The Inferiority Gap

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This article is an excerpt from my book, From The Inside Out: A Counterintuitive Approach To Re-Attracting An Ex.

By far the biggest problem people who want their ex back face is that they lift them high up on a pedestal. Worthiness-wise, they see their ex as above them and themselves as below. And in doing so, they create a sort of gap between how they perceive their own worth and the worth of their ex. I call this the inferiority gap.

We chiefly create these gaps because of low self-esteem borne out of some flavor of childhood trauma.

Maybe you were bullied a lot in school. Maybe you got your heart broken by an earlier ex. Maybe Dad neglected you and made you feel like you didn’t matter. Maybe Mom tried to force her values on you too much, and once you retaliated, started to guilt trip and shame you for it. Or perhaps you were exposed to even more somber experiences like extreme poverty or sexual or physical abuse.

The other reason we form inferiority gaps is due to societal conditioning. That is, a collection of preconceived notions that we grow up assuming to be true because everyone around us told us they’re true — even when these notions are often erroneous and sometimes even harmful.

A few such examples: a guy should always chase after the girl and try to impress her; a girl should always play hard to get; love trumps everything; breaking up equals failure; premarital sex is sinful and dirty; standing up for yourself is selfish and being selfish is wrong and evil.

When a person cultivates an inferiority gap in relation to their ex, they consequently begin to place a higher priority on their perception of them than their perception of themselves. They essentially start to care more about what their ex thinks, feels, believes, needs, and stands for than what they think, feel, believe, need, and stand for.

The actions of a person with an inferiority gap are thus primarily motivated by impressing their ex and obtaining their approval. They’ll be more invested in them than they are in themselves. And by investment, I mean the degree to which they sacrifice and alter their thoughts, feelings, and motivations for the other person.

Conversely, the actions of a person without an inferiority gap will be primarily motivated by embodying and living out their own thoughts, feelings, values, and desires. They’ll be more invested in themselves than their ex.

All unattractive behaviors, whether directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, are a result of this inferiority gap. Largely because its reverberations permeate the person and are what inspires and provokes them.

Generally, our attractiveness is inversely proportional to the width of our inferiority gap. The narrower it is, the less needy behaviors we’ll display and the more attractive we’ll come across. The wider it is, the more needy behaviors we’ll display and the less attractive we’ll come across.

While trying to get back with their ex, many people overcompensate for their inferiority through various questionable behaviors. Like hiding their true interest, playing games, purposefully giving mixed signals, sticking to dumb rules like how you should never text twice, or that you should always end the conversation first to leave your ex wanting more, and so on.

In other words, some people can’t help but keep putting on a show to get their ex to like them more. They can’t help but to pretend to be someone they’re not. They’re, as I like to call it, addicted to performing.

Little do they know, however, that the more they perform, the more unworthy they’ll feel. It’s a classic case of the downward spiral: the more we perform, the more unworthy we feel, and the more unworthy we feel, the more we feel like we need to perform.

But this is just the effect the inferiority gap has on us. There’s also its impact on our ex that’s worth noting. But to understand it, we need to grasp some fundamental knowledge of what makes a person attractive in the first place.

To make a long story short, the one trait all men and women across the board find attractive — regardless of culture or time period — is the perception of social status. And the way people judge and determine social status is by looking at one’s behavior.

So your ex will mainly look at your behavior to judge how much or how little social status you have and, by extension, how attractive/unattractive you come across. But how can you know what behavior then determines how much status you have? Well, it all boils down to intentions.

If you feel like you need to impress your ex, show off, or display all sorts of behaviors inauthentic to what you really think and feel just to make them more attracted to you, what does that sub-communicate? It sub-communicates you’re performing.

So what happens eventually is that your ex detects you’re performing. And what happens then? Your ex digs into your motivation, into your intentions — why you’re doing what you’re doing.

And sooner or later (because they probably aren’t stupid, and these things are usually pretty obvious), they realize that the reason you’re performing is because you don’t feel good enough for them.

And what does that mean? It means you’re overcompensating for your lack of self-worth and are being needy. It means you’re displaying some set of unattractive behaviors that will inevitably squash your ex’s interest completely.

This, dear reader, is the whole irony of conventional “get your ex back” advice.

The more you perform, the more inauthentic you are, the wider your inferiority gap gets, the more needy behaviors you display, and the more unattractive you come across. Whereas the less you perform, the more authentic you are, the narrower your inferiority gap gets, the less needy behaviors you display, and the more attractive you come across.

Read that shit again, motherfucker.

The more you fake and gimmick your way through re-attraction, the more you fuck things up. It’s not until you start approaching your ex as an equal — not as a deity above you or as a peasant below you — that re-attraction can shift in your favor.

This is where people often shrug, give me a weird look, and ask, “Okay, so I probably have a little inferiority gap tucked away somewhere in my psyche, but how do I close it? How can I treat and think of my ex as an equal?”

Well, there are a couple of solutions. For one, pick an approach to re-attraction that doesn’t involve performance. Next, change how you see yourself in relation to your ex for the better. Then, make it a habit to respond to any instance of neediness appropriately. Finally, though, cultivate a healthy dose of vulnerability — it’ll make everything else I listed a bazillion times easier.