What episode does Rachel forgive Ross?

There are no more divisive words in television history than “We were on a break!”—Ross Geller’s defensive, impassioned battle cry was the scream heard ’round the world for nearly 10 seasons and 236 episodes of Friends. But the mystery still stands: Were Ross and Rachel officially broken up when he hooked up with Chloe from the copy place? It’s a nuanced situation that fans still can’t agree on.

“The Break” is one of the longest-running gags of the series. It begins in season 3, episode 15, “The One Where Ross and Rachel Take a Break.” The title of the episode is kind of an answer—but what does that really mean? With the 25th anniversary of the Friends pilot coming up on September 22, it’s time to find out once and for all. Since the internet can’t come to a conclusion, I asked three couples therapists to weigh in.

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But first, here’s a bit of a refresher. In the episode, Ross and Rachel get into a fight when she bails on their anniversary dinner to stay late at work. They both have valid reasons to be upset: Ross thinks she’s prioritizing work over their relationship, while Rachel thinks he’s disrespecting her newfound career independence. There’s also the fact that Ross is jealous of Mark, Rachel’s handsome male coworker, and constantly questioning his motives.

When they finally hash things out, they both think the other should be the one to apologize. Interestingly, Rachel is the one to suggest they take “a break from us.” (This goes against everything future episodes and story lines would have you believe) Ross interprets it as a breakup, and that’s when he gets drunk and sleeps with Chloe...which Rachel finds out about the next day. It doesn’t help that Mark invited himself over to comfort Rachel, and she let him.

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“I didn’t think there was a relationship to jeopardize. I thought we were broken up,” Ross says in the next episode, “The One the Morning After.”

“We were on a break,” Rachel counters.

To which Ross responds, “That, for all I knew, could last forever. That, to me, is a breakup.”

Was Ross wrong to hook up with Chloe? Should he have told Rachel what happened right away? Should Rachel have let Mark come over? WERE THEY ON A BREAK OR NOT? Time to find out.

What Even Is a “Break”?

Patrice N. Douglas, LMFT, owner of Empire Counseling and Consultation, puts it this way: If a couple isn’t being intentional with their words, dissecting the semantics of them is pointless.

“This happens a lot. People take the word ‘break’ and they’re not intentional about what they mean about a break. Rachel was not specific; therefore, she did leave room for interpretation for Ross to believe that they were broken up,” Douglas tells Cosmo.“She should have said, ‘Let’s take a time-out.’ That’s the word that we use in couples therapy and anger management. She used the wrong word.”

Sam Talone, LCSW, psychotherapist and couples therapist, echoes Douglas’s sentiments about their severe lack of communication.

“Healthy communication seems to be lacking in their relationship,” Sam tells Cosmo. “Our respective subjectivities are our reality. Rachel thought they were on a break, and she was right. Ross thought they had broken up, and he was right. It’s only when these subjectivities can engage in a dialogue that we’re able to maintain healthy communication and therefore healthy relationships.”

So, Who Is Right?

To psychotherapist Yoon Kane, LCSW, founder and CEO at Mindful Psychotherapy, Ross and Rachel shouldn’t have been fighting over who was right and who was wrong. There’s no “winner” in their argument because neither of them fought fairly.

“You can’t choose being right over the relationship. Either you’re going to choose the relationship and the connection, or you’re going to choose to be right,” Kane tells Cosmo. “In this situation, what they’re choosing is to be right.”

Yoon adds that the reason they both chose being right may have been because they felt they were losing their individual senses of self in the relationship.

“When you’re in a relationship, your identity and who you are become blurred because you become a unit," she explains. "So, a lot of these arguments that couples have is a way for them to establish themselves as a separate person that stands for something different from their partner.”

When pressed to answer the question point-blank, no one could give me a straight yes or no.

“They both made poor decisions in the phase of not knowing where they stood,” Douglas says. “Rachel should have never let that dude come over, and Ross shouldn’t have been in the bar drinking. Alcohol and being in your feelings never mix.” Can relate.

Okay, So How Do You Fix It?

Sam argues that while their fight started over a botched anniversary dinner and, ultimately, Ross’s hookup with Chloe, those things aren’t what caused their eventual breakup—their lack of communication did.

“Sleeping with Chloe, while understandably hurtful to Rachel, is really incidental here and symptomatic of their poor communication,” he says. I see this in couples all the time: They end up fighting about some transgression that’s actually beside the point.”

So, let’s put TV's favorite couple in the hot seat. Here's how Sam would work through the issue if Ross and Rachel were sitting in his office.

“There’s a technique I use in couples therapy that I might want to try with Rachel and Ross. I ask Partner A to make a statement and I ask Partner B to repeat back, in their own words, what Partner A said,” he explains. “It would be shocking to most people how divergent these statements can end up sounding—like they’re speaking two different languages.”

The next step is the most important. “I then offer each partner a chance to clarify what they said/heard until a useful, non-defensive dialogue can occur,” Sam continues. “This trains the couple to pay attention not just to what they are hearing but to what their partner is attempting to communicate.”

So, were Ross and Rachel on a break or nah? I always envisioned there would be a clear-cut winner that Friends co-creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane would casually tweet about years later to disrupt the fandom and send Wiki editors into a frenzy. But they haven’t, because it turns out there isn’t a good enough answer. Ross thought one thing, Rachel thought another, and they both chose to be right about it. It might not be the most satisfying conclusion, but that, my friend, is what they call closure.

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