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abstract: 'The kinetics of the self-assembly of supramolecular polymers is dictated by how monomers, dimers, trimers etc., attach to and detach from each other. It is for this reasons that researchers have proposed a plethora of pathways to explain the kinetics of various self-assembling supramolecules, including sulfur, linear micelles, living polymers and protein fibrils. Recent observations hint at the importance of a hitherto ignored molecular aggregation pathway that we refer to as “*body evaporation and addition*”. In this pathway, monomers can enter at or dissociate from any point along the backbone of the polymer. In this paper, we compare predictions for the well-established *end evaporation and addition* pathway with those that we obtained for the newly proposed *body evaporation and addition* model. We quantify the lag time, characteristic of nucleated reversible polymerisation, in terms of the time it takes to obtain half of the steady-state polymerised fraction and the apparent growth rate at that point, and obtain power laws for both as a function of the total monomer concentration. We find, perhaps not entirely unexpectedly, that the *body evaporation and addition* pathway speeds up the relaxation of the polymerised monomeric mass relative to that of the *end evaporation and 