“I was one of those who said that once the relationship ends, it’s over. That there are no second chances. But it’s not all that simple. It depends a lot on each situation,” says Gema Llorens, 24 years old. About eight months ago, she decided to try again with her ex-partner, after five months apart. When is it worth giving a second chance at love?
For Gema, the most important thing is the reasons why she left that relationship in the first place. “I don’t feel like I could go back to someone who has cheated on me, for example,” she says. In her case, there were no third parties involved. They separated after two years of relationship, when her partner went through a “quite strong period of depression,” says Gema and explains: “My partner is a singer. On stage and with people she was a very happy person, but when she got home she went off. I was his trusted person, with whom he could show how he felt at that moment. But for me it was difficult to understand that the problem was not with me. That ended up affecting me a lot. I spent the last month crying every day, and that didn’t help his situation. He decided to stay away from me so as not to hurt me.”
A few months later, “he realized that the solution was not to leave him.” Gema felt that there was a very strong commitment to recover what was lost. She “started to do everything on her side. At first I didn’t want to know anything. When you’ve already fought so hard for a relationship, you burn out. But, as much as I wanted to deny it, I always knew that I wanted to be with him,” says Gema. Even though she was about to go live in Norway, about 3,000 kilometers away, she jumped into the pool. “I saw that we both had clear ideas,” she explains.
“Little by little, we are getting closer again, but in a different way,” says Elena (this is not her real name), 62, and explains: “I don’t want to get back what I had before, because I’m not the one.” same person. “I don’t want the same.” She and her partner are united by more than thirty years of shared history and two children in common.
About eight years ago, they went through a “very strong crisis,” which led them to even live apart for a time. “Right now, we are doing couples therapy, which is helping a lot. There comes a point where you want to put your anger aside,” she says and assures: “At the same time, I want to start over. We are trying to recover something, but in a different way, always with a little distance and respecting my individuality, which is sometimes lost a little in the family context and which with the crisis I have been able to rediscover.”
What led them to slowly rebuild their bond was not a conscious decision to give themselves a second chance. “It was not about deciding to give him a second chance, but rather there was a need to clarify things. We did not start therapy with the idea of ??necessarily saving the couple, but of recovering something positive, even if it was just a friendship, and that if we left it it would not be out of anger but in a more conscious and good way,” she explains.
“Sometimes when a relationship is very worn out, trying to revive it can simply be prolonging the inevitable. But in other cases, like mine, it can result in a happy ending,” says Blanca Victoria Álvarez Garcia, 27 years old. She began her current relationship two years ago. The distance – she lives in León and he in Miami – meant that at one point her partner suggested that perhaps the best thing would be to end the relationship.
“It left me devastated. But after a brief period of silence, she contacted me again. “She missed me and wanted to try again,” she explains, adding, “I decided to give her that second chance, and since then, I have been incredibly happy. I always say that he who does not risk does not win.”
The second chance that Jorge Melli (43) and Pilar Domínguez gave each other is like a movie. They were dating when they were 16 years old. They had been together for almost a year but, after spending the entire summer apart, the relationship cooled and they decided to call it quits. In the following years, they lost contact. They met again almost 25 years later, by complete chance.
Jorge is a civil guard and decided to accompany some of his classmates to a talk at a school in his town. “We were inside the class. The classmates were going to start the talk and, at that moment, she entered through the door. She told me: What are you doing here? And we gave each other a hug,” he remembers. Although Pilar worked there, she really wasn’t supposed to go to that class. She seemed like a work of fate. The conversation continued on Facebook, then on WhatsApp, then in a cafe and, after a hiatus due to the pandemic, they never separated again.
Today they live together, with the children she had with her previous partner. “From the beginning, it was like no years had passed. It is incredible that he ended up meeting her again, after so much time,” says Jorge and confesses: “I always had her in mind. During the years we lost contact, I remembered her because she was my first serious girlfriend. Although we didn’t talk, every now and then I would look up her on Facebook to see how she was doing. I found out that she had gotten married from a photo. She never completely left my mind.”
The psychologist and director of the Couples Therapy Unit at the Centta Institute, Silvia Cintrano, warns that “it is difficult to consider in which cases a clear yes would be proposed to give a second chance in a relationship, since many factors come into play and it is “a very personal decision.” But for her, “there are predisposing signs in which it would be beneficial to consider it.”
First of all, there must be a willingness to change, to understand what went wrong, what responsibility one has in what happened and position oneself as an agent of change. There should also be good communication, commitment and a solid foundation in the relationship, being sure of the foundations that support it.
“Giving second chances can work out,” says psychologist Andrea García-Paredes. This is something that she has not only seen in her consultation but in her own experience. She and her husband have known each other since they were teenagers but they were not always on the same page. “We have always been friends with benefits until we were 23, which was when I fell in love with him. We had many comings and goings. It was a very intense relationship but it didn’t work,” she explains. So, they decided to leave it. Five years later, they tried again. “We are reunited with maturity and clear things. Today we have the healthiest and most stable relationship I have ever had,” she says. They have been together for five years and married for one.
In these cases, he considers, “it is important to listen to our intuition and not confuse it with our emotional needs.” Another good indicator to know if it is best to give a second chance is time, and what has been done in that time. “Has enough time passed for there to be a maturity of thought, a cognitive change in both that helps them change their perspective on conflicts, or for those reasons for rupture to disappear? Have the factors that destroyed the relationship in the first place been worked on or resolved?” asks the psychologist.
Another good sign to take that step is to have more certainties than doubts. “If we start a relationship with mistrust, fear and alarm, our body will be on alert and we will not be able to appreciate the good moments,” he says. There are cases where giving a second chance is not usually the best idea: “In which enough time has not passed for the reasons for the breakup to be worked on or changed or in which it is no longer the second, but the third, the fourth or more chance,” says García-Paredes.
For Beatriz ‘Trice’ Medina (24), giving a former partner a second chance was a mistake. “I think that when you give someone a second chance, there has to be an awareness of what has happened, assuming the mistakes and working on them. In my case, the decision was more linked to emotionality, missing that person. We do not comply with that zero contact process that must be gone through,” she explains about the experience she lived almost three years ago. “When we tried it again without having solved anything, what really happened was that the mistakes from the beginning kept repeating themselves and new mistakes were made. A ball formed that was difficult to solve,” she says.
Giving a second chance “to get that pimple out” can be counterproductive. “It did help me say ‘Never again’ with that person. But there is a phrase that I always say, which is that you never give someone the opportunity to destroy you twice, once is enough,” says Trice and adds: “I had to go through a second duel and it was much more painful than first. I don’t know to what extent that’s worth it.”
For her, before making the decision to return to an ex-partner, it is essential to have implemented “zero contact”, that is, breaking all types of communication or contact with that person. “It is a step that we cannot skip. If you don’t do it, you will never see things from a cold point of view. And I think that’s the issue, that many people make these types of decisions because they don’t want to grieve, because of that fear that the other person will forget about one…but if it’s really your person, it will also be your person in two or three months. three years,” says Trice and adds: “Even though it turned out badly for me in this case, I do believe in second chances. But I think it’s important to first give yourself space to heal and really see what you want without that emotionality in the way.”
“It is a complicated process in which you try to make the best decision from a rational perspective, but it is tremendously influenced by emotions, loyalty, common history, and affection. It is not easy to reach conclusions,” says Silvia Cintrano.
What can help in that process? “Trying to put your ideas in order: making decisions based on current needs and the future plan will be what makes the process easier. In addition, seeking external help and support, feeling accompanied and understood, without judgment, will calm stress due to the state of uncertainty. To do this, individual or couples therapy can provide that safe space for reflection, support and presentation of different points of view to make the best decision or, at least, the one that feels most caring for you,” says Cintrano.
Something that can help in these situations, says psychologist Andrea García-Paredes, is to ask yourself the following questions before making a decision: What are we going to do to make it different from the last time? Do I trust the relationship? Do I feel capable of accepting another failure in the relationship? It can also be useful to make lists of “pros and cons”, of the reasons for the breakup to know what the problem(s) were, and of the certainties that demonstrate that these reasons will not interfere again.
Although Gema feels that her relationship is at its best today, she does not believe that second chances are necessarily always the best path. “Although this time it turned out well, I think second chances have to be thought about very carefully, it’s not just anything,” she says and adds: “There has to be a lot of communication. In our case, we both went to therapy, there was a lot of work. It is important to give yourself space, think things through and not be guided by impulses, because there are people who may return due to simple dependency and that does not work.”
“I am in favor of second chances, but it depends a lot on the circumstances. In my case it has worked and we are very well. But it depends a lot on how the breakup was in the first part of the relationship,” says Jorge and points out: “In our case, the relationship simply cooled down, we decided that it was not going well and we decided to leave it. We didn’t end badly. Maybe if we had continued now we wouldn’t be together, you never know.”
