Are Miley Cyrus And Liam Hemsworth Finally On Stable Ground For Good?

On-again, off-again—it’s a descriptor assigned to many a celeb couple, but few actually make you want to cheer them on the way Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth do.

A super pared-down timeline of their up-and-down relationship: The two met on the set of the film adaptation of Nicholas Spark’s tearjerker The Last Song. For a while, it was all handholding and love songs—until the first breakup in August and the next in November. And then like a wrecking ball, they called off their engagement in 2013, a year after Liam proposed.

In the interim, the two dated other people while maintaining a private friendship—which eventually morphed back into a full-blown relationship in 2016. It was a tough break, but they clearly needed the time apart.

“It’s good for people to have that space to grow individually. Otherwise when you’re with someone from 16 until 24, you grow into the same person,” Miley told The Sun on Sunday. She even sealed the re-engagement with the release of “Malibu,” a sob-inducing song about Liam. (P.S. Liam photographed her for the cover art, in which she's sporting her engagement ring again...aww!)

Then in a major turn of events, when their Malibu home burned down in the wildfire that ripped through California in November 2018, the couple tied the knot in a last-minute, über-casual ceremony a month later. Miley admitted to Vanity Fair that she and Liam might not have gotten married so soon had it not been for the loss of their house, but “the timing felt right,” she said, “and I had to go with my heart.”

While the rumors come and go, Miley says that she and Liam have “found a new bond underneath all that rubble"—and it seems that with time to mature independently, they’re on again for good. But if history repeats itself, who’s to say they won’t need time apart again?

Well, for one, relationship expert Terri Orbuch, PhD, author of 5 Simple Steps to Take Your Marriage From Good to Great and professor at Oakland University in Michigan, does. She analyzed the couple's body language over the years—here's what she sussed out: