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DESIGN BY ANSLEY CHAMBERS & NICHOLE THOMAS
THE
18 | THE HUMAN CONNECTION
GRAPHIC BY MCKENNA PICKERING
DEBATE: RESTARTING RELATIONSHIPS
If you and your significant other break up, then get back together, do you restart the time that you have been together? By Evan Shibel Asst. Editor-in-Chief & Sports Editor
By McKenna Pickering A&E Editor
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PRO
n relationships, the milestones you hit are big deals – six months, one year, two years, etc. But what if there’s a break in between? Do you keep it going after the break or start over from the beginning? If you breakup with your significant other, you should restart the time you were together. There’s nothing wrong with saying, “We dated for this many months, but then broke up,” but saying you dated for a year when you definitely broke up about five times in the process just doesn’t add up. Unless your “break” was less than a day long, then it doesn’t matter, but days, weeks and months definitely count. Think of it this way: you start a streak and then when you end it, it’s over. Dating is like that streak. You don’t start where you left off. If you and your significant other were dating for a long time and took a day or two off, then that’s another thing. Dating for five months, breaking up for two, getting back together and immediately celebrating your seven-month-anniversary just doesn’t seem right. It can be different for long term or married couples, but that doesn’t apply to teenagers. You ended your relationship streak. You ended the time together. Set aside the feelings because you can breakup and still care about someone. When you breakup you and that person are done. If you get back together, the time restarts. I feel like it’s just dumb to start back up where you left off when you had an agreement to call it off for a signifcant amount of time.
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CON
hile many people consider a break up as being the absolute end of a relationship, I believe otherwise. Yes, there are such things as breaks, but as long as that time during the break is not counted towards the total relationship time, it should be allowed to be continued after the couple gets back together. Imagine a couple is together for two years and one of them is going through a rough times with their family and just “needs a break” for a month or so. If the couple gets back together after and someone asks how long they have been together, imagine how awkward it would be if that answer was “Oh, just a couple weeks,” even though that person knows they have been together for now over two years. This scenario is fairly common in high school as well. Hearing about couples that are “taking a break” is not a rarity in high school and can make the length of a relationship a discrepancy within the relationship and something that can confuse many people around them. Thus, a break between two periods of a relationship should not be added to the total of the complete time in a relationship, but the two periods can be added together to make the total of a relationship to avoid the awkward responses when a couple has been dating for over two years, taken a break, then gotten back together and has to further explain that they have “only been dating for a week.”
