While each situation is different, there are a variety of reasons why relationships don't go the distance. The main reasons why relationships fail are loss of trust, poor communication, lack of respect, a difference in priorities, and little intimacy.
Infidelity
Relationship breakup statistics in the Journal of Marriage and Divorce report that 70% of Americans will engage in some form of infidelity at some point during their marriage. Further studies reveal that infidelity is one of the most common reasons people break up.
As respect, attention, and kindness wane, so can feelings of love. Even more concerning, partners too often let their guard down and stop being considerate to each other. When couples are no longer sensitive and protective toward one another, their relationship suffers from negative energy and neglect.
And while there are many natural reasons why relationships don't work out – timing, diverging growth trajectories, differing values, and so on – there are three avoidable reasons that will cause any relationship to fail: non-acceptance, lack of trust, and poor communication.
New research shows that relationships are actually more vulnerable to demise far sooner than the dreaded seven year itch. The most common time for a couple to split is right around the two year mark. By then, you've most likely seen everything about your partner—their best and their worst physically and emotionally.
Basically, after a break-up, the three-month rule is a rule that says you and your ex are both given 3 months before entering the dating scene again. Just waiting it out, and mourning that your relationship ended. Just go on with your individual separate lives and see what happens.
In that time, I've noticed something: the prime number years of relationships are often the hardest (i.e. 1, 3. 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29…) Often, it seems these years correspond with significant transitions and pressure points in marriage.
The most common reasons for breakups usually include fading feelings, infidelity, a lack of effort, a loss of trust, and a pattern of unproductive, unhealthy fights.
6. Almost 50 percent of all marriages in the United States will end in divorce or separation. 7. Researchers estimate that 41 percent of all first marriages end in divorce.
The average relationship length is 2 years and 9 months. A long-term relationship is 2+ years long. 70% of relationships fail in the first year. 79% of people that end their relationships were actively using social media.
In fact, researchers found that men thought about confessing love six weeks earlier, on average, than women. The general consensus among studies on love is that men fall in love faster than women.
Every couple argues. It's only natural for disagreements to arise, even in the happiest and healthiest relationships. But how much is too much fighting in a relationship? First things first: There's no “average amount of times” couples should argue.
While it is established that about half of all marriages end in divorce, it is commonly assumed that the breakups are initiated by both genders equally. In fact, it is surprising to most people that women are actually more likely to end their marriages than men.
The seven-year itch is the idea that after seven years in a relationship, whether that's as a married couple or cohabitees, we start to become restless. Bored perhaps. Everything begins to feel a little bit mundane or routine. Anecdotally, it's said we're more likely to go our separate ways around this time.
If you've ever wondered who the dumper in the average US long term couple is, breakup statistics say that women are more likely to call it quits than men. 76% of women said that they had ended the relationship, just like 62% of men. Women might end things more often, but they also feel more pain after.
While it's true that many relationships end before the age of 30, there is no reliable data or study that supports the claim that 90% of relationships before the age of 30 will necessarily end, which makes it difficult to determine the exact percentage.
While there are countless divorce studies with conflicting statistics, the data points to two periods during a marriage when divorces are most common: years 1 – 2 and years 5 – 8. Of those two high-risk periods, there are two years in particular that stand out as the most common years for divorce — years 7 and 8.
There was a fairly significant gender difference, with women claiming around six ex-partners and men around eight. In general, there seems to be a pervasive tendency for women to report having fewer opposite-sex partners than men do.
The likelihood of happily forever after
The results showed that the majority of people (70.8%) did not get back together with their ex at all. About 14% reconciled then broke up again, and about 15% got back together and stayed together.
Cheating, technology and the cost of living crisis are some of the biggest factors in relationship break-ups in 2023, experts say.
Key points. Repeated ending and renewing of a relationship is often called relationship cycling. Cycling appears to be very common in couples. The poor relationship quality characteristic of cycling during dating relationships may persist into cohabitation and marriage.
That's how the term “seven-year itch” was born. “It's now used as a catchall term to describe feeling dissatisfied or restless in a relationship at or around the seven-year mark,” Dr. Borland explains.
Couples with an age gap of 1 to 3 years (with the man older than the woman) were the most common and had the greatest levels of satisfaction. Relationship satisfaction decreased slightly for couples with age gaps of 4 to 6 years and continued to decrease for couples with an age gap of 7 or more years.
Stonewalling is when a person in a relationship withdraws from an interaction, shuts down, and simply stops responding to their partner. Rather than confronting the issue, people who stonewall resort to evasive maneuvers.