Conventional wisdom says you should take time to process a breakup before you start a new romance. Research suggests the opposite.
“Rebound relationships” have a terrible reputation. A romance ignited shortly after another ends seems chaotic-like an opportunistic ricochet rather than an intentional search for compatibility. And people dating someone who’s fresh off a breakup are told to be wary-of being used as a distraction, or being treated carelessly by someone fumbling through their own heartache. But research doesn’t seem to support the idea that rebound relationships are inherently toxic or doomed to fail.
Perhaps that sounds unromantic, but according to Hackney, it’s healthy to be reminded-promptly-“how many people we really can have fulfilling relationships with
When someone fresh from a split starts dating, it’s true that they might not be totally over their ex. In one study of participants recovering from breakups, those who’d found a new partner were more confident in their own desirability, more trusting of other people, and less likely to say that they still had feelings for their old partner. Another examined rebounders who’d been in their new relationships for a year and a half on average. The quicker those subjects had jumped into that rebound, the higher they rated on measures of well-being and self-esteem.
Amy Hackney, a psychology professor at Georgia Southern University, found something similar when she investigated what helped college students get over breakups. “The sooner they began dating someone new, the faster that they felt that they had recovered from that prior relationship,” she told me. Although that might conflict with conventional wisdom, she thinks it fits with basic social psychology: A partner provides validation, care, and companionship, and when they go away, there’s no reason someone else can’t take their place. ”
Rebounding can be especially helpful for certain people. Men, for instance, are more likely than women to believe in the idea of a one-and-only soulmate, and they tend to remain more emotionally attached after a breakup to their ex; they also have less social support than women do, on average, to help them mend. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, they’re more likely than women to enter into rebound relationships. People with an anxious attachment style, who long for validation and fear abandonment, also tend to struggle with letting go of exes; pivoting to someone new can help them detach from an old partner, researchers have found, which can lead to growth-developing new interests, connecting with others, gaining confidence and independence.
As valuable as rebounds can be for the brokenhearted, they can still be destructive for the other person-say, if the rebounder isn’t open about being preoccupied with an ex, or relies too heavily on their new partner for solace. But the experts I spoke with said they wouldn’t assume that one partner’s progress comes at the expense of the other’s feelings, or that a new relationship is less meaningful if it comes on the heels of an old one. Cassie Shimek, a communication professor at Northern Virginia Community College, told me that when she started studying rebound relationships, she expected to find bonds that were largely superficial-but she was startled by how many blossomed into long-term partnerships.
She thinks that rebounds are really a phase, rather than a category, of relationships; if in the beginning one partner is processing a breakup, that might not mean much about the couple’s future. Indeed, one study found no link between the time since a woman’s divorce and the success of her next marriage. The author of that study, Nicholas Wolfinger-now a sociology professor at the University of Utah-summed it up bluntly: “There is no rebound effect.”
But new relationships can help people move on from old ones
That doesn’t mean that every rebound relationship will work out. But of course, any romance carries the risk of deteriorating; every partner brings some sort of emotional baggage, and every new experience is shaped by past ones. We don’t have the luxury of neatly resolving all of our old hang-ups before moving forward, arriving in our next relationship as a clean slate.
Why, then, are people so skeptical of rebounds? Wolfinger believes that when people advise pausing after a breakup, it’s a way of acknowledging how important relationships are, and how major it is when one dissolves. The mistake comes in thinking that healing happens in a vacuum. “What does ‘sitting with my pain’ mean?” Wolfinger asked me aloud. “It means I sit in a darkened room and think about my loss?” That doesn’t strike him as realistic. “Human life,” he told me, “is a series of going from one distraction to the next.”
Kathrine Bejanyan, a psychologist who has studied rebounds and now works as a relationship counselor, told me that clients frequently ask her whether they’d be wrong to start dating shortly after a breakup, or simply before they feel that they’re “ready.” In rare cases, she said, when people have “heavy traumas” that they need to address on their own, it’s not a bad idea to take a breather. But she tells most people to go right ahead; after all, she noted, “We’re never finished products.” Whatever her clients are working on in their sessions-say, setting boundaries, or being more vulnerable-can really only be practiced in the real world, in relationships with other people. Past entanglements, however recent, don’t make you less fit for a new love; they actually might make you more prepared, because you learn from them.
When I asked experts how people can try to rebound thoughtfully, some said the key is probably just honesty-being upfront about your breakup and its ongoing relevance. Your new love interest should understand, Shimek told me: Relationships that are important to us are rarely fully forgotten. “To expect us to completely shut the door on past feelings for someone who we had a strong, committed relationship with … That doesn’t make sense,” she said.
She believes that the rebounds that succeed are likely to be the ones that involve reciprocal emotional support: The rebounder leans on their new partner, and the new partner can be vulnerable too. That’s something she’s picked up on in her research-and in her own life. At one point, the man she was seeing opened up about his previous relationship, and she realized that she herself was in a rebound. “I welcomed the conversation,” she told me. “I didn’t shut it down.”
Today, they’re happily married. And when she teaches classes, getbride.org web she tells her students that partners don’t need to be damage free and completely self-sufficient in order to find a happy relationship. They just need to complement each other.