Watch the subtitled video above if you prefer to listen to my advice.
What does it mean when you are staying friends with an ex & when an ex stalks you on social media? For example, when your ex looks at your stories. It can be very distressing after a breakup to see her profile when you’re in the middle of no contact because you’re not sure what to do when you see your ex stalking your social media.
Why Your Ex Stays In Touch: Understanding Ex Stalking On Social Media
There have been studies on why ex partners stay friends after a relationship & why they might keep in touch. There are three scenarios for this: One of them is due to narcissism and your ex-girlfriend wanting an ego boost, and the other reason is due to sentimental feelings. Often an ex girlfriend wants to stay friends due to sentimentality or reliability — she relates to you on a platonic and romantic spectrum. Your ex feels close to you because she felt comfortable in the relationship with you, even if you had some problem/s that lead to the breakup. This doesn’t always mean she wants to get back together, but she misses how peaceful her life while having you in her life.
In the narcissistic scenario, the reason to stay friends with an ex and/or stalk an ex is pragmatism and convenience. It’s about personal gain & benefit. You may have a lot of money which your ex could “extract” from you. Your ex-girlfriend tries to get a lot of favors from you. A narcissistic ex will use you for convenience without regard for your feelings. Maybe you know how to fix computers or household items. Maybe you have insight on how to help her improve her business, her career, or her job. This is why doing no contact properly without being obsessed over your ex and walking away from an ex if she doesn’t value you is important.
It has been studied that if her reasons are on the pragmatic side — so it’s for convenience — then your ex girlfriend’s personality contains several narcissistic traits. If your ex girlfriend is narcissistic, she’s just using you and you should use no contact to walk away from her forever instead of trying to re-attract her.
The third reason is that your ex girlfriend still has strong feelings for you. Your ex has deep romantic feelings that have never been resolved. She didn’t get any closer, or she cannot or doesn’t want to move on. Your ex realized that losing you was the worst thing that could have happened to you.
So, I got a message from a guy whose ex-girlfriend is not narcissistic — I believe she cares about him. Just keep in mind that there is always a chance that your ex is narcissistic if she wants to stay friends, keeps on stalking you, reaches out and pulls away repeatedly, goes hot & cold, and so on. An ex like this just uses you as “supply”, like a recourse to use up. Keep that in mind. So his situation goes like this:
Understanding Your Ex’s Perspective: When She Breaks Up And Wants Nothing To Do With You
Coach, I need your advice. My ex-girlfriend and I have been broken up for nearly seven months and even though she was the one who ended our relationship and was insistent on us not getting back together, she has been checking out my IG stories but for roughly three months after our breakup, she was 100% clear on wanting nothing to do with me, mainly by being unreachable and ignoring me as much as she could.
This is a textbook ex-back scenario. It’s almost always the ex-girlfriend who breaks up or is unhappy in the relationship. Women are more relationship-driven than men and pay more attention to problems in relationships. They are much better at nurturing relationships and because of that they also pay attention to the fact that a relationship is not working out. They’re usually the ones who first attempt to fix a relationship but usually their attempts don’t work out. Either because they don’t know how to do it the right way, or because their efforts are one-sided — so if you want to have an edge as a man, always be a leader in your relationship. Otherwise, a woman will always leave you eventually once she had enough of all the relationship problems.
And when an ex girlfriend is done with her boyfriend, she’s done. At least for the moment. She wants to find another man who will make her happy. Or she will focus on being happy on her own. She wants to explore herself, be single, or maybe hook up. Your exes’ goal is autonomy after the breakup. The bottom line is: She wants to discover and have some fun again because her relationship with you now longer felt like fun. But, the grass isn’t greener on the other side and after a while, she realizes “I screwed up!”
The Breakup Boomerang Effect: Begging, Pleading And Sending Your Ex Girlfriend A Letter Backfires
I messed up a lot with begging, sending her messages and letters for probably two to three months until I accepted that it is over and decided to focus on myself instead and started to work on myself.
You’ve done something great, and something terrible. Begging your ex girlfriend never works, especially by sending her a letter. Whether you beg for one, two, three months, or longer, it won’t do anything. It just makes it worse. Whether you send voice messages, emails, letters, text messages, or show up in front of her house to apologize in person. All desperate attempts to get your ex back are in vain. In fact, it makes it harder to get her back. You are not giving her space and time to forget the negative influence due to the relationship. Instead, you’re rebooting all her resentment for the relationship over and over. Never reinforce your ex-girlfriend’s belief that she needs to find happiness elsewhere.
So, this didn’t work and then you started focusing on yourself which is the right thing to do. Most guys make the mistake that they only do this after a while. As soon as you’re broken up, even if you want your ex back, even if you want to try and see if you can fix it eventually, you should focus on yourself. You are a king! You should turn yourself into the best version of yourself and hopefully, of course, the woman that you love is going to realize that you are a true king, you improved yourself, you can do better, what didn’t work out in the relationship won’t repeat itself. But if she doesn’t realize that, then you’re still happy all by yourself. And that’s essentially what your ex is doing as well when she breaks up with you and she doesn’t want anything to do with you. Because she’s done with you and she thinks “I’m gonna turn myself into a queen.”
Maybe she already thinks she’s a queen. She thought that she deserved better but she didn’t get it from you, so she looked elsewhere. So she wants to be a queen, you should wanna be a king. Work on yourself as soon as possible and when she comes back, that’s mostly just a bonus because trust me, as long as you focus on yourself, you’re going to improve yourself. Your career, your social circle, the friends you hang out with, the women that you meet, the results that you get in life, your body, your hobbies, your passion, everything is going to improve so much by focusing on yourself. And of course, that will then ripple out into other areas of your life, and especially your romantic relationships. Then either your ex comes back or you’re going to date a woman who is likely even better than your ex.
Your Ex Girlfriend Begins To Miss You During No-Contact: When Your Ex Starts Checking Your Social Media
We broke up in the middle of 2021, and around the start of December, she started checking out my IG stories.
What a coincidence! You basically have been messaging her and begging, and annoying her, essentially, for two to three months. So you broke up in July and then two to three months, July, August, September, October. So roughly October-ish. That’s when you stopped begging and then in December she messages you, so or she checks out your IG story, sorry. So she’s starting to realize: “He’s gone. What’s going on? He’s been begging?” and now she’s starting to miss you. Now, maybe, maybe she’s realizing things are not that great.
And last week she even liked one of my IG posts. I really don’t know what I should do. I want to reach out to her and start a conversation but I am afraid to say the wrong thing, or maybe worse, what if she still doesn’t want to talk to me?
Well, I’m assuming December came up. Christmas season came up and I don’t know how long you’ve been in a relationship. You didn’t mention this here but let’s assume that maybe you’ve spent at least one Christmas together. You spent one of the great holidays together. You had Christmas, New Year, maybe Valentine’s Day. What else is there? Maybe you’ve spent Thanksgiving. All of these occasions where you spend time together as a mini family, as two partners who really love each other and value each other and who want to build the life together. Now all of a sudden that is gone. All of a sudden, you are now finally gone. You stop begging, it’s December, Christmas is around the corner, New Year is around the corner but you’re not there anymore. All of a sudden she’s starting to miss you. She probably starts to feel lonely. She probably is realizing that just breaking up didn’t solve her problems.
Yeah, she wasn’t happy with you but it doesn’t mean that she’s automatically happier without you because now she’s realizing all the good things that you had. So whatever didn’t work out in the past, of course, that sucked! Of course, you both need to work on that, but relationships have good and bad sides and as long as the good sides heavily outweigh the bad ones, then a relationship is actually good. So of course, for some reason, the bad things in your relationship outweighed the good ones in that instance. So you have to flip it around, of course, if you get back together. But she also realizes there were a lot of good things and right now she’s just not focused on the bad things. That’s how psychology works.
It’s called the fading affect bias. We forget the negative stuff after a while and so even though, honestly, I believe that probably during your relationship things were bad… So you could say that for every good interaction in your relationship, you probably had three bad ones, and your girlfriend just didn’t want to take it anymore. But now she’s forgetting these bad things. So all you have to do is basically get back together and then reboot and no longer have this bad balance. You have to have the balance, all the way flipped around, basically. So three good interactions for one negative one. And that’s all just about being conscious and paying attention to your relationship. But anyway, you want to know “What am I gonna do? I wanna reach out to her but what if she doesn’t wanna talk to me?”
Well, the fact that she’s checking out your stories and your Facebook, or was it your IG post… Well, she’s liking them, so she’s sending you a signal. She cares about you but you should not be the one who messages her. She’s the one who broke up so she made a mistake. It wasn’t a mistake to break up, of course, because you didn’t make her happy probably for some reason. But she needs to admit that maybe she has been too impulsive. She didn’t give you another chance. She didn’t give you a chance to try to fix it. She didn’t give you a chance to listen to you and see what’s your side of the story and try to figure out how can you resolve this. That was a mistake.
So now she’s realizing “I miss you” but she probably doesn’t want to message you. She’s too shy. She’s insecure. She’s afraid of rejection. But that doesn’t mean that you should message her. You are a king! You should keep on working on yourself and it has to be her idea to get back together. It has to be her idea to rekindle. And what I would say is, typically if this wouldn’t be a breakup… So women always send men signals. They reply to an Instagram story. They watch your stories. they will look at you when you go out in bars. They will send you signals that they like you and then it is up to the man to basically take action and walk over to her and talk to her. But often, also it’s just a woman who sees a story from Instagram, or a video on TikTok, whatever, and that’s a chance for her to message you and she will do that on her own. But sometimes it’s also you, the man, who has to take the action. But in this case, in a breakup… Nope! You’re not gonna take action!
She has to show you that she wants you again and even if it is hard for her to do that… I know that’s very scary. She has to do it. She has to overcome that fear. She has to show you that she really means it and there’s no other way of getting back together because you have to value yourself and you have to respect yourself. So do not message her. I know you think right now she’s looking at your story, so hey! This is the perfect opportunity to message her! But no, it’s only great to talk to her if she really makes an effort. And if she doesn’t make the effort, well, then let her burn a little bit more in loneliness hell. She’s eventually gonna come around and if she doesn’t come around, then it is her loss and you’re going to find someone else who makes you happy.
When Your Ex Stalks Your Instagram Stories: Should You Reach Out To Your Ex?
Maybe I am reading too much into this but seeing her interact with my social media has given me hopes and excitement that we could fix our relationship. Given that we haven’t talked since the last time that I begged and she has been looking at my stories for about the last five-ish weeks, do you think it’s time for me to reach out to her? We basically have been in no contact for several months. I checked out her TikTok account and most of her TikToks are videos about her being happy, enjoying life, etc, so I am afraid to message her. Please give me some advice on what you suggest I should do. Thank you.
So I would suggest that your no contact is working out. Now there might be scenarios where messaging an ex when she shows some signs that she’s into you again could work, but I think most of the time it’s going to backfire. You’re going to do something insecure. She might already start the conversation or think when the conversation starts that you’re insecure. That you’re needy. And she doesn’t want that. So if you already started off that way by reaching out to her, she already has a suspicion. She’s looking out for signs that you are going to be needy and insecure and then she might throw some tests at you.
And honestly, sometimes we fail these tests and it’s not 100% our fault. Of course, if we’re insecure and someone throws a test at us, a woman throws a test at us, if we’re insecure, that’s our fault. But maybe she already throws you in the wrong spot where it becomes harder to actually pass that test. So of course, you want to put yourself in the right position. And so you want her to reach out to you because then it becomes easier. She’s already shown you a very clear sign. She’s into you once she reaches out to you and then maybe she’s going to test you, yes, but it’s probably going to be easier to pass her shit test to see: Are you strong? Are you confident? Are you not going to resort to begging and all that stuff again?
She wants to see that you fixed yourself and that you are a king again. Because she wanted to live a life as a queen and she realizes well, she is a queen, but without you, everything is not complete. The kingdom is not complete. So she wants to see if she messages you, she talks to you, are you going to be happy? Are you going to talk to each other with security? Without insecurity? Are you not going to cause drama or going to be obsessed with her? And then she realizes “You are a king again. I’m a queen. We’re both not perfect but let’s get back together and build that kingdom from scratch and build it on a better foundation!” So you have to wait. I think your no contact is working!
Never Make False Assumptions During No Contact: Don’t Assume Your Ex Is Happy Without You
You think that the videos say that she’s happy and everything is fine. You’re afraid of messaging her. My advice for you is in general about her social media, you should maybe mute her stories and not look at them. She probably did the same thing when she broke up with you. That’s why you didn’t see her looking at your stories but now she’s obviously doing it again. She probably pressed that mute button. She didn’t want to see your stories and what you’re up to. And maybe on your TikTok, she unfollowed you. I’m not sure if you can mute on TikTok but I’m assuming you can. And you know, she didn’t want to see it. Now she wants to see it again but I think for you, maybe seeing her account just makes you overthink. You’re basically interpreting too much into this and she is pretending to be happy and enjoying life.
Okay, it could be the case. I’m not saying that she couldn’t be happy. Of course, she could move on. She could have moved on and be completely over it but then why would she check out your Instagram? Why would she be interacting with you? Clearly, she’s curious. And I think it’s kind of unlikely that she’s already moved on after just seven months. It’s very, very, very unlikely. And so she’s probably just trying to find a way to get back in again, but of course, there is the possibility that she might have moved on, and then yeah maybe she’s just interacting with your post because she just wants to stay friends and she really just means it like that. But I would not assume that this is the reason why she’s interacting with your social media. I’m thinking she’s missing you.
But you should not assume that she’s happy just because she’s posting happy stuff. To give you an example: Right now, or actually for the last few months, one of my exes, she has been messaging me and she messages me basically whenever there’s trouble in paradise or after she’s broken up. And that’s when she starts watching my Instagram stories again and maybe she actually doesn’t necessarily interact with my stories, but then when I check out her Facebook posts and I’m just curious you know, what is she up to? I wouldn’t mind maybe having some sex with her, although I’m not so inclined to get back with her. But anyway, I check out her Facebook posts and they are happy but I know there’s trouble in paradise. I think she already broke up with the boyfriend and she’s not sure… “Should I get back with him?”
So she’s looking at the previous partners, trying to figure out maybe I should get back with them. Maybe they are better choices. And if I look at her previous ex, pretty sure I’m a better choice. He didn’t seem like he really takes care of himself & his body. He seemed very insecure. Not really an alpha male. He’s someone who needs to do a lot of work on himself. So that’s why it’s really obvious why she’s messaging me and why she’s reaching out to me and so then I see her stories that are a complete contradiction. Life is great! She’s enjoying herself! She’s going out and going on trips on Instagram and doing all of these…
These selfies where girls pamper themselves and “our life is so great!” and they’re at a resort and they’re at the pool and blah blah blah and all that crap. But you know, deep down they’re super fucking unhappy. So you know, she might be super fucking unhappy! Honestly, we can’t know for sure. I’m not saying that she is super fucking unhappy. You really need some experience to be able to read this and understand what a woman is going through. Obviously, as a dating coach, I look at this stuff all the time and I can immediately just spot when a woman is not happy and when she’s pretending. I just know. It’s like my spidey sense is tingling and I can just read the crystal ball, basically. Here’s my crystal ball! And I can tell when a girl is not happy. I just look at their Facebook posts, or their Instagram posts, and whatever, and I know what’s going on. So you shouldn’t read into this. Your no contact is probably working.
Trust The No Contact Process: Become The Best Version of Yourself To Re-Attract Your Ex-Girlfriend
She needs to reach out to you! You’re a king! You’re not going to take her back. You’re not going to grovel. You’re not going to beg her and go on the floor, on your knees, and do whatever it takes to get her back. You love yourself. You respect yourself. And like you said: You’ve been focusing on yourself and working on yourself. I don’t know what it has been that you’ve been doing to work on yourself… Keep focusing on this! Even if maybe right now that feels like it’s hard, at some point, it gets really, really, really, really fun! To give you an analogy: I’ve always wanted to become a musician but I’ve always not gotten through that point of playing the guitar where it’s not fun… where it is just too much work. It hasn’t been fun. And I never got over that moment to work hard enough once I’ve reached that tipping point where it becomes so fun and easy and like a real habit.
There’s a great book called Atomic Habits by James Clear and he talks about this. I forgot the name of what he calls it, but he calls it like the chasm or something of something, or whatever. It’s basically at that point when you become good at something and that’s when it really pays off and you start to have fun. I recently hit that point with guitar, where my regular practice that has been so tedious, and so boring, and so frustrating, has become so fun. So practicing scales and trying to force myself to learn music theory has been so fucking annoying but now it’s finally fun.
So what is it that you’ve been working on for yourself? And if it’s not fun yet, keep on working on it. Become a king at whatever you want to become good at. And then the chicks, the women, they’re going to follow. Success is going to follow in your life. Either with her or with another woman.
