No two breakups are created equal, even though how you react to them is always going to be the same.
(hint: read my guide to the no-contact rule to get clued in)
When it comes to us guys, breakups are straightforward.
Not so much with women. Is anything with women cut and dried?
While studying breakups over the last 5 years, I’ve noticed that there are several different types of breakups, 6 to be exact.
Now this isn’t some Cosmo bullshit, because the type of breakup plays a huge role in how hard it’ll be to get her back.
Honestly, when I connected the dots, I couldn’t believe it. No one is talking about this, but it makes a huge difference.
As I said before, the type of breakup should never change what you do in regards to your ex (with one exception, which I’ll talk about later).
What it does change, is the path you need to travel emotionally and spiritually in order to transcend your own personal faults that led to your breakup.
Now please bear in mind, these numbers are estimates based on personal experience. You shouldn’t read them as absolute chances.
Your numbers will vary depending on your skills with women, and whether or not your using the resources I have for you here.
The higher the number, the better the chance you’ll be able to get back together with your ex.
PS – if you want more free advice on how to get your ex-girlfriend back, check out the guide I’ve linked for you.
It’s a must read complete guide to the 18 best ways to get your ex-girlfriend back.
With that out of the way, let’s dive into your chances of getting your ex-girlfriend back.
1: The Angry Breakup
Chances of getting her back: 50%
Every so often you’ll see something like this while you’re driving down the road.
I live in Florida, so I see stuff like this more often than most.
#floridaman
Now you might think that this guy is absolutely not getting his ex-girlfriend back.
But you know what’s strange?
Of all the breakup types on this list, this guy has the best chance to get his ex-girlfriend back.
Now whether he should try to get her back or not is an entirely different animal.
Because clearly, this is one crazy bitch.
And as much as I love dating hairdressers and chicks named Tiffany, if I’ve ever learned one lesson, you avoid the crazy ones.
And by avoid, I mean absolutely donotfucking give it another shot.
But let’s back up a little bit.
Angry Breakups Start With 2 Highly Emotional People
Once you’ve seen enough angry breakups, you begin to notice a pattern.
People aren’t naturally angry, beyond short bursts here and there.
An angry breakup involves fundamental anger, and that anger is always learned from somewhere.
Whether that’s a drunk as a father or a psychotic mother, the seeds of an angry breakup start at home, during childhood.
And it leads to both people being extremely emotional, usually borderline neurotic.
And as it often does, like attracts like, until it doesn’t.
Kaboom.
Because these breakups are almost never one-sided, as both parties tend to explode at once.
Now you can usually see one of these bad boys coming from afar. The lead up always involves cycles of emotionally charged fighting, which worsens over time.
We’re talking yelling, screaming, throwing, where you’re seeing red, and your car is at an increased risk of being keyed.
You’ll have a couple of months where everything is great, followed by a couple of months where you’re constantly at each other’s throats over anything and everything.
After a period of fighting, there’s usually an emotionally charged make up session, and then things are good for a little bit until the cycle inevitably repeats itself.
It’s a pattern, where the fights progressively get worse until one person (almost always the woman) decides that she’s had enough, and leaves, at least temporarily, as we’ll talk about below.
If you’re involved in one of these breakups as a guy, it means you’re too fucking emotional, and you need to get that shit under control because you’re going to bring out the worst in your women if you don’t.
As a man, it’s your job to set the tone in your relationship. Angry relationships are almost always our fault for not practicing emotional control.
Now, I hate that I’m about to use this example to show you what this looks like, but this is the one most of you will know
Damn you, American culture.
That’s right, it’s Jersey Shore.
Watch this clip, and don’t blame me for the brain cells you lose.
Ron absolutely loses his shit, and Sam does no better.
If this looks a lot like watching children fight, you’re right.
Adults practice emotional control, while children will scream their heads off until they get their way.
Children usually learn from their parents that anger isn’t an acceptable response to a problem, but because one or both parents were prone to anger, this was never learned.
It’s a sad state of affairs – but it can be stopped.
But Here’s The Catch
Angry breakups are almost never about attraction, and if you just went through one, you’ve got a really good chance of getting her back.
Anger usually goes hand in hand with very strong physical and emotional attraction.
That’s the good news.
Split up a couple that’s headed for an angry breakup and then put them back together about a month later, and I promise you they’ll be all over each other.
I’ve watched it happen dozens of times.
You see this with Ron and Sam in Jersey Shore, who break up and then get back together several times over the numerous seasons, despite absolutely being at each other’s throats.
At first, this seems totally batshit crazy until you look a little bit deeper.
Co-dependency, depression, and anger are all related.
And it’s very hard to recover from this without serious therapy. This isn’t something you can just triumph with “positive thinking”
This toxic cocktail leads to a cycle of breakups, and makeups.
If you’re caught in this cycle, you’re probably nodding your head in agreement right now.
This is a great example of just because you CAN do something, it doesn’t mean you should.
If your ex-girlfriend has the tendency to get extremely angry, and you’re reacting in kind, you’re not ready for a relationship, and you need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and figure out where your anger is coming from.
If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for a self-destructive cycle that will only lead to you being unhappy and unfulfilled.
Plus, dating an angry chick is miserable.
I should know, I’ve been there.
This is the one case where you really shouldn’t try to get her back. Let her go, and focus on dating other new women.
2: The Long Distance Nightmare
Chances of getting her back: 20%
The long-distance breakup can shake out in one of two ways.
You want to see her. She (might) want to see you.
But she’s 6 hours away.
So what do you do instead?
You make plans to see each other, but it never happens as often as you want, and that is a bad deal for you as a guy.
You need sex to function at peak effectiveness, there’s no way around it.
And without it, eventually, one (or both) of you get bored.
Eventually, you’ll catch the eye of a fine-looking gym chica, while that “friend” she keeps telling you about seems to be spending more and more time with her.
Before long, she’s pulling away, while you’re focused on how much your gym girl is squatting, and how great she looks in her pink spandex.
Soon, the barbell isn’t the only rod she’s lifting, and one of you decides that enough is enough.
Statistically speaking, it’ll usually be her that ends it.
It’s a tale as old as time, and one I’ve lived personally.
And honestly, it’s for the best.
Although many studies have found that long-distance relationships don’t impact relationship satisfaction as much as previously thought, I always question these results: because people conflate happiness, with appearing happy, as Nobel-prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out.
Who wants to seem single and miserable?
There’s another angle to this though: when the long-distance stops being long distance.
The way it usually shakes out is as follows.
One (but usually both) of you realize you miss the freedom of being in a long-distance relationship. You start seeing things about her that you hadn’t seen before.
Suddenly, the Friday night out you’d been looking forward to spending with your buddies turns into her shouting at you about your drinking problem.
“Babe, how come there’s no laws when you’re drinking claws, but the second I decide to go out with the boys it’s like I’m living in North Korea?”
You realize this isn’t the girl you thought she was, and you split.
But it’s not the good kind of split where it’s your banana in…okay I’ll stop now.
Seriously though, this what happens in about 82% of cases, according to a great study out of Ohio State University.
And it happens fast, often within 3 months of being close again.
What does this mean if you want her back?
Long distances relationships are designed to fail, and your attempts to get back together with a long-distance girlfriend are doomed to fail if she’s 6 hours away.
At that point, I wouldn’t even bother. Don’t fall prey to the illusion that your ex is special. She’s not.
Now it’s a slightly different story if you were long distance, but one of you moved to be closer to the other.
If you moved to her, you need to read my article about getting her to react to you, because right now, you’re fucking up.
That said, the chances of getting her back are low because these relationships often end because one party realizes they don’t like the other as much as they thought.
A rule I like to live by: the closer you are to your woman, the more you’re going to notice her negatives, as opposed to her positives.
Fundamentally speaking, long-distance breakups are rarely about attraction.
They’re either about logistics, or two people realizing that they don’t really want to be in a relationship after all.
The best way to recover one of these is to go back to what was working before.
Begin no contact, and start dating other women right away.
In most cases, you’ll very quickly find that your long-distance relationship was that way for a reason.
3: The Cheating Breakup
Chances of getting her back: 50%*
These are fun.
In the same way that getting whacked upside the head with a frying pan is fun.
They feel about the same.
There are two types of cheating here.
The one-time incident, and the pattern cheater.
The one-time incident is one frying pan to the head, while the pattern cheater is, well, you know.
I’ve actually written about cheating breakups before, so if you’re in this situation, I’d read up, because I covered it there in much more depth then I will here.
The short of it these come from lack of attraction.
Your woman wants you to notice her, and when you stop doing that for long enough, her attraction to you begins to fade, and it can lead to her going behind your back.
Women are always seeking out an emotional connection. If she doesn’t have it with you, she’ll either break up with you, or start looking elsewhere.
What does this mean if you want her back?
Cheating is a funny thing.
You know the catch-phrase “once a cheater, always a cheater?”
I’m not saying people can’t change – but the numbers aren’t exactly favorable. A 2017 study showed that if she cheats once, she’s more than 3x as likely to cheat again.
But you probably knew that.
Now this goes two ways because that’s actually what makes her easier to get back.
But when I say back, I don’t mean in a committed relationship. A woman that cheats on you will always have you looking over your shoulder.
You’ve got other things to worry about.
Date her, or hook up with her but don’t give her commitment.
Use my women management system, and don’t ever let her get higher than a low-level starter. Don’t get lazy and let her become a de-facto girlfriend either.
4: The Surprise (Not Really) Breakup
Chances of getting her back: 35%
While you might be surprised, I promise you she’s not.
She’s been thinking about it for at least a month, if not longer.
On the other hand, you might think everything’s going great while she’s been losing attraction to you. That’s the way she works.
She’s been trying to tell you her attraction is dropping, little comments here, mood changes there, and it’s up to you to notice.
It’s also possible you were too needy.
It happens a lot, and once you know what to look for it’s easy to spot it coming.
Whether it’s her texting you less, giving you less affection, or just being more combative in general, the signs are always there if you know what to look for.
I’m going to talk more about this in the future, so I’ll keep it brief here.
The good news about the surprise breakup is that’s these are almost always caused by you making mistakes in your relationship, which means you’ll have a good chance of undoing them if you know what to do.
What does this mean if you want her back?
Of all the breakup types, you have the best chance of restarting your relationship after a surprise breakup.
Because the surprise breakup happens due to mistakes that you can fix, it’s entirely possible for you to get another shot and do it right.
The first thing you need to do is diagnose what went wrong with your relationship.
Were you too weak? Too distant?
If you can figure it out and correct the issue, you’ll have a chance. Remember, at one point she was attracted enough to you to be your girlfriend.
The only reason the chance of getting her back isn’t higher is because of what happens when you solve the problem that ended your relationship.
You almost always come to realize that your ex-girlfriend isn’t special, and you end up with someone better.
5: When She Drifts Away
Chances of getting her back: 30%
After a night of pounding brews, you wake up to a splitting headache and no Alka-seltzer.
Ah shit, here we go again.
After washing the inevitable hangover away, you realize it’s been about a week since you’ve heard from the girl you’re seeing.
Things seemed to be going well even though she hadn’t the relationship talk with you yet.
Two weeks later after not hearing from her, there’s a picture of a new guy on her Instagram.
You might think you did nothing wrong, but chances are you were a little bit too needy and didn’t let her come to you at her own pace.
In the early stages of your relationship, you need to establish that you don’t react to her, she reacts to you. What happens way too often is the reverse.
You pursue her too often (whether that’s texting, calling, etc) and make yourself available to her all the time.
In her eyes, this isn’t attractive.
She wants to chase you, not the other way around. She knows the guys that push her hard aren’t successful with women, and she’s got no time for that.
So she starts to back away, eventually ending up with her backing away from you completely.
Your texts go unanswered, while your calls go to voicemail.
This type of breakup only happens with new relationships, which does make it harder to get her back if you screw up.
Alright, I Fucked Up. Can I Get Her Back?
You can.
However, considering that you pushed too hard, too early in your relationship, you won’t have history with her.
Less history = more chance she’s going to end up with another guy.
The best thing you can do to help yourself out in this regard is to practice outcome independence.
If a girl falls off the map like this on you, your best bet isn’t to keep pushing.
Go no-contact and start dating other women. If you can work on these, plus throw in some outcome independence, you’ll have a good chance of seducing her if she reaches out to you.
Once she does reach out to you, set a date at your place. After the date goes well, don’t text her back.
Wait a few days and see if she reaches out to you.
Once she reaches out to you, set the next date.
Keep this up, and before long the other guy will be out of the picture. Repeat the cycle as needed, and enjoy the results.
The “Mutual” Breakup
Chances of getting her back: 10%
She’s not feeling it.
You’re not feeling it.
All it takes is a quick conversation. No hard feelings. Both people go their separate ways.
You’re “happy” for her when she starts dating again, and there’s no jealousy on her part when you start dating someone else.
Does this actually happen?
Or are you just kidding yourself?
If you’re reading this, I’m willing to bet it’s the latter.
If you’re not, you don’t need me to tell you that you probably won’t get back together.
Well, I Made A Mistake. I Want Her Back.
You did, didn’t you?
We all make them sometimes, but it’s going to be tough to overcome this one.
A mutual breakup almost always means both of you haven’t been trying.
Whether that’s in romance, spending time together, etc.
You both arrive at a place where you don’t care. Apathy is exactly what you’re fighting against with your ex.
You need to make her feel things again, which is easier said than done after a mutually acknowledged breakup.
Here’s what I can tell you: it can be done, but she’ll have to arrive at the same conclusion without you forcing it on her.
If you two are still friends stop being friends right now. Beforehand though, reach out to her and tell her that you made a mistake being friends. Tell her that it’s either a relationship, or you’d prefer to go on your own.
After that, ignore her and what she’s doing in life, and on social media.
Now, making her care again is an entirely separate domain which I’ll cover another time.
But that’s really what it boils down to.
In fact, that’s the core of your chances with each of these breakups.
Can you act in a way where she begins to care about you again?
Can you elicit strong emotions within her that leave her seeking you?
Cultivate her emotions, and even the biggest breakup mistakes can be undone.
Talk soon my friend,
Coach Jack
PS: Got a burning question about your ex-girlfriend or your unique situation that you want my expert advice on? Click here to learn how I can help you.