If you’re reading this article about why you can’t get your ex back, you’ve probably tried every popular trick in the book and failed.

So now you’re miserable and confused, wondering why you fail to get your ex back.

Well, today I’m going to talk you through five of the biggest reasons people fail to get their exes back and how you can avoid them.

No one ever wants to be in a situation where they’re googling how to get their ex back if it’s just not working out for them.

We have found that it is a little bit of a 50-50 proposition – sometimes people are in genuinely tricky situations where they have little to no chance of getting their exes back; other times, people fail to get their exes back because of self-inflicted reasons.

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The Five Main Reasons People Fail To Get Their Exes Back

I want to address both these categories under my five reasons today so you can finally find out if your actions are why your ex isn’t coming back or if it’s just your circumstances.

1. Too Much Of A Focus On Tactics And Strategy
2. Missing The Point Of No Contact
3. You Just Have A Harder Situation
4. You Time Things Wrong
5. Secure Attachment Failure

Let’s dive in a bit deeper.

Failure Reason #1: You Have Too Much Focus on Tactics and Strategy

What’s the first thing you look for on Google or YouTube when you think of getting your ex back?

Is it something like “five things to say to get your ex back” or “technique to get an ex back”?

If yes, you’re looking for specific advice, strategies, and tactics to get the results you want.

On the surface, it doesn’t sound like there’s anything wrong with leaning on tactics and strategies. In fact, when I first started ex-boyfriend recovery and ex-girlfriend recovery, I pretty much only focused on targeted tactics and strategies. It wasn’t until I started interviewing real success stories of people who got their exes back that I realized those people didn’t go too overboard with the tactics and strategies; they focused on the mindset instead.

These success stories didn’t innovate and go hard on strategies, but they did go through a huge mindset shift to outgrow their ex before reaching back out. The people who were willing to outgrow and potentially lose their ex were much better positioned to succeed at using all our ex recovery tactics than those who were still desperate to get their ex back.

So if you’re wondering why you’re consistently failing in getting your ex back, it might boil down to the simple fact that your mindset isn’t right. Now you might ask if it’s okay to “fake it till you make it” since no one can actually see your mindset. Well, I had the same curiosity, so I asked every success story I interviewed on our podcast.

I asked if they truly felt they didn’t care about getting their ex back or if they had to fake it till they felt it, and almost every single person said they truly felt it. After all, that mindset details how the rest of your ex recovery process goes, so your ex would probably catch you in a heartbeat if you tried to fake it.

So getting to an emotional place where you’re okay with failing and losing your ex gives you the kind of confidence and power you need to succeed when you finally talk to them again.

Failure Reason #2: Missing the Entire Point of No Contact

This is actually something that I was guilty of when I first started ex-boyfriend recovery and ex-girlfriend recovery.

A lot of times, I would talk about the no contact rule as this be-all-end-all rule that will help make your ex miss you if you consistently ignore them.

However, when I started interviewing success stories to understand what really works, I realized that coming into the no contact rule with that manipulative frame of mind where you just want to make your ex miss you is the worst approach. That mentality actually hurts your chances of success.

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This is intertwined with reason number 1 where people fail to outgrow their exes before they talk to them. The whole point of no contact is to ignore your ex and focus on yourself so you can eventually outgrow your ex.

I know it sounds cliche, but this is the opportune time to experience emotional growth and get to a point where you’re okay with losing your ex before you can talk to them. Think about it: when you talk to your ex again with this strong mindset, you’re in a much better position to lead conversations and negotiate the future of the relationship.

The no contact period is also when you have a chance to focus on your magnum opus – the thing that you want to be remembered by the end of your life. Something tells me you don’t want to be remembered for this failed relationship with your ex, you want to be remembered for more, and that is the entire point of no contact.

It isn’t a strategy to make your ex miss you, though that’s a welcome consequence; it’s a strategy to work on yourself. If you spend the entirety of no contact focused on manipulating your ex, you miss the whole point.

By the time you do start to talk to your ex, you tend not to have really good conversations because no significant change has happened within yourself,. Your ex basically feels like they’re talking to the same version of you that they decided to leave.

You don’t want to reaffirm their decision to leave you by boring them or appearing desperate; you want them to regret their decision. That’s only possible when you’ve had personal growth during the no contact period, so you bring something new to the table when you start having conversations with your ex again.

Failure Reason #3: You Just Have A Harder Situation

I’m a big believer in focusing on the elements that you have some form of control over.

Unfortunately, if you have a situation that is just naturally more difficult to see success in, there’s really nothing you can do, and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over that. Let’s look at some of the most challenging situations to be in.

Cheating, specifically if you cheated on your ex. If your ex is the kind of person that cannot forgive cheating, you have a bigger uphill battle to get them back. Not saying it’s impossible, but it’ll definitely be more difficult than breakups without an element of cheating. It can be incredibly hard to rebuild trust after you’ve been unfaithful to someone, but the first part of that is also experiencing the personal growth we try to teach all our other clients.

Another hard situation is when your ex is completely indifferent towards you. Your ex doesn’t block you in this case; they simply don’t respond to you or talk to you or do anything related to you.

They’ve essentially ghosted you on such a level that you are dead to them. It can be tough to get their attention again after being ghosted like this.

We have also had slightly more difficulty with long-distance relationships just because of the distance, but we don’t find that as difficult as some of the ones I just mentioned. Most people would naturally assume that an ex moving on to someone else is a more complex situation, but we have found that it’s actually not as bad. In fact, there are specific strategies like the being their method that we can do to help raise your chances of success if your ex appears to have moved on.

So don’t beat yourself up if you’re in a more difficult situation. Sure, the playing field is different, but the strategies and mindset you need are still the same. You have to put in the internal work required to come out the other end of no contact, having outgrown your relationship before you try to talk to your ex.

Failure Reason #4: You Time Things Wrong

We most commonly see this in people who break the no contact rule too early and end up failing to strike a conversation with their ex. You might think a 21 day no-contact rule is enough for you, but if your ex is an avoidant, then 21 days probably isn’t enough for them to actually miss you. So you basically end up contacting your ex again while they’re still feeling the exact same way about you as they did when they broke up with you.

Now a little bit of a primer here on avoidant exes: avoidants avoid close emotional connections, so it takes a lot longer for them to allow themselves to miss you. Timing is crucial in this case because the worst time to contact an avoidant ex is too soon after a breakup. They simply haven’t had nostalgic reverie yet where they reminisce about all the good times you had together.

So all you end up doing by contacting them early is reminding them that you are the same version of yourself that they broke up with, causing them to retreat more. On the other hand, if you worked on yourself and took the time to let them experience nostalgic reverie, they’d be much more open to talking to you.

Failure Sign #5: A Secure Attachment Failure

When I talk about outgrowing an ex or feeling like you’ll be okay without them, I’m referring to adopting a secure attachment style. Usually, this means switching your current anxious tendencies to secure ones.

Someone with a secure attachment style looks at a breakup in a way that they allow themselves to grieve, but they don’t let the breakup bring their life to a halt. They know they need to grieve, but they also know that they will be okay without their ex because they have a life outside that failed relationship.

On the other hand, someone with an anxious attachment style will see the breakup as the end of their life. They have a tunnel vision regarding their ex because their whole life and identity were centered around their relationship. They’re the ones who are likely to GNAT their exes – Going Nuts At Texting. They’re also the ones who are likely to beg for their exes because they don’t know who they are without their ex.

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We try to teach our clients to shift their mindset to approach the breakup in a more secure way instead of the anxious way. But a lot of people fail to do this, so they can’t get their ex back. Why is that?

Well, a no contact rule is basically an anxious person’s nightmare. It’s extremely hard for them to sit through 30 to 45 days of ignoring their ex and not knowing where their chances of getting back together stand.

But if they follow our advice and focus on becoming secure throughout that no contact period, it becomes easier and easier to stop obsessing over their ex.

They no longer check their phone to see if their ex reached out or stalk their ex’s social media because they’re too busy living their best life. Their ex is no longer their first priority; they are their own first priority!

That’s really the secret to getting your ex back – prioritize yourself and become more secure.

Conclusion:

Here are our top 5 reasons for failure at getting your ex back:

1. Too Much of a Focus on Tactics and Strategy – you can try all the ex recovery strategies in the world, but none of it will work till you have the correct secure mindset.
2. Missing the Point of No Contact – no contact is not meant to make your ex miss you; it’s meant to focus on yourself and outgrow your ex.
3. You Just Have A Harder Situation – some things are out of our control, and you will have a harder time getting an ex back if you cheated on them or they ghosted you, etc.
4. You Time Things Wrong – timing is key when dealing with avoidant exes: if you break no contact too soon, you will just push your ex further away.
5. Secure Attachment Failure – you probably have an anxious attachment style that’s hard to convert to a secure one. However, having a secure attachment style is the key to getting an ex back, so you need to keep working on that.