Psychology Today43%
Six Ways to Find Closure When a Relationship Ends 17%
By Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD32% ABPP36%
6/13/2026, 2:33:53 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Authority, Optimism Bias, and Negativity Bias, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 27% saturation with 328 hits. Analysis detected 1,912 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,216 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 32.2% and a BS Rank of 17% (18,341 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 83.80% of the article peer group.
Susan Krauss Whitbourne PhD, ABPP
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The ending of a relationship is associated with a range of negative feelings that can prevent getting closure.
A new study identifies six pathways to closure that can allow those who are left with a sense of meaning.
By moving from shutting out to letting in, you will be more likely to find fulfilling new relationships.
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Relationships are at the very heart of an individual’s ability to manage life’s many challenges.
Being close to another person, especially in a committed relationship, allows you to have someone with whom to share your experiences, and also to gain greater solidity in your sense of self.
Nora and Tony were together for three decades, raising their family and living in what both would be a “forever” situation.
However, Nora began to wonder if perhaps Tony was growing more distant.
In fact, Tony was becoming more involved with someone at work, and sure enough, let Nora know that it was time to end things.
She was devastated.
The Need for Closure in Relationship Endings
According to University of Haifa’s David Roe and colleagues (2026), when a long-term romantic relationship comes to an end, this involves “not only re-experiencing past losses but redefining one’s self-concept , especially those that were intertwined with the partner” (p.
1).
Nora had never stopped to pause and reflect on how much of her identity was defined through her love for Tony.
She could barely imagine a time when her thoughts and actions didn’t in some way include him.
Roe et al. believe that the aftermath of a relationship ending can bring with it unresolved conflicts, or what they call ‘unfinished business.”
Everyone experiences a yearning for a past partner to a certain extent, but eventually these feelings become resolved.
This process becomes particularly painful for people high in attachment anxiety , or the fear of being neglected and left alone by the person or people who care for you.
Nora never thought of herself as falling into this category, but now she’s starting to wonder.
Using what the authors call “meaning making frameworks,” closure is possible to achieve as the now broken-apart couple members each strive to come up with a “coherent personal story” that incorporates what happened into a broader sense of self.
However, not everyone gets there the same way.
Six Pathways to Closure
Using a subset of 859 adults (mean age 30 years) from an earlier survey of romantic breakups, the authors assessed the extent to which their participants achieved closure through a statistically-derived 14 item scale.
Sample items from this scale included “To what extent do you imagine being together with your ex?,” and “To what extent do you imagine being held by him/her?”
At the end of the survey, the authors also included two open-ended questions: “Looking back, what would you say [X] ‘left you’ with?”
and “To what extent do you imagine being held by him/her?”
After coding the responses and checking them for reliability among raters, the authors generated six prominent themes, with each open-ended response being scored for its one overarching meaning.
These are the six themes, with their percentages included in parentheses:
General personal growth (25%)
In this theme, respondents stated that they were changed for the better by their ex, such as changing “the entire trajectory of my life.”
Development in the realm of intimate relationships (23%)
People expressing this theme felt that they learned about love and intimacy, such as not settling “for anything less than what I deserve in a relationship.”
Positive experiences (9%)
In this theme, no specific mention was made of growth, but instead respondents reflected back on how much the relationship meant to them, such as “he was my once in a lifetime.”
Mixed experiences (16%)
This theme, as the term implies, included reflections on positive and negative aspects of the past relationship, such as “the greatest love and heartbreak of my life.”
As the authors note, people mentioning this theme held both “realities” simultaneously without putting them together in some kind of growth narrative.
Negative experiences, but with lessons learned (16%)
As is true for many stressful experiences in life, one way to move on is to derive meaning from this particular “adversity,” in the words of the authors.
People who expressed this theme felt that would now be more aware of red flags in a new relationship, or felt that they were “stronger than I thought I was.”
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Negative experiences (without growth) (22%)
This large percentage of responses reflected, as the authors note, “a relationship you are still trying to recover from.”
Some of the feelings expressed by these responses included a range of negative emotions such as guilt , shame , anger , and rage as well as financial distress.
The authors derived an overall “closure factor” from the closure scale whose mean was 3.9 (out of 7), signifying that although most people did achieve some form of closure, there were lingering loose ends.
As the authors expected, closure scales were lower among people whose open-ended responses were entirely negative without mentioning growth or lessons learned.
Surprisingly, though, closure scores were not as strongly related to any of the positive themes as they were to negative with lessons learned.
Higher attachment anxiety was also associated with lower closure scores.
Anxiously attached individuals, the authors concluded, never stop yearning.
Moving on Without Shutting Out
Although relationship breakups cause pain and emotional wounds, rather than suppressing these feelings, people are more likely to achieve closure if they put their feelings in the larger perspective of their lives.
Returning to Nora’s case, there’s no doubt she would rather that the ending of her relationship with Tony would not have happened.
However, she will benefit over time in achieving closure if she is able eventually to see how their relationship changed her in positive ways.
They did have their family, many enjoyable times, and learned from each other both emotional truths as well as the many practical ways that couples make it through their years together.
Moving to “lessons learned” from emotional devastation is what will allow her not only to achieve closure on this relationship, but to think about what she’ll want when the possibility of a new relationship presents itself.
To sum up , life experiences shape us in a myriad of ways, many of which we may not even recognize.
Managing to survive a breakup and achieving closure is one of those experiences that can bring us fulfillment as we chart our future relationships.
David Roe, Barry A.
Farber, Hilla Yaniv & Nicholas Anderson (06 May 2026): What’s left after a romantic breakup?
The vicissitudes of closure, Counselling Psychology Quarterly, DOI: 10.1080/09515070.2026.2666640
Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. , is a Professor Emerita of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Her latest book is The Search for Fulfillment.
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100%flagged-word coverageDavid Roe and colleagues (2026)
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