Valentine’s Day: Do You Need to Evaluate Your Relationship?

With Valentine's Day fast approaching, it's easy to get sucked into all the hype about romance. As someone who studies relationships and communication, I can say one trend that's growing is the on-again/off-again relationship between partners, especially among millennials. It seems we all know people who are one day "on" with their significant other, and the next day they are "off." Researchers define it as relationships that break up and renew one or more times. In fact, the numbers suggest that on-off relationships might be becoming the norm rather than the exception. Statistics show that two-thirds of us experience at least one on-again/off-again dating relationship. And about one-third of the people reading this right now are currently in, or their most recent relationship was, an on-off relationship. Even a third of marriages had an on-off nature during courtship, and the instability can be carried forward into the marriage.