NEW YORK, March 25 -- A breakup almost never happens out of the blue. Warning signs appear long before the split, sometimes years in advance, but you might not spot them, unless you can recognise and decipher them.

According to a German-Swiss study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the decline of a relationship tends to follow a very specific two-phase pattern.

To conduct their study, researchers from the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Bern analyzed data from four major studies conducted in Germany, Australia, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

These so-called WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) countries offer complete freedom of relationship statu...