Getting over an ex-partner can be tough

After a relationship ends, many people still feel emotions for their ex-partners. Depending on whether someone wanted the breakup or not, it can be difficult to emotionally “get over” an ex-partner. This is especially true if a relationship has lasted for many years when getting a divorce. Two open questions in psychological research are whether it is possible to completely dissolve all emotional bonds with an ex and how long this process usually takes.

A new study on the long-term stability of emotional bonds to ex-partners after breakup

A new study, now published in the scientific journal Social Psychological and Personality Science (Chong and Fraley, 2025), aimed to answer these questions. The study was conducted by Jia Y. Chong and R. Chris Fraley from the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and focused on the long-term stability of emotional bonds to ex-partners after breakup.

To be included in the study, volunteers had to fulfill several criteria. Most importantly, they had to be adults and had at least one romantic relationship that lasted longer than two years. Also, this relationship needed to be over, and the ex-partner had to be still alive at the point of the study. Overall, 328 volunteers completed the study. They had an average age in their early thirties, and 57 percent were women. On average, the volunteers had been together with their ex-partners for about 4.6 years, and the breakup had occurred 5 years on average before the study. However, the individual variation in these numbers was large.

The volunteers had to answer several questions from different questionnaires on emotional attachment and bonding. These questions were focused on different thoughts and feelings about whether they still felt emotionally attached to their ex-partners. They concerned areas like whether the volunteers still liked spending time with their exes, whether the exes gave them a sense of security, and so on. The volunteers also answered the same questions regarding a stranger. This way, the scientists had an individual comparison value for each volunteer to assess whether they showed stronger emotional attachment to their ex-partner than to a stranger. In addition, the scientists asked the volunteers whether they or their exes had ended the relationship, whether they had a new relationship since the one with their ex-partner ended, and several other questions about the relationship with the ex-partner. Using these data, the scientists conducted several advanced statistical analyses.

It takes about four years to get halfway over an ex, but some never do

What did the scientists find out? In the long run, the emotional bond to ex-partner reached zero in the statistical models. This is good news for anyone struggling with a messy breakup: The data show that at some point, almost all people really “get over” their exes fully and do not have a stronger emotional bond to them than to a stranger on the street.

However, the time it takes to get to this point is surprisingly long. It takes about 4.18 years to reach the halfway point of dissolving the emotional bond to an ex. While this suggests that the emotional bond to an ex is, on average, fully dissolved around 8 years, the individual variation was large, and, for a few volunteers, the emotional bond to an ex was higher than that to a stranger even many years later. Thus, among a few select people, the emotional bond to an ex never fades fully.

The scientists also analyzed which factors affected getting over an ex-partner. Interestingly, being in a new relationship and gender did not affect how quickly the emotional bond to the ex-partner faded.

The most important factor in predicting a continued emotional bond to the ex was if someone continued to have contact with their ex. Moreover, very anxious people tended to have longer-lasting bonds with their exes. Having children with the ex-partner resulted in an initially stronger emotional bond, which faded more quickly than for childless ex-partners.