What to do to get your ex back and what NOT to do!
If you want to get your ex back, you better start repairing the relationship right now before it’s too late. I know it may sound like your ex “hates” you, but let me tell you a powerful irony: This is actually a very good sign.
“Hate” shows that there are still emotions related to the relationship and you can work with it. Ambivalence usually means that the feeling your ex once had for you has now died and won’t return. Nestled between hate and ambivalence, it’s a “golden” moment where you can win back the love of your life, but ONLY if you play your cards right.
The seeds of failure lie in your natural “fight or flight” reactions located in your brain stem. These panic impulses are not based on reason but rather on survival. They are as old as time, genetically inherited from our prehistoric ancestors whose daily life was a challenge just to stay alive. When you’re chased by a hungry dinosaur, you run… but if you run off a cliff, the end result is the same as being eaten alive.
When it seems like an important relationship is over, panicking is the last thing you want to do. Here are some of the self-defeating things we robotically do when threatened with the end of a romantic relationship:
1. We take responsibility.
2. We constantly express regret but end up looking weak and pathetic in the process.
3. We vow to be better people and look weak and pathetic in the process.
4. We tiptoe, stalking and spying.
5. We repeatedly tell them we love them and make ourselves look weak and pathetic in the process.
6. We try to blame them.
7. We reach out to their friends and relatives to see if we can gain some leverage there and just piss off the very person we’re trying to win back.
8. We call and text them all the time and end up looking weak and pathetic.
And worst of all,
9. We BEG you to come back making us look DESPERATELY weak and pathetic.
The hard thing to understand is that even though all these “fight or flight” responses come from a good and loving place that just wants things to go back to the way they were, they always end up backfiring, which is exactly what you do NOT want. . To see this more clearly, imagine that the roles were reversed and your ex showed you all this “fight or flight” stuff in a desperate attempt to win you back. How attractive would you find your ex then? Gross!
What you need to do (and be) is something else entirely. You need to become a “llama” and your ex a “moth” who is irresistibly attracted to your flame. If you think about it logically, you need to position yourself as a person of great value, someone worth coming back to, someone your ex thinks she can’t live without. You don’t do this by looking weak and pathetic. You do this by being strong and wise and perhaps seeming a little standoffish.
There are many completely reasonable psychological techniques you can use to strengthen your case, but you MUST do something soon, before your ex finds someone new and falls into ambivalence. There are books out there that can help you with this. Buy a good one today and get started right away. Above all, fight all those “fight or flight” reactions until you know what to do (and be) that works to get what you want and need.
I admit from personal experience that the breakup can hit you like a ton of bricks. It’s just overwhelming, like a 50 foot tsunami, knocking you off your feet. You feel like you can’t breathe and you panic. In some cases, there were ample warnings beforehand, but he simply ignored them or couldn’t see them, convinced, in his blindness, that he was safe in their relationship. And, from time to time, the breakup comes as a complete surprise.
This is how it happened to me at the end of my first marriage, years ago: one night, she said, almost inaudibly, “I want a divorce.” I couldn’t believe what she was hearing! I tried to talk her out of it, but she was unmoved.
I ended up doing most of the reckless “fight or flight” things I mentioned above, but no matter what I tried, nothing worked. I moved in with my parents. I lost almost 30 pounds. I couldn’t sleep at night, except briefly. The moment I woke up, that tsunami washed over me again. The food tasted like sawdust. I couldn’t stop talking about my breakup. Meanwhile, he found someone else. We divorced and she remarried.
Today, many years later, I recognize that we were not meant for each other and that it would have been a mistake to get back together even if I had been able to. The irony is that if I had known then what I know now, I could have gotten it back, eating out of my hand. In retrospect, it’s lucky that I didn’t know what to do at the time. Now I know it wouldn’t have lasted. We were too different.
Your family and friends will undoubtedly strongly advise you not to try to get back together. They will most likely label your ex as the source of all your difficulties and try to take your side because they love you. They are afraid that if they get back together, it will only break their hearts one more time. You must resist all this “advice”. Close your ears because, if you’re honest with yourself, you’re the only one who knows about your relationship and you’re the only one who knows, deep down, whether getting back together is a good idea or not. It is you who has to make the decision and you are the person who has to live with it.
That being said, if you do decide that you aspire to get back together with your ex, the good news is that most relationships can be salvaged IF you play your cards wisely and take action soon enough. If you do the “fight or flight” things, you will push your ex further and further away. They will become even further away from you than they are now.
Alternatively, if you do the moth thing and call her, you will almost always get your ex back, but you MUST take action quickly before “hate” turns into ambivalence. Bottom line: Give your ex reasons to get back with you instead of justifications for leaving you. While this won’t heal EVERY relationship, it will work for most if the spark still exists underneath all the anger and “hate.”
I don’t have space here to go into all the details of what to do and what to be. I suggested earlier that you buy a good book for that. However, I can only give you a few tips to share:
1. Apologize, but do it in a way that makes you seem strong, not weak and pathetic.
2. Show your ex what they are missing, not what YOU are missing.
3. Resist sex until the relationship is fully healed. Sex too soon is counterproductive. Make-up sex later can be amazing.
4. The fact that you cheated doesn’t have to be a deal breaker. It’s actually a lot easier to restore loyalty and trust than you might think.
I wish you all the best in recovering your relationship with your ex. Now that you have some of the tools and can purchase the resources to learn the rest, get started before it’s too late. Don’t waste another minute!
Bob Gillespie
© 2011 Robert M. Gillespie Jr.
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