When is it a good idea to get back together with an ex?

It’s the new Happily Ever After.

Forget conquering evil stepmothers or being awoken from a curse by a magical kiss from your beloved. What people really want, apparently, is a stunning getting-back-with-your ex success story.

Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, pictured at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021, seven months before their second engagement.Credit:Getty

Because when Jennifer Lopez announced that she and Ben Affleck married over the weekend –18 years after breaking off their first engagement and going on to marry other people – the public went wild. With exclamation points.

“Good thing come to those who wait – Congratulations!!!!” wrote one person below an Instagram post Lopez put up earlier today with a photograph of herself lying in bed, with directions to read her latest newsletter. In it she detailed how she and Affleck married at a Las Vegas drive-through chapel just after midnight on Saturday. (Countless others felt the same.)

Jennifer Lopez, right, announced on her website that she and Ben Affleck got married in Las Vegas on July 16; she in “an old dress” from a movie, and he in a jacket from his closet. Credit:onthejlo.com

Lopez herself has pointed to the rightness of finally making it to the altar with Affleck after all the time they’ve spent apart and the multiple challenges they’ve overcome, including Affleck’s treatment for alcohol addiction, marriages to other people, intense media scrutiny, and Lopez’ 2019 engagement to American baseball player Alex Rodriguez.

“Love is kind,” Lopez wrote in her newsletter. “And it turns out love is patient. Twenty years patient.”

But when is it a good idea to go back to an ex? And what conditions should ideally be present for a relationship to thrive the second – or third, or fourth – time around?

The reasons why a couple has decided to get back together are a crucial part of the equation, says Dr Rowan Burckhardt, director of the Sydney Couples Counselling Centre.

“I’ve seen couples trying to rekindle their relationship because of how onerous a separation is, [where they think] ‘Wouldn’t it be easier to live back together again?’” he says. “It’s more a decision based on convenience, or practicality, rather than being in love.”

This is common, he says, when a couple feels that their children will be in agony if they part, or finances or religious reasons compel a couple to stay together. Burckhardt also recalls one man he counselled who left his partner after cheating on her with another woman.

“Then he realised that they” – the man and his new girlfriend – “were being shunned by family and the kids were upset. So he tried to ditch his new girlfriend and go back to his previous partner.”

How do these types of re-couplings, inspired by the desire to avoid the painful consequences of a break-up, fare?

“Never well,” says Burckhardt. Primarily because these types of breakups are often proceeded – or followed – by one member, or both members of the couple, falling out of love with each other.

“It’s really awful because often the person coming back” – after infidelity or another crisis that prompts a break-up – “is absolutely genuine in their desire to repair the relationship,” he says. “They’re not even faking it. But if you don’t have that kind of ‘in love’ feeling, your mind and your desire and your will power cannot overcome what your internal body is stopping you from having.”

Far more successful, says Burckhardt, are couples who are still in love after breaking up and have a genuine desire to repair their relationship. (Yes, he says, even after multiple occasions of infidelity.)

“If there’s a willingness to go through the work that’s required, then that’s absolutely repairable,” he says.

By “the work”, Burckhardt means that people need to be able to express to their partner the full impact of what they’ve done that’s hurt them or led to the breakup, and their partner has to be willing to “hear” what they say. Both parties also need to be able to identify the cause of the breakup – relationship dissatisfaction and alcohol abuse are common causes – and address it.

“It really creates this bonding and closeness,” he says, noting that relationships that are rekindled after this process can often be stronger than they were prior to a break-up. “Often the person didn’t realise what was going on for their partner, how unhappy they were.”

But being able to accurately and honestly address the real reasons behind a break-up is easier said than done, says Elisabeth Shaw, CEO of Relationships Australia.

“I think sometimes people put break-ups down to circumstance, and that can be true,” she says. “It could be that there’s just been too many issues – unemployment, a tough time with kids and in-laws – that mount up. But, more often, it has to do with how the couple actually managed issues that came up. And those are the things that are going to come up again and again.”

Burckhardt agrees. “That’s the main thing that makes a couple work well or not work well… When you have two people who have a really well-refined mechanism for resolving differences, if they also have the ingredients of chemistry as a foundation and a commitment to build a relationship, those are the couples that will do amazingly for their whole life.”

Another factor that helps determine whether a couple can get back together again is what they’ve done since they broke up, and whether resentments have built up during that time, says Shaw.

The way they were: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, pictured at the 2003 premiere for the film, Gigli, when they were engaged the first time around.Credit:AP

“If the breakup was fairly acrimonious, you may need to do some healing about the breakup,” says Shaw. “One classic thing is one [person] has done more of the child-rearing and there can be all sorts of debts and inequities that have built up over time, which all need to be resolved… It’s really whether you’ve kept good feelings between [each other] or not.”

Burckhardt says there is one question people should ask themselves, when considering getting back together with an ex, regardless of the circumstances.

“‘What’s different now? Or what could you introduce that would be different?’ Obviously you’d have both felt, or one of you would have felt, that it [the relationship] wasn’t working. So, to just repeat the exact same thing with no changes is probably unlikely to be a good idea. But if there’s been substantial personal changes on one side, in terms of personal growth [or] if certain circumstances have changed, then it can perhaps be a good idea.”

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