Change Your Mind About Getting Your Ex Back

Over the years, I’ve consulted hundreds of people who wanted their ex back. Some of them achieved this goal rather quickly, and some of them stagnated, month after month, rarely making any tangible progress in reuniting with their former lover.

What gives? Why do some people get back with their ex in just a matter of months (or even weeks) while others struggle and fight yet never make any progress? Why do some people break up again right after getting back together, and others keep their relationship intact permanently?

Well, after talking with enough people who were dead-set on getting their ex back, I’ve noticed something intriguing.

In time, I’ve noticed a fundamental difference between the first group of people — those who make little progress in re-attracting their ex — and the second group — those who improve steadily, genuinely, and actually do get back with their ex at the end.

The first group focuses on performance; The second group focuses on self-improvement.

The Performance-Oriented Person

A person who opts for a performance-based approach to re-attraction largely relies on tricks, tactics, techniques, and fake behaviors. More specifically:

• They play hard to get, use reverse psychology, rely on reusable texting templates, jealousy tactics, and faux confidence.
• They memorize the right things to say, how to handle each situation, all the body language cues, all possible contingencies of their ex’s reactions; and then they respond accordingly.
• They see re-attraction as a skillset full of pieces that need to be memorized and acted out on, similarly to a chess game.

When such a person arrives at a problem — for example, their ex calls them out for their controlling behaviour — they usually get hyper-analytical afterward. They curse material they’re studying and buy another dodgy ex-back product, where they focus on learning and memorizing even more tricks, tactics, techniques, and fake behaviors. Maybe these will work!

You’d be surprised but the vast majority of ex-back advice is perfomance-based. Why? Because it sells better.

A product dunking you in an murky void of perfomance makes an average person feel as though they’re making way more progress than if they’d start consuming healthy self-improvement advice.

Also, most people just don’t want to hear that they have emotional problems that they’d need to address and resolve. Fuck no! They want to hear how learning games and gimmicks and 1-2-3 formulas alone is enough to rekindle their relationship.

The funny thing about perfomance is that it’s a way for people to cope with their underlying emotional or self-esteem issues.

For example, a person doesn’t know how to get their ex to like them, so they read a book telling them that one way of accomplishing that is by saying some pre-prepared set of phrases. Let’s call them “lines,” for short.

So this person then uses a line outlined in their book, gets their ex to respond positively, and, as a result, becomes convinced it’s the line that’s working, not them.

But here’s the kicker: their line, whatever it is, is a placebo — like all perfomance behaviors.

Whereas the person was scared of engaging in a conversation with their ex prior, being given the line and being told that it will make their ex like them more gives them the false confidence to engage in a conversion ably. With this same confidence, this same person could successfully engage in a good conversation with just about any line.

At it’s core, a performance-based approach shows your ex a false representation of you. It’s the equivalent of emotional manipulation. It also always follows the same sad and shallow underlying formula: follow behavior X and your ex will like you more.

Last and worst, it makes you objectify yourself — in the eyes of perfomance, you’re basically a robot and the key to getting the correct outputs is simply putting in the correct inputs. Like that ever works out.

The Self-Improvement-Oriented Person

The self-improvement-oriented person tends to tackle getting back with their ex not through trying to perfect what they say or do, but through working on and perfecting themselves. Not for their ex, of course, but because they themselves genuinely want to improve.

They also let their ex returning be nothing more than an added benefit to their already good life. They consider it as side-effect of winning themselves back.

Now I’m not making an argument about how these people don’t care about their ex. They do; they want them back and, like anyone, shed tears if they don’t return. I’m simply arguing the following: a self-improvement person’s world won’t suddenly collapse if their ex decides not to give them another chance.

For they know their ex isn’t special. And they realize that labeling them as such is an insult to literally millions of other people that they’d find attractive and intelligent and who, unlike their ex, are able and ready and willing to create a future with them.

When a self-improvement-oriented person comes across a problem (e.i, their ex doesn’t return their call), they don’t begin to overthink, don’t start criticizing their ex or labeling the material they absorbed as “not working.”

On the contrary: they find out where they went wrong and try better next time. And if there is no next time, there’s not much fussing since they know they don’t need their ex; they have themselves and they’re quite happy with that catch.

Ultimately, it’s these people who most often get back with their ex and actually cultivate a healthy relationship with them. Don’t get me wrong, though. It’s not like the performance-based approach doesn’t work. It does.

You can learn all the right things to say. You can become a pro at all the gimmicks and tricks. You can develop an unerring sense of when to pull back and when to push forward. You can learn all of these things as if you were learning to cook or to write. Performance, at its core, is a skill. You can study it, become better at it, even master it.

All I’m saying is that an approach based on performance never works as well as one based on self-improvement. It’s also not as fulfilling.

Typically, the people who become successful through performance, while they do seldom get their ex back, always fail to keep them. Here’s a story that perfectly illustrates how they, even after many small wins, eventually falter and fail.

The Performance Approach To Getting An Ex Back

Bob feels like he’s going to die.

His girlfriend, call her Sindy, of 3 years, has dumped him for being a needy nitwit. Bob was the type of boyfriend who expected his partner to report where she was on the regular.

But not via text, of course. Hell no! Bob wanted a literal picture of where his girlfriend was and with who she was hanging out. And he forbade her from going out with any other guy that’s not of her blood. No wonder he’s single.

As expected, Bob wanted his ex back after their whole shit show. He realized he made some huge mistakes and wants another shot. So, he quickly searches the internet for solutions and finds a handful of shoddy “get your ex back” programs that promise to get him the result he wants quickly.

He buys all of them — like every other naive breakup survivor.

Then, just as his programs suggest, after 30-45 days of ignoring his ex (that is, being in what’s called a “No Contact Period”) Bob sends her a short pre-ordained text message. She responds, and he follows it up with several quirky lines to get her sending laugh emojis.

Good sign.

Over the next few days, he continues to talk to Sindy about pre-ordained topics he’s comfortable with — just like his programs recommend. Likewise, he only talks with his ex in the evenings and ignores her messages and calls till then.

Supposedly this is more romantic than talking mid-day or in the mornings. He’s able to punctuate each hiatus with tried and tested jokes and lines his trusty ex-back gurus supplied him with. Sindy laughs on cue and responds as predicted.

She’s interested again. Fuck yes!

A week later, after some fun and flirty back and forth riffing, Sindy finally agrees to go on a date with Bob. It’s their first one since their breakup.

When they meet, Bob executes everything he’s learned: stick to light and positive topics, lean back and sit across from her, let her talk more than you do, pretend to like her less than you actually like her, use a planned excuse to get her back to your place, etc.

There are hiccups along the way, but it all more or less works out. Sindy seems genuinely interested, and when Bob finally works up the nerve to kiss her, she kisses back enthusiastically.

Fast forward the next couple of dates; everything goes well. There’s a ton of uplifting talks, fun times, and mind-blowing makeup sex. Bob is on cloud nine. He’s drunk on validation, and there’s nothing but excitement ballooning and dancing within him.

Soon after he jumps online to talk to his friends and tell them all about the clever lines, scripts, and tactics he used and how much they helped him get his ex back.

Little does Bob know that it wasn’t his lines and tricks that his ex fell for; it was because she thought he finally matured and resolved his unattractive tendencies. She felt as if her boyfriend turned into a secure, assertive, and confident badass — someone worthy of her time, love, trust, and respect.

However, it was not long until Sindy’s view on Bob changed.

Bob and Sindy saw each other a few more times over the following weeks, but something was off — something changed. Since they’ve been dating for so long, Bob wasted all of the lines and tactics he learned and slowly reverted to his usual, needy self: desperate for approval and validation, possessive, and incapable of trusting others.

This change began subtly with Bob getting more and more curious about the guy-friends Sindy kept chatting with on Instagram. Soon this curiosity turned into irritation and then into fear.

At that point, the whole shit-show began anew. Bob starts spying on Sindy’s phone location, goes through her texts without her knowing to see if there are any other men she’s flirting with, and even tries to slyly forbid her from seeing some of the new friends she made while single.

Nevertheless, Bob was not the only one who changed. Sindy went through a similar transformation. She not only realized that her boyfriend was putting on an act the whole time.

She also realized that she doesn’t have many common interests with him. When together, they mostly just watch movies and eat junk food. There’s no continual dating and courtship, nor is there much excitement in the relationship overall.

One day, Bob texts Sindy about coming to his place for the weekend. She was busy studying for her finals that night and didn’t reply. In her mind, she really was busy, she tells herself.

But what she doesn’t admit is that she could have made time for Bob if she wanted. She felt something was off with him. Bob begins to feel insecure about this and asks his friends for advice.

The next day, after her finals, Sindy sees her phone and notices five new texts from Bob. The first two are casual, but each one gets progressively weirder and more nonsensical.

Consequently, Sindy gets turned off — it’s Bob’s neediness rearing its ugly head again. After a few more weeks of simmering in the same shit-stew, Sindy throws in the towel and dumps Bob. Again.

Bob’s story is a quintessential example of why performance is only a short-term solution for getting back with an ex. All Bob did was leverage it to trick Sindy into thinking he was far more mature, confident, and less invested in her than he actually was. And it worked! But only for a short period.

The irony here is that what attracted Sindy the most was not Bob’s tricks, tactics, techniques, or fake behaviors; it was the mature persona he put on. She genuinely thought he changed for the better. She was so attracted to this faux-quality of his that she, for a time, even overlooked his glaring incompatibility.

But as Bob’s perfomance ran out, the true level of his emotional investment and maturity became more and more apparent. Bob’s behavior became needy again and disgusted Sindy, causing her to eventually dump him for the second time.

Here’s the kicker, though. Bob was lucky. A lot of people don’t even come close to getting this far with performance. They may conjure the impression of confidence and maturity for only the first date or even just for the span of a few text conversations before they falter.

Such are the stresses of performance.

The Self-improvement Approach To Getting An Ex Back

As you can deduce by now, getting back with your ex is not about learning what to say, or what to do — it’s not even about pursuing and chasing after them.

Getting back with your ex is about making a change in your mindset, your self-perception, and your self-respect. And it’s as simple as changing your mind about a few things. So, take a moment to consider…

… that instead of trying to prove yourself to your ex, you could realize you don’t need to nor shouldn’t try to prove yourself to anyone.

… that instead of trying to impress them, you could wonder if they’ll work on impressing you.

… that instead of silently wondering what to say or do next to re-attract them, you could silently wonder what they’ll say or do to re-attract you.

… that instead of clawing for your ex’s validation, you could figure out that you can just validate yourself more.

…that before you send them that fourth text or call them up for the second time in a row, you could ask yourself if they texted or called you anytime beforehand.

… that instead of obsessing how you come across when you talk to them, you could focus on how they come across when they talk to you — are they invested, semi-invested, or turned off?

… that instead of getting upset or pissed off when they don’t want to get back together with you, you could decide that it means you probably wouldn’t want to get back together with someone like that anyway.

This may all sound a bit selfish. But, in fact, it’s called having firm boundaries, noteworthy self-respect, and high self-esteem. It’s the equivalent of being a mature and healthy individual with standards and a spine.

Only make time for your ex if they make time for you. Only put effort into meeting your ex’s needs if they put in the effort to meet your needs. Only work on getting your ex back if they work on getting you back.

Maybe you think you’re not strong or experienced enough to do these things. Maybe you think you’re too needy or attached to your ex. Maybe you think you’re too weak. And perhaps you’re right about all of that.

But being right doesn’t change the point. If you want a better chance at reforming your relationship, you’ll have to work on changing your mind. There’s no other way around it.

You’ll have a much better shot of re-attracting your ex if you can be someone who they can respect, someone who they can trust, someone actually worth coming back to.

If you’re constantly the only one fighting for their love, chasing after them, seeking approval, blowing up their phone, fussing about how they perceive you, and so forth, how can they ever respect, trust and love you?

Newsflash: they can’t.

No one is attracted to or truly loves someone who they can’t respect or trust. That’s why you can have all the best tricks, tactics, techniques, and fake behaviors, and in the long run, still fail to rekindle your relationship.

For the mindset those things produce only lead to unattractive behavior. They promote anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, and obsession. They encourage the need to impress, try too hard and say things that are not genuine, sincere, or ethical. They nurture relational dysfunction and misery.

You are what attracts or repels your ex, not the performance you put on. Put differently; it’s not about what you say or what you do that gets your ex back. It’s who you become that gets them back — what you stand for, represent, and embody. What you say or do should only be an extension of what you embody. In and of themselves, the words and actions mean jack shit.

Basically: don’t act attractive, actually become fucking attractive.

It’s this mentality that leads to all attractive behavior. It helps you freely express yourself instead of saying or doing what you think your ex wants you to say or do. It lessens your irrational fears and insecurities instead of expanding them. It erodes the feelings of unworthiness instead of hardening them even further.

I don’t care if your ex has a supermodel bod, a bursting social circle traversing all seven continents, or a bazillion dollars in their bank account. Are they worth your time, energy, and effort? Do you enjoy being around them? Do they treat you well?

These are the questions you should be asking yourself. And the only way you’ll start asking them and actually get helpful answers and based on them pick empowering responses, is if you improve yourself.

Besides, the only real ex-back advice is self-improvement. Hell, the only real dating and relationship advice is self-improvement. Eat well. Work out. Get quality sleep. Conquer your anxieties. Date around. Invest in your lifestyle. Overcome your insecurities. Resolve your shame. Build up some confidence. Take care of yourself. Love yourself. Otherwise, no one else will.

Note: This article is based on a chapter from one of my favorite books: Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, by Mark Manson. If you like it, consider buying the book. And don’t let the name fool you. Women should read it too — because, contrary to what many people think, it’s much less about dating as it is about emotional maturity.

If you need more help getting your ex back, check out my Radical Re-Attraction Course. It includes hours of video and hundreds of pages of writing, and a community with exclusive weekly Q&A calls, private chat, and 1-on-1 coaching.