When your ex says or shows he or she is done with the relationship and doesn’t want you back, you’ve got to understand that your ex has lost feelings, trust, and/or respect. Your ex has given up on emotionally investing in you, working on common goals, and being in a serious committed relationship with you.
Your ex would rather spend time with other people and not feel pressured to do what you want.
Due to emotional detachment and different goals, wants, needs, and expectations, your ex would rather focus on things and people who make him or her want to spend time and energy on them. This includes anything and anyone who distracts your ex from the past and makes your ex feel positive emotions.
Since your ex lost the drive to be with you, your ex is no longer the person you got to know. He or she has changed into someone who prioritizes his or her life over your problems, desires, and needs. This is probably the first time you’ve seen your ex act so aloof. You never saw your ex so detached and uncaring because your ex was on the same page with you and had no reason to act differently.
Maybe you didn’t agree on everything, but you were emotionally connected and shared common goals. Things changed when your ex began to pull away or pulled away completely. That was when your ex revealed that he or she didn’t want to be with you anymore and that he or she needed you to accept the breakup and move on with your life.
It happened suddenly and hurt you immensely. The pain you experienced was so intense it shocked you and made it difficult if not impossible to see yourself not being in a committed relationship with your ex. Your gut feeling told you you had to do something to increase your ex’s feelings and reconcile otherwise you’d continue to feel rejected, unwanted, and brokenhearted.
What your gut feeling didn’t tell you, though is that you needed to respect your ex’s decisions and feelings. Space was something your ex needed and expected from you after breaking up with you and showing you he or she didn’t care enough to give you another chance.
If your ex still wanted you to fight, he or she would have told you that. Your ex wouldn’t have abandoned you and become cold and heartless, angry, and unreceptive. Unreceptiveness indicates a loss of feelings and complete detachment. It shows that your ex feels smothered and wants to be left alone to focus on other people and things.
You mustn’t force yourself into your ex’s life and expect your ex to be as crazy about you as you are about him or her. You should expect your ex to feel cornered, disrespected, angry, cold, and bitter. The more you pressure your ex to relieve your urges and meet your needs, the more your ex will resist your efforts and avoid you.
Every desperate move to be with your ex will achieve the opposite of what you want it to achieve as it will push your ex away and increase his or her doubts about the relationship.
So if you want your ex back but your ex doesn’t, don’t waste your energy and time selling yourself and convincing your ex you deserve another chance. Don’t turn into a beggar and show your ex that he or she is worth chasing and humiliating yourself for. That will only reduce your ex’s interest and respect and put your ex on a pedestal, making you more dependent on your ex.
You’ve got to understand that your ex has made up his or her mind and that your ex won’t budge no matter what you say and do. Your ex won’t feel love for you even if you go on your knees and recite the most beautiful poem ever written. Your ex might pity you and feel bad for hurting you and turning your life upside down, but other than that, his or her feelings will remain the same.
Self-pity and pain won’t make your dumper regret leaving you and want you back. But it will make your ex feel pressured and glad things ended for good.
I know you want your ex to take you back and that you’re prepared to do literally anything, but if you want your ex to respect you and feel something for you, you have to present yourself as a respectful and love-worthy individual. You have to keep your dignity (watch what you say and do) and preserve your value.
You can do that not by contacting your ex and rationalizing with him or her but by leaving your ex alone and focusing on yourself. In other words, you must go no contact with your ex and impress your ex indirectly (with patience, self-control, emotional independence, and confidence).
Forget about winning your ex back with persistence and hard work as if your ex is some prize to be won. Your ex doesn’t deserve (nor want) to be pursued. Your ex wants you to give him or her space and mind your own business.
You may not have been a perfect partner, but at least you stayed committed and wanted to resolve problems. It was your ex who detached and gave up in the end. He or she thought life would be better alone or with someone else.
This doesn’t mean you’re more to blame than your ex and that your ex is the best person you could be with.
All it means is that your ex ran out of patience first and let it affect his or her affection and determination to work things through. Your ex decided the relationship had run its course and that it was time to pursue happiness elsewhere.
If you try to show your ex that he or she can be happy in a relationship with you, your ex will feel pressured and/or despise you for it. He or she will think you’re too persistent, disrespectful, and weak to handle a rejection confidently. Your eagerness to fix things won’t look good.
It would if you were still together. But since you’re not, it will show you’re in denial and make you look extremely unattractive.
It’s essential not to:
- take the breakup personally
- feel responsible for fixing the broken relationship alone
No relationship can be fixed just by one person. It requires two equally invested people with decent self-awareness and healthy problem-solving skills. If it’s just one person crying, begging, and caring, it shifts the balance of power to the other person and makes the relationship seem like an unworthy investment.
So think rationally and avoid acting on emotions. Make sure to stay composed and not do anything your ex could dislike and react negatively to. That way, you’ll keep your worth as a dumpee and have the highest chance of reattracting your ex when your ex gets in trouble (perhaps with another person) and rediscovers your romantic worth.
For now, your job isn’t to focus on reconciliation but on things you can control. This includes reflecting on relationship problems, getting rid of bad habits and behaviors, learning more about relationships and breakups, getting in shape, improving self-esteem, detaching from your ex, regaining focus, and finding purpose and joy without your ex.
It won’t be easy to stop caring about someone you love, but I never said it would be easy. The breakup will push you to your limit, reveal your weaknesses, and test your emotional strength, resilience, and breakup knowledge. There will be days when you feel like you can’t stay away from your ex any longer and that you must pour your heart out to your ex.
Those will be the most important days of your no contact journey. They’ll determine how your ex thinks and feels about you and even more importantly, how you feel about your ex and yourself. If you act on your urges and contact your ex with the intention of getting back together, you’ll probably get rejected, miss and need your ex so much that you feel sick, and feel undeserving of your ex’s love.
Your actions will affect your self-esteem and consequently, delay your recovery time.
In today’s post, we shed some light on why your ex doesn’t want you back and what you can do to encourage your ex to see your positive traits and improvements.
Why doesn’t my ex want me back?
A reconciliation doesn’t work the same way as an ordinary relationship argument. You can’t fix broken trust and/or a loss of feelings just by apologizing, explaining why you said or did what you did, and promising to do better. It takes much more than effort on your part to convince your ex the relationship is worth investing in.
Since your ex doesn’t see your value and doesn’t want to be with you, your words and actions mean nothing to your ex. They lost the weight behind them because your ex associated negative beliefs and feelings with your persona and convinced himself or herself the relationship couldn’t be saved.
It could be saved when you were a couple because your ex still loved you, respected you, and saw a future with you, but now that your ex lost the determination to talk about problems and resolve them, your ex doesn’t see the relationship from your perspective and care about your wants and feelings.
Your ex stopped caring about them when he or she emotionally disconnected from you and found different things to look forward to. Things that made your ex feel empowered and in control of his or her life.
I know you’re confused that your ex doesn’t want you back (especially if your ex loved you like crazy and did a lot for the relationship), but that was then and this is now. Feelings and priorities have changed for your ex. They showed your ex there were better or other ways to be happy and that he or she should give them a go before he or she considers coming back.
For many dumpers, other ways include dating other people, spending more time with friends and family, going out more, learning new skills, and engaging in new hobbies and activities.
If your ex were to take you back, your ex wouldn’t just have to admit to you, him/herself, and others that he or she made a bad/impulsive decision. Your ex would also have to feel a desire to give and receive love and want to revisit the past with a renewed sense of hope. This means your ex would have to have strong feelings for you and believe the relationship can and will work short and long-term.
Your ex would have to be certain that he or she wouldn’t get hurt or disappointed by you (if you did something you shouldn’t have), have blind faith, and know that he or she wouldn’t feel unfulfilled again. Only then would your ex be able to trust you with his or her happiness and appreciate you as a person.
Until your ex has processed the past (negative experiences, thoughts, and feelings), don’t expect your ex to want you back. Don’t expect the man or woman to hear your pleas and see a way to benefit from you. If the breakup just happened, your ex feels relieved and can benefit the most by staying away from you.
Space and quiet let your ex feel elated and respected whereas unsolicited pleas, complaints, and reachouts in general smother and annoy your ex. It’s extremely unlikely that your ex will want you back shortly after breaking up with you.
It will happen only when your ex:
- is indecisive and has a tendency to leave and come back (your ex is immature, impulsive, and controlling)
- leaves you for someone else and realizes the new person isn’t who he or she portrayed himself or herself as
Under other circumstances, your ex will probably need months or years of no contact to get punished for thinking he or she could easily find a replacement for you. He or she will probably have to get broken up with and/or experience a sudden loss of self-esteem. That’s when your ex will start thinking about the past and comparing it to the present.
So why doesn’t your ex want you back after the breakup?
It’s because getting back together is what you want. You see the benefits in getting back together (healing, validation, support, company, life/relationship goals) whereas your ex sees the drawbacks (irritation, exhaustion, suffocation, unhappiness, and stagnation.
The thought of reconciliation makes your ex uncomfortable, tires your ex, and stops your ex from finding the happiness he or she is looking for. It forces your ex to meet your expectations when all your ex wants is to move forward with his or her life.
Getting back together may seem natural and sensible to you, but not to your ex. He or she thought long and hard before breaking up. It doesn’t make any sense to ignore all the problems and negative feelings. It makes much more sense to reject your wish to reconcile and focus on more productive things.
To understand why your ex doesn’t want you back, you must put yourself in your ex’s shoes. Try to understand how your ex feels and thinks. Ask yourself how you’d feel if you dumped a person and he/she expressed pain and need to fix the broken relationship. If you broke up with a person before, you probably already know how it feels to be the dumper.
You remember that your dumpee ex made you feel space-deprived and happy to be free of relationship obligations. The last thing you wanted was to get back with an ex you were trying to get away from. Every fiber in your body told you to run for the hills and leave your ex to his or her devices. The more your ex tried to change your mind, the less you respected your ex and wanted to get back together.
So keep in mind that your ex doesn’t want you back anymore because your ex worsened his or her opinion of you and decided the relationship can’t give him or her the satisfaction he or she craves and expects from a romantic relationship. Whether your ex got the grass is greener syndrome or dumped you for legit reasons, your ex trusts and prioritizes his or her beliefs and feelings over your regrets, pain, and wishes to self-improve and reconcile.
Things will stay that way until your ex fails in some way that is important to your ex and acknowledges the value you add to his or her life.
With that said, the following picture signifies why your ex doesn’t want you back.
How can I make my ex want me back?
The question every dumpee directly or indirectly asks at least 100 times.
First of all, you can’t “make” your ex do anything he or she doesn’t want to do. Your ex is his or her own person with unique thinking and behavioral patterns. If you try to make your ex think and feel the way you do, your ex will consider you rude and may even explode at you. Many dumpers do because they feel unheard, trapped, and disrespected.
They think their ex is selfish and only wants what he or she wants. This irritates them and makes them want even more space and time away from their ex.
You’ve got to keep in mind that your ex won’t understand why you value the relationship and want to get back together. Your ex’s perception of the relationship differs from yours and won’t change with a few rational explanations. It doesn’t matter whether you apologize and express the wish to work hard on the relationship.
Now that feelings are gone, it’s no longer about the problems and reasons the breakup happened. It’s about your ex’s negative opinion of you and the emotions that prevent your ex from being vulnerable. Your ex doesn’t trust you and doesn’t think you can reach his or her romantic expectations. Your ex is convinced the breakup is your fault or that you’re just too different (incompatible).
How can you possibly reason with that mentality?
The answer is, you can’t. It’s impossible because your ex has emotionally checked out and developed beliefs (defense mechanisms) that protect him or her from investing in you and getting hurt or disappointed again. Before you can encourage your ex to do anything, your ex has to feel safe and comfortable with you. He or she has to stop thinking and fearing that you want him or her back.
This could happen when your ex processes the breakup and wants friendship or when your ex wants you back.
The mistake most dumpees make is that they try to force their ex to love them. They ignore their ex’s feelings and force themselves into their ex’s life. Some dumpees bother their ex with texts and calls and say they won’t give up on the relationship, whereas other dumpees try to prove their worth indirectly by playing jealousy games and trying to make their ex feel insecure.
Both reconciliation tactics are unlikely to work because they try to get your ex back on your terms. They’re not considering your ex’s personal feelings, experiences, and incentives for falling back in love with you.
So give up on making your ex develop feelings. Instead of trying to manipulate your ex’s feelings, let your ex discover your romantic potential on his or her own. There’s no guarantee that he or she will, but it’s your only option. The other option is staying in touch with your ex, annoying your ex, and getting rejected and hurt by your ex.
As an ex who was dumped, you must let your ex come to you. Whether your ex is male, female, or something in between, your ex must reflect on the breakup and the decisions he or she took. That’s the only way your ex will value you and want to be in a romantic relationship with you.
I know you want to take action and make your ex want you back, but reconciliations don’t work that way. Your ex won’t find you attractive as long as you’re asking for love and expecting your ex to fulfill your needs. Your ex will find you attractive mostly when he or she encounters problems he or she can’t resolve without you.
That’s when your ex will think highly of you, reach out, and initiate reconciliation talks.
While you’re waiting for something unpredictable and painful to happen to your ex, focus on getting yourself back. Do that by getting your ex out of your system and enjoying your life. When your ex gets hurt and needs your validation and support, you’ll need to be emotionally strong and in control of your life.
Your strength will attract your ex whereas a display of weakness will repulse your ex and deter your ex from wanting you back.
Why do you think your ex doesn’t want you back? What’s stopping your ex from letting go of the past and falling back in love with you? Share your thoughts below the post.
And if you want to tell us your full breakup story and discuss your ex’s reasons for not wanting you back, visit our coaching page and subscribe to coaching.
My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Buy me a coffee, learn more about me, or get in touch today.
