we lost count. “Some couples get hooked on reconciliations and that can indicate that they are not capable of moving towards the next level of intimacy,” says Carme Sánchez Martín, clinical psychologist and sexologist, head of the Gender Violence Program at the Center for Mental Health of Adults (CSMA) in Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona). “The mechanism is simple: to avoid moving on to the next phase of the relationship, they dismantle it and return to square zero. And, in the process, they perpetuate the emotion of the early days,” she says.
This emotional and sexual tension is becoming more and more uncontrollable. And not only for those who experience it, but for those who witness the unpleasant spectacle. “Often, both members of the couple make their friends take sides by telling them things and giving them information when they are angry with the other. But, at the same time, they are required not to judge what they do when they get back together,” says Sánchez. “For this reason, friendships are also affected by these quarrels and it is very difficult for both partners to keep mutual friends once the relationship is over. Generally, groups are established that support one or the other,” warns the expert.
“Confusing quarrels with passion is the pattern of toxic relationships; they combine great dramas and tragedies with idyllic reconciliations, which always come hand in hand with sex,” says clinical psychologist and sexologist Miren Larrazabal. “In this type of union, everything is lived to the fullest; the happiness and the pain. It is a pattern of intermittent reinforcement, although true love has nothing to do with this. You have to have enough emotional intelligence to know when to let go and when to fight for a relationship; because it is just as valid to try to save a union that is worth it as it is to know how to leave when there is no remedy,” adds the president of the International Society of Specialists in Sexology (SISEX) and member of Lyx, Institute of Urology and Andrology, in Madrid.
Second parts without repeating the same script
Giving yourself another chance doesn’t necessarily have to be the biggest mistake to avoid. Sometimes, it can be a good idea, as long as you come back with the desire to write the story in a different way. “It’s not true that second parts are never good. For me, Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), I liked it more than the first film,” says Raúl González Castellanos, sexologist, psychopedagogue and couples therapist at the therapeutic support office A la Par, in Madrid. “The first thing I do when a couple comes to therapy is ask them: ‘Why haven’t you ‘Separated?’ Some look at each other with a look of relief, they are the ones who come to a professional to give them permission to break up; but others show a look of terror. They are in a bad way, but they have never considered ending it, they would never leave the other, because one feels that is where one belongs.
For González Castellanos, “a relationship is based on three pillars: intimacy, trust and passion,” and these can collapse at any time. “It is said that a couple can break up for eight different reasons: family problems, work problems, religious problems, financial problems, mistreatment, disagreements regarding the desire to want or not want to have children; infidelity or sexual problems,” lists the expert. “I would say that mistreatment is already a big deal, and no one should go back to an abuser. Beyond this red line, it is true that infidelity is very damaging to the couple and differences regarding the desire to have children are also damaging, but everything depends on why the relationship broke up and how the problems are managed. You can always try again, but this requires an act of contrition and a certain penitence. That is, identifying the problem, being aware of each person’s share of the blame, asking for forgiveness and committing to not repeating the same mistake again. If this is not done, the couple will stumble over the same stone again and again,” he says.
It is curious how many yo-yo couples, when trying for the second time, fail and break up after two years, more or less. That is what has happened to Lopez and Affleck. In Larrazabal’s opinion, this is a textbook case, because, if you go back without doing your homework, the maximum period that the union usually lasts is 24 months, after the phase of falling in love, that irrational state of intense passion. “Going back to living together makes pending issues come to the surface again. Really, the difference between happy couples and those that break up is not the problems, but the skills to face them. Because love cannot always overcome everything, and conflicts are not solved with a night of passion. Skills, resources and strategies are needed to put an end to them. If this is done, then we can say that some second parts can be successful,” he believes.
Return for love, loneliness or financial problems?
Among the excuses to get back in a relationship, sex is emerging as a powerful reason to rewind. Memory likes to clean up and keep the good things. So it is not strange that after months without sexual activity, people tend to idealize the torrid nights with their ex, and even crown it with sexual exploits that do not correspond to them.
Strange as it may seem, jealousy is often another reason why people seek a second chance, because they cannot bear the idea of their ex-partner being with someone else. There is also the excuse of the children: “I’m doing it for them.” Something with an expiration date and not at all advisable: “Especially if the children have already gone through the trauma of separation and have become accustomed to their new situation, because the best model that can be given to them is for them to see happy parents, or at least calm, and not immersed in constant battles,” says Carme Sánchez.
Crises and the fear associated with them are another powerful glue, capable of holding together the thousand and one pieces of a relationship that has lost all its strength in the arduous battle. “It is very common to go back to your ex in turbulent times,” Sánchez continues. “It is seen in abused women and it was seen a lot during the pandemic, when there were many reconciliations, because danger makes us look for what is safe or, at least, what we know.”
When getting back together is not a burning nail to cling to, but a feeling that we are missing something that we lost and that we want to recover, Sánchez suggests the following: “The key is to meet up with the person and analyze how we feel afterwards. Because for getting back together to work, there must still be something of what there was when the relationship began. I am referring to things like excitement, feeling good with the other person, having fun together, sharing things and wanting to see them again. If there is still some of that left, then the second time may be the charm,” says the psychologist.
As many therapists maintain, the couple takes away all the things that one has not been able to solve in life, all the things that one has pending; because the couple is something very intimate, where all our insecurities are projected. Miren Larrazabal points out: “Many of the problems in a couple are nothing more than problems with oneself, which must be solved so that they do not repeat themselves, again and again, in our relationships. Sometimes the solution is in oneself, not in the other.”
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