They leave, they come back, and you expect nothing now
They leave and come back with no warning, and you expect nothing now. The signs of an on-and-off relationship, why the cycle holds, and what to do today.
Ricardo De Castro KingPsychologist · Meet the author 
It is twenty to midnight on a Tuesday. The phone lies face down on the table, next to a glass of water that has gone warm. It buzzes once. You turn it over with your thumb: the message is one word, “hey”. They have not written in four days and you have spent four days checking the screen every time it goes dark. You answer in under a minute and then sit still, with your thumb over the screen, no longer expecting anything in particular from the next few weeks.
That is where people in an on-and-off relationship live. It is not the place of someone who just broke up: it is the place of someone who has already ended it three times and gone back three times, and knows that the word “hey” announces nothing good and nothing bad. It only announces that the cycle is still running.
Direct answer. An on-and-off relationship has recognisable signs: breakups nobody decides but that slowly happen, returns with no concrete change, a status that never gets named, and a waiting that takes more mental time than the relationship itself. Naming them does not force you to walk away. It moves you out of not knowing what to expect.
1. Twenty to midnight
The water went warm because you had been sitting at that table since nine. The phone buzzed and your stomach moved before you read a single word, and that detail matters: your body reacted to the possibility of a message, not to the message. When you finally read it, the word is short, neutral, and could mean five different things. You answer fast anyway, because leaving them waiting feels like losing an opportunity you cannot name.
There is the first symptom, and it is the hardest one to see from the inside: uncertainty became part of the relationship. It is not a problem that shows up now and then between two people who care about each other. It is the weather they move in, including on the good days.
The second thing on that table is time. Four days of checking the phone are four days of attention placed on someone who is not there. Nobody counts that as lost time because it does not hurt the way a breakup hurts. It feels like a normal life with a hum underneath it.
The third is the question you have been asking yourself for months with no answer: is this going anywhere? It is the right question in the wrong place. Until the status of the relationship gets named, no answer you give yourself will last more than a week, because the ground shifts every time one of you changes their mind.
2. Myth 1: “They came back, so they love me”
Here is what that reasoning leaves out. That wanting and sustaining are different things. That a person can genuinely miss you and still not be available for what a relationship actually asks for: time, decisions, uncomfortable conversations, a place in their week that does not move. The story that they came back for love says nothing about those four things.
The second effect of the myth is worse than the first. If the return proves the love, then you are the one who doubts. You start measuring yourself against an impossible ruler: you have an unstable relationship, and the blame for the instability moves to your side of the table. Every new cycle starts with you apologising for having doubted.
What is left at the bottom of the glass is a sentence that sounds generous and costs a lot: “as long as they come back, there is something”. There is something, yes. What you have to look at is whether that something is enough to live on, and a message does not answer that question.
What if they really do love me but cannot be in it?
It can be true and it changes nothing you can do. The sentence “they love me but cannot” is true thousands of times and settles none of them: a relationship is held up by available capacity, not by feeling measured in messages. If the other person cannot today, the cycle in your hands still exists, and the decision you are left with is what to do with your week while that capacity appears or does not.
3. Myth 2: “It settles on its own, it is a phase”
Applied to a cycle that has already repeated three times, the myth pulls a trick: it turns a pattern into a phase. They are different things. A phase ends because you move through it. A pattern repeats precisely because you never move through it: it comes back whenever the same conditions appear, and those conditions are almost never sentimental. They are practical.
The real conditions are duller than the myth. It breaks when one of you moves city, changes job, enters a month of exams or has a relative fall ill. It comes back when the other one is free, when there is a move back, when a Sunday feels too lonely. That is the grammar of the cycle: it is not a couple’s crisis, it is a relationship that switches on when there is room available and switches off when the room closes.
That is why “it settles on its own” does not work. What settles on its own is the habit of returning. If nobody changes anything, the next complicated month will switch the relationship off just the same, and when that month ends it will come back, with the same short message and the same night of waiting.
There is a quick way to tell whether you are facing a phase or a pattern. Ask yourself if the change you are waiting for has a date and has an owner. A phase is left behind with locatable decisions: quitting the job that drains you, moving, starting therapy, talking to the family. A pattern is left behind with a decision about the status of the relationship: either it gets named, or it gets closed. If there is no date and no owner, what you are waiting for is not maturity. It is the next chapter.
| What gets said | What it promises | What it leaves inside |
|---|---|---|
| ”They came back, so they love me” | Proof of love in every return | Every doubt of yours becomes a flaw of yours |
| ”It is a phase, it settles” | Patience and maturity | The same cycle with a different date |
| ”The problem is I cannot decide” | Control over the situation | The whole responsibility stays on your side |
| ”Better not to talk about labels” | Avoiding the fight | A status nobody can name or care for |
The third column is where this shows. All four myths make the same move: they hand you back the responsibility and take away the information.
4. Myth 3: “The problem is that I cannot decide”
What it leaves out is simple. Deciding requires a status for the relationship, and that status is defined by the couple, not by one person alone. You can decide with all your strength that you want a steady relationship with someone who comes back every three weeks and leaves every six. Your decision does not produce the change you are after, because the other half of the system is not at the table.
There is a way to check whether the myth has you. Go through your last decisions about this relationship and ask whether any of them was about the status or whether all of them were about how you were going to react. Almost always the result is this: you decided not to answer so fast, not to beg, to wait longer before replying. Those are real decisions and they are all about your reaction. None of them says what this is.
The trouble with decisions about your reaction is that they run out. Every time you decide “this time I will not run”, the first week passes, the message arrives and you run all the same. After four rounds, you stop believing your own decisions. Not because you are weak, but because you were deciding about the only thing that does not move the cycle.
The decision that does move something is different: naming the status of the relationship, out loud, with the other person in front of you. That does not guarantee an outcome. It guarantees that the cycle stops being a silent deal nobody ever mentions.
5. Myth 4: “If I cut contact, it is solved”
The last myth is the one most people use to get out, and it fails too. It says all you need is to block, delete the number, take down the photos. Something in that is true: cutting contact lowers the noise. What it does not do is end the relationship, because an intermittent relationship lives more on what was never said than on what was said.
When the cut is only about contact, the head keeps working. The scenes that never happened start showing up: the conversation you never had, the explanation you never asked for, the last word that never got said. That is why many people break the block two months later, not for lack of will, but because the matter stayed open inside them.
| Getting out by | What it fixes | What it leaves open |
|---|---|---|
| Blocking the contact | The immediate noise, the wait for a message | The conversation that never happened |
| Deleting the photos | Easy access to the memory | The scenes the mind completes on its own |
| Finding someone else | The feeling of being alive | The cycle, with another person in the middle |
| Naming what it was | The relationship, for real | Little: ordinary grief remains, and that one closes |
The fourth row is the only one that touches the status of the relationship instead of touching access.
What if I already tried to close it and they wrote again?
Them writing again does not erase the closing you did. The sentence that matters is not “do not contact me”, because that one depends on the other person; it is “I have already closed this”, which depends on you and stands on its own. Answering does not mean going back. It means there is something unresolved on your side, and that can be worked on, with the person in front of you or with someone else.
6. What the evidence does support
The research on these relationships does not say the back-and-forth is an illness or a proof of love. It says something more useful: there are measurable differences between living in a steady relationship and living in one that switches off and on, and the differences are not in the intensity of the feeling. They are in the uncertainty, the commitment and the work the bond demands.
The first study compared couples who had got back together with couples who had never broken up, and found that the on-again/off-again ones stand apart through more uncertainty about the future, a less firm commitment and a heavier maintenance load. They are not relationships with less love: they are relationships with less ground under them (DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-6811.2009.01208.x).
The second piece of work followed the same line and sharpened it: relational maintenance, uncertainty and commitment vary by the type of relationship and by the status it is in at that moment. That explains something people inside the cycle recognise at once: the same couple feels different in the reconciliation phase and in the waiting phase. The love did not change, the status did (DOI: 10.1080/03637750903514292).
7. The signs to read in yourself
The first is the scanning. You check the phone for no reason, look at the last seen time, open the chat to see if anything changed. Scanning has a clear signature: it produces no new information and you repeat it anyway. It is the mental version of opening the fridge every fifteen minutes.
The second is the bookkeeping. You start keeping score of who wrote first, how many days went by, who cancelled the last plan. In a steady relationship the score shows up during fights and then goes. In a back-and-forth it stays up like a dashboard.
The third is the parallel schedule. You keep weekends free “just in case”, you do not accept a plan until Thursday, you stay in town when you could travel. It is the most expensive sign and the least noticed, because each decision looks small and together they are a life on hold.
The fourth is the body. Sleep breaks up, focus drops, there is a low hum of tension that shows up every time the subject comes near. It is anxiety tied to a relationship that is unresolved, and it drops when the relationship gets named or closed, even when that hurts.
| The sign | How it looks today | What it is telling you |
|---|---|---|
| Repeated scanning | You open the phone when nothing arrived | Uncertainty takes your attention without giving data |
| Bookkeeping running | You know who wrote first this week | Commitment is in dispute, not in motion |
| The parallel schedule | You keep the weekend free “just in case” | Your life is waiting on someone else’s decision |
| The body on alert | You sleep badly and cannot focus | The cycle already has a visible cost |
| The prepared explanation | You have the line ready for if they come back | You are holding the cycle up from your side |
That final row is the one hardly anyone reads as a sign, and it is the clearest one: if you already have the answer ready for a message that has not arrived, the cycle is not ending inside you.
8. The exercise: the status on one sheet
Set aside twenty minutes, a sheet of paper and a pencil for this one. Night is the best stretch, because by then you are not going to write to anyone.
- Write the status of the relationship in one sentence. Not what you wish it were or what you were told: what it is today, in the words you would use with a friend who does not know the story. If it does not come out, that is the first piece of data.
- Count the breakups and the returns of the last two years. Exact number. Two figures are enough to know whether this is a crisis or a mechanism.
- Next to each return, write what had changed before it. A move, a new job, a free month, a family fight. If no concrete change shows up, the return was only time.
- Mark the three things you stopped doing to keep the cycle going. A trip, a course, a friendship, a space of your own. The parallel schedule shows up only when you write it down.
- Write the question you are going to ask out loud. Short and without accusation: “what are we today?” or “is this going to have a name this month?”. Write it down as you would say it and rehearse it once, speaking.
- Pick the date on which you will ask it. Within seven days, with a time. A question without a date is an intention, and intentions do not move a cycle.
- Decide what you will do with each possible answer. If it is yes, what changes from Monday. If it is no, how you will take care of yourself that week. That is what keeps the answer from catching you unprepared.
Twenty minutes. If it takes longer, you are negotiating with the sheet, and negotiating is what the cycle does inside your head. Close it at twenty.
One thing worth saying out loud: no single sheet reaches every person the same way. When the back and forth carries years of family history behind it, twenty minutes of paper fall short, and there comes a point where somebody trained in this counts for more than any list. The sheet puts in order what you already carry. It is not a substitute for treatment when the case demands one.
9. Andrés’s case, 41, mid-career
Andrés is 41 and works at a mid-sized publishing house. He joined six years ago as an analyst and for two years now has run a team of nine. He is at the point where the career asks for a decision: stay and grow in the same company or jump to another city for a better role. At that same point, for four years, is Valentina.
Andrés’s cycle has a simple grammar and it is always the same: they reactivate every time one of them changes city or job. When he got the offer in Medellín, they talked for three nights straight and agreed to try. He left. Four months in, the messages slowed, two weeks of silence followed and the end was said over the phone. A year later, when Valentina changed company and moved back to Bogotá, the short message appeared and it started again, with more intensity than the first time.
| What Andrés said | What it looked like from outside | What was actually happening |
|---|---|---|
| ”We love each other, we just never coincide” | Two people with bad luck | The cycle depended on geography |
| ”This time it will be different” | Reasonable hope | The return brought no concrete change |
| ”I put the master’s on hold” | A decision about time | Parallel schedule: he stopped moving in case she came back |
| ”I have the answer ready for when she writes” | Being prepared | The cycle stayed open on his side |
| ”It is not that serious, we are fine like this” | A quiet arrangement | A status nobody was naming or caring for |
The conversation was not calm and it did not end in agreement. What did happen is that the status of the relationship stopped being an assumption. Andrés said the figure out loud and asked whether she was willing to give this a name and a plan, or whether she preferred him to get on with his life. Valentina asked for a few days. The answer came back with a concrete proposal: stop reactivating the relationship every time someone moved, and sustain it only if both of them were willing to decide about the same city.
10. Returns that add and returns that reset
The first is rare and recognisable. It arrives after a long stretch, with a conversation about what will be different and with at least one verifiable change: a decision about the city, an agreement about time, therapy started, a commitment you can see on the calendar. It does not guarantee that it will work. It guarantees that it is another attempt and not a repeat of the previous one.
| What changes in the return | A return that adds | A return that resets |
|---|---|---|
| The conversation before | The cause of the breakup gets discussed | The two of you discuss how much you missed each other |
| What it brings | A verifiable change with a date | An impulse and a long night |
| The status of the relationship | It gets named and cared for | It stays as it was: unnamed |
| The next crisis | You see it coming and talk about it | It arrives the same, from the same cause |
| At the end | A different attempt | The same cycle with a new date |
What if the verifiable change never comes because you are both so busy?
Being busy explains the delay, not the absence. A busy couple can still decide four concrete things in a twenty-minute conversation: which city you are in, how often you see each other, what happens when one of you moves, and who is allowed to know you are together. If after three attempts at that conversation none of the four is there, the problem is not free time. It is that the status of the relationship is comfortable as it is.
11. Crisis box — if you are in crisis NOW
If this is a crisis right now, if you have thoughts of hurting yourself or someone else, or if an argument in this relationship went far enough to put someone at risk, close this page and call.
- Colombia: Line 123 (national emergency) · Line 106 (mental health)
- United States: 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline)
- United Kingdom: 116 123 (Samaritans)
Nothing has to be at risk for those lines to be for you. An on-and-off relationship leaves some very long nights, and on a few of them what helps is a person at the other end who does not dismiss you as overreacting and does not rush you to be fine. Calling for that reason counts too.
12. The question you left open for months
Let us go back to the Tuesday at twenty to midnight, to the warm glass of water and to that one-word message.
The question you have been asking yourself for months was not “do they love me?”. It was another one, less romantic and more yours: what am I in this?. Until the status of the relationship has a name, that question has no answer, however long you stare at the phone.
What I cannot give you is the answer. Whether the other person said yes or no, whether the cycle closes this week or runs another year, is not something this piece decides. What it decides is smaller and more useful: that you stop holding the cycle up without knowing you are holding it. The question at the end is this one, and now you can answer it: how much of your week is placed on a relationship that still has no name?
The on-and-off relationships hub carries on with what does not fit on this page, and the interactive tools turn what you just read into today’s practice. If yours is the case of the return and you cannot understand why you go back, that is in why we go back to the same person; and if the signs are already in front of you and only the decision is missing, it is in go back or close it. To place yourself with more precision, you can take an on-and-off relationships test that draws your situation into a result, without closing any diagnosis. And if the cycle runs a long way back and returns every few months, therapy at rdkterapia may be the next step.
