Why Your Ex Moved On Quickly And How To Best Respond

If your ex moved on quickly — perhaps even started dating someone else already — they’ve probably been plotting and reflecting about breaking up with you for weeks before they actually pulled the plug.

It’s throughout this “mulling period” that they got over you. After all, they had plenty of time to mourn your relationship and relinquish any intense emotional attachment for you.

To wrench the knife even deeper, your ex likely hinted that they’re disengaging or that you’re doing something that keeps turning them off. Perhaps they even outright told you these things and tried to help you turn your relationship around.

After five years of helping people with breakups, I’ve seen this pattern time and time again.

Your ex practically never moves on quickly. It only feels that way because they kicked off the process while you were still together, when you still had intense feelings for them — feelings often so intoxicating they blinded you to their hints, their efforts to help, and their gradual decline in attraction. That is, until it was already too late.

But perhaps it’s not over yet. Read on to understand what really influences how fast your ex moves on — and how you can revive their lost attraction and ultimately mend your relationship.

Reasons Your Ex Moves On Faster Than Usual

1. Your Ex’s Support System

A support system is a group of friends, family members, and peers that a person trusts and feels safe with and who will actively listen to their concerns, share heartfelt advice, and consistent well… support.

The theory goes that if your ex has a strong support system in place, they may get the emotional backing they need to process the breakup faster.

Tangential to support systems, however, therapy and self-help also play a big role in your ex’s moving on process. In fact, they can both serve as their own forms of support systems. After all, like with any support system, your ex can find reassurance from a therapist and inspiration from a self-help expert.

And the more your ex relies on these things — so the more therapy they get and the self-help material they consume — the more likely they are to have equipped themselves with potent emotional tools for moving on.

2. Your Ex’s Attachment Style

A person can embody one of four attachment styles: anxious, avoidant, disorganized, and secure. For relevancy’s sake, I’ll focus exclusively on the first two since they’re most common. For a deep dive into all four, however, refer to my article on attachment styles.

The anxious is someone who can’t help but seek validation and approval from others and tries to control everything and everyone. As you’d expect, this is the person who usually has the toughest time moving on.

Whereas the avoidant is a person afraid of intimacy and emotional closeness, who has a high need for independence. This is someone who usually has fewer problems moving on due to their solitary nature.

3. Your Ex’s Emotional Intelligence

Emotional intelligence (EI) plays a huge role in how quickly someone can move on after a breakup. It’s made up of five key elements: self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, motivation, and social skills.

• Self-awareness: the ability to understand yourself and your behavior on three levels — knowing what you’re doing, how you feel about it, and recognizing your emotional patterns.
• Self-regulation: the ability to control and redirect disruptive emotions and impulses and adapt to life’s changing circumstances.
• Empathy: the ability to consider and understand other people’s emotions and share yours freely.
• Motivation: the ability to be aware of what motivates and drives you and to motivate and drive yourself toward your goals.
• Social skills: the ability to connect with people emotionally, and form and sustain healthy relationships.

In essence, the higher your ex’s emotional intelligence, the quicker they moved on — they had the tools to manage their emotions and transition into the next phase of their life, whether it’s being single or dating someone new.

On the flip side, if they have low emotional intelligence, they’re more likely to remain stuck, struggling to process the breakup and delaying the moving-on process.

4. Your Ex’s Rebound Relationship

Rebounds often provide temporary relief from the emotional pain of a breakup, creating the illusion that your ex has fully moved on. But in reality, these relationships are often fragile and short-lived.

Mainly because a rebound can serve several toxic purposes for your ex:

• Emotional distraction: rather than fully processing the end of your relationship, your ex may dive into a new relationship to distract themselves from their lingering feelings of hurt, guilt, or sadness.
• Validation: especially for people with anxious or avoidant attachment styles, a rebound can offer a quick source of validation, helping them avoid feelings of rejection or inadequacy. It also becomes more about proving they’re still desirable than about true connection.
• Filling a void: some people jump into a rebound relationship simply because they’re uncomfortable being alone. The new person fills the emotional void left behind, but because the foundation is weak, these relationships often crumble once the initial excitement fades.

The key thing to remember about rebounds is that while they might appear to move fast, they’re usually not built to last. Many rebounders eventually come face to face with unresolved emotions from their previous relationship — meaning, despite appearances, your ex may not have moved on as thoroughly as it seems.

5. Your Neediness Level

Neediness is a measurement of how you prioritize your self-perception compared to your ex’s perception of you. The more you prioritize how your ex perceives you, the needier you are. The more you prioritize how you perceive yourself, the non-needier you are.

Okay, but how do you measure neediness? By observing your behavior. Are you:

• Spamming your ex’s phone?
• Chasing after them?
• Trying to get confirmation that they still love you?
• Seeking their validation?
• Attempting to impress them?
• Feeling you’re nothing without them?

These behaviors are all solid indicators of neediness. And the higher your neediness, the more you probably frustrate your ex, making them move on faster.

6. The State Of Your Relationship

Was your relationship toxic? You know, cheating, lying, codependency, emotional or physical abuse… those kinds of things.

Was your relationship boring? Were you and your ex more like roommates than an actual couple? Have you rarely dated, courted, and fucked each other?

Was your relationship long-distance? Meaning, were you unable to see each other more than, roughly speaking, once a month?

These things determine the state of your relationship. So if yours was toxic, boring, long-distance, or a combination of any of the three, there’s a good chance it helped your ex move on faster than they would if you had a healthy, exciting, and non-long-distance relationship.

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Hints Your Ex Gave You Before They Moved On “Quickly”

As I alluded to at the beginning of this article, your ex probably gave you plenty of hints that their attraction was declining before the breakup. Here are some of the most common ones to pay better attention to next time.

• The frequency of their texts and calls tapered off.
• They began to cancel dates and/or make excuses for why they couldn’t show up (see: mixed signals).
• They started to ask fewer questions (and the ones they did ask became less personal).
• They gave out less and less information about themselves.
• They became less affectionate, intimate, and sexual.
• They seemed more on edge, bitchy, aggravated, and frustrated.
• They began having more and more moments of indifference.
• They became increasingly preoccupied with their own life.
• They became overly critical or nitpicky.
• They communicated less about their feelings.
• They stopped making future plans with you.

Many people think their ex is a bitch or an asshole for simply not coming out and telling them, “Hey fuckface, you’re losing me. Step up to the plate and do something about it.”

But here’s the reality…

Either your ex already told you something like this, but you haven’t been paying attention, or they believed you just didn’t have what it takes to get yourself together and handle a call-out, so they remained quiet.

Beware: one exception to the above is toxic exes. A toxic ex usually won’t directly call out your relationship problems or be too eager to help square them. Instead, they’ll opt for finding backups behind your back and, at worst, cheating on you head-on.

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How To Mend Your Relationship After Your Ex Moved On

Let’s start with some important things to avoid:

• Don’t revisit your relationship’s extreme moments — both the positive and the negative. Because while it’s natural to either romanticize the good times (leading to intense longing) or fixate on the bad (leading to feeling like it’s all your fault) when trying to make sense of a breakup, neither perspective reflects the full reality of your relationship. The real nature of your relationship is usually found somewhere in between the two extremes. Focus on embracing this more balanced view.
• Don’t assume your ex’s new relationship is just a rebound. I get that it makes you feel better since you can always comfort yourself with the fact that rebounds are short-lasting and shallow affairs (as I wrote earlier). But sometimes, the relationship your ex got into is just a typical relationship. And hell, there’s even a chance that what once started as a rebound eventually turns into a non-rebound.
• Avoid pestering your ex — don’t be a gnat. Go no contact and be alone for a while. It’s only after an extensive hiatus from your ex that you could spark back their attraction, get them to miss you, and eventually reach out.
• Avoid trying to manipulate your ex. Using guilt, jealousy, or pity to influence your ex’s feelings will always backfire in the long run. Sure, manipulative tactics might seem like a quick way to get their attention, but they’ll erode trust and make your ex hate your guts.
• Avoid overanalyzing their social media. Constantly checking your ex’s social media for signs of their feelings or relationship status will only keep you stuck. It feeds into unhealthy obsession and false assumptions. What you see on social media rarely reflects the full truth. It’s better to disconnect and focus on your own life, not on deciphering every post or photo.

On the flip side, let’s talk about what you should be doing to turn around your relationship.

• Be grateful you even had a relationship in the first place. Not everyone is fortunate enough to experience meaningful relationships, even when those relationships fizzle out eventually.
• Start looking forward, thinking about how you can reinvent yourself and be happy again. A few ideas: spend more time with friends and family, work out more, eat healthier, sleep better, double down on your career, get some new hobbies, build character, etc.
• Act as if your ex is never coming back. This way, you free yourself from the emotional chains that keep you stuck in the past. It’s an approach allowing you to focus fully on yourself, and ironically, it’s often when you’ve moved on and truly let go that an ex becomes interested again. But that’s not the point — the goal is to build a life you’re proud of, regardless of whether they come back.
• Let go of resentment and blame. It’s easy to fall into the trap of blaming your ex or yourself for the breakup. But harboring resentment or self-blame only prolongs your pain. Instead, focus on acceptance. Your breakup happened for a reason, and while it’s important to learn from it, holding onto negative emotions will only hinder your growth. In the same vein, forgive yourself and your ex, not necessarily for their benefit but for your own peace of mind.
• When your ex reaches out about something personal, set a date with them. Because this gesture is often a sign that they’re feeling more comfortable reconnecting. In other words, this is your opportunity to move the conversation offline. Instead of lingering in text or calls, suggest meeting in person. However, don’t force deep relationship discussions during this first meet-up; focus on re-establishing a comfortable connection and let things unfold naturally from there.

If this all sounds a bit vague, that’s because it is. So here are some additional guides that go deeper into these bullet points, if you’re interested:

• How To Get Your Ex Back And Actually Keep Them.
• The Ultimate Guide To The No Contact Rule.
• 30 Absolute Best Books To Read After A Breakup.
• 16 Striking Signs Your Ex Is Never Coming Back.
• Top 16 Signs Your Ex Is Pretending To Be Over You.
• A Complete Guide On How To Be Happy After A Breakup.
• How To Forgive Your Ex When You Can’t Forget Them.

Onward to some final thoughts.

Your Ex Moving On Doesn’t Mean They Don’t Feel Anything For You

The odds of your ex coming back aren’t in your favor. They never were, and whoever tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you some bullshit.

However, maybe — just maybe — your ex still feels something for you. And it would be a shame if you’d chase after them right now and try to force yourself back into their life. If you’re not in touch already, this behavior will only turn push them away from you.

Because pushing yourself back into your ex’s life while they’re trying to move on only reinforces their decision to leave. It confirms that you haven’t changed and are still the same person they chose to walk away from. This is why giving them space is so damn critical.

So let your ex figure out if rekindling your relationship is something they’re up for on their own. Yes, even if they’re dating someone new — hell, especially if they’re dating someone new.

Besides, if they really are dating someone else, that still doesn’t guarantee they’ve completely moved on. However, whether or not they’re thinking about you is not something you can control.

By maintaining your distance and focusing on your own growth, you give them the opportunity to reflect on what they may have lost — but more importantly, you ensure you’re creating a better version of yourself, regardless of the outcome.

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