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If the messaging is going well, I think that would be okay. She might say no, but it sounds like she might say yes too.
Stay no contact. Your ex is not ready to talk to you. You are pressuring her and not respecting her desire for space. You are not giving her the chance to move past her resentments and start to miss the good times with you. Every form of contact, even “an elephant in the room” letter is only going to re-enforce her belief that she made the right decision and that you will not give her space. She is likely to dig in even more and build that wall around her even stronger. She might even get mean, because she really wants you to leave her alone so she can work out her feeling on her own. You have already broken no contact twice, and it did not help you. This won’t either. Every time you break no-contact, you reset the whole process and it will take longer for her to get through the stages to the point of missing you and wanting to contact you again. Never contact your ex in anyway until she contacts you, if you goal is to get her back.
You didn’t specify who did the dumping. If she is the dumper, you might be heading to the just friends zone where you are feeding her self-esteem boosts and behaving as her safety net while she considers other options. She likely won’t let you get very close if that is the case and you would be helping her move on.
I am not convinced she had anything to do with this life event changing. But I am not familiar with that either. The pictures with you are still up.
Unfriending her will NOT be the final nail in the coffin. It will help you, because it will make you look like you are moving on and that is going to trigger her anxiety. The fact that you are keeping her on the friend list actually could be similar to being Just friends. You are helping her move on and still in a way acting as her safety net. You don’t want to do that.
It will make you stronger too. The reason you don’t want to do it is because you are addicted to watching her page and you know when you unfriend her you won’t be able to do that anymore if her page is showing to friends only. Addiction is not good. End it. It will make you look good to your ex. She could very well be thinking it’s pathetic that you haven’t already unfriended her.
I could be wrong, but I think there is a good chance she is going to reach out to you soon after she notices that you unfriended her.
I understand. That would be painful to me too. It really doesn’t always mean what we think it means. It could mean she is still struggling and trying to remove the temptation. But, keep in mind, this is why you might be best served to unfriend her, before she unfriends you.
See you are no contact, she is posting lots of pictures trying to trigger you into breaking no contact to get back on her hook. You are not responding to that, so she will try something else, such as untagging herself from the life event with hopes that you will respond to that, because she desperately wants her safety net back while she tries other options. When you don’t react to that either, the next effort might be to unfriend or block you and that is going to hurt even more and you will have lost your power over the situation.
If you unfriend her first, it can be very empowering for you and kick up the anxiety level in her that you are moving on. If you don’t unfriend her and she unfriends you, you are going to be crushed and you might start chasing and make things worse. You just said here that you wish you had turned the life event off ages ago. Apply that to unfriending her. If she unfriends you first, you are going to say you wish you had unfriended her ages ago.
I highly recommend that you take your power back before she takes more from you by unfriending her first. This would be therapeutic for you in many way and will make you look good to her as opposed to needy and clingy that you would want keep her on your friend list.
Yes it really is an emotional roller coaster. The stages of grief do not come in order and they fluctuate back and forth to where you will be repeating stages again. It does get easier with time. I promise. I know it feels like it, but it still hasn’t been that long for you.
A thought, memory or event can trigger our emotions greatly. Emotions typically last only 90 seconds, but we tend to feed them and that sustains them into lasting much longer, but even then, they usually pass with a little time. I always say to myself when I am upset about anything, “This will pass by tomorrow”. Tomorrow you will probably feel better and whatever triggered you might not feel like such a big deal anymore.
It might help to explain what triggered you, if anything, when your emotions go off the charts. Getting it off our chests can be therapeutic.
I hope you are right and I really do want it to go well.
Keep working on improving yourself and taking care of yourself. Not for her, but for yourself.I agree that you should keep the communications limited and go slow, but at the same time, be careful to not become just friends. It is very possible that is the whole reason she agreed to this. She is lonely and needs a friend who listens to her while she finds her way to the next relationship. This allows her to avoid the consequences of the breakup while not actually committing to you. You will be very severely hurt if that happens. So if you get the impression this is heading to just friends, put a stop to it.
Now I will give you a piece of dating advice. Don’t wait for her to decide the place. She will like it when you take charge in that situation and pick the place. Just send her a text and say “How about we just go to Starbucks on Incognito street. It’s quieter there.” or something like that.
@dreambig, You sound like you are getting stronger and making healthy choices. I still feel very confident that your ex will be contacting you before long.
@Lee Brads becareful to not fall into the just friends trap. Review my earlier comments to read why that is bad.
You broke no-contact very early and gave your power back to your ex. Now she is in control again and you are anxious because you know you hadn’t had any time to make changes and you are afraid you will screw it up, or that she will change her mind. You are completely at her mercy as you prepare to step back into the same relationship dynamic that she wanted out of. I would be nervous too if I were you.
I know it was thrilling that she responded as well as she did. I am happy you got to experience that. But, already you are a nervous wreck and you don’t know what to do next. My advice was for you to remain no-contact and let her come to you, so you would be on stable ground. You decided to ignore that and let your emotions lead the way. So, I am not sure I should bother giving more advice. I will say, go slow and keep it casual. I hope it works out.
Your ex exaggerating her happiness is a typical sign that no-contact is working.
I explained a couple times the reason she is most likely ignoring your last message. Maybe if you go back and read that you will feel less angry.That sounds good about your posting frequency. If you take a trip or something, that is a good thing to post and yes we want her to see that. Her posting as frequently as you say, really does sound like an attempt to get to your attention and make you jealous.
I like the way Kevin says it:
“Is your ex trying to make you jealous? Do they post pictures on facebook specifically to push your buttons? Are they going out of their way so that you know that they are dating someone new? Do they become extra flirtatious with other people when you are around? Then congratulations, your ex is probably still in love with you (aside from being a little immature).competitive_exWhat your ex is trying to do is win the post breakup competition. Not only is it a pretty immature way of dealing with the breakup, it’s also a very ineffective way. The fact that they are doing this means that you are on their mind most of the time. And the fact that you are still on their mind means that they are still in love with you.”
That is exactly right. She IS expecting you to message her again. She is feeling the loss of the relationship because she sees you are not on her hook anymore. So, she is trying to provoke you into messaging her to get you back on her hook. Posting all those happy pictures are attempts to convince you and herself that she is really happy and to provoke you into saying something about it. People who are content with their lives don’t need to broadcast it. Even just a simple “hello” message will assure her that you are still thinking about her and that she is still safe to come back to you whenever she wants. Don’t give her that message.
Eventually she will begin to doubt herself and become frantic that maybe you are not thinking about her after all and that you are moving on. That is when she will start thinking about contacting you. How you respond is very important. If you respond in a way that implies you were thinking about her all this time and you miss her so much, she will just think “yep, he is still on my hook.” and go back to ignoring you. But, if you respond in a way that implies you had been just fine without her, that you had been busy living your life and barely had time to think of her, that will look attractive. She will want to be part of that. Be polite, friendly and most of all cheerful when she contacts you to portray confidence and security, not neediness and depression.
I am still concerned about you still being on her friend list. She knows that you are seeing her posts. I am afraid that when she decides this current method of provoking you isn’t working, she will unfriend you and that is what will get a reaction from you. I am also concerned that the two of you are competing on who looks the happiest on Facebook. Even she will eventually see through that and realize it is fake.
And how does your real girlfriend, the one your family knows about feel about this? Does she even know? You don’t see a problem here? Sounds kind of narcistist to me and a toxic borderline/narcistist personality disordered relationship. You seem to think you are entitled to two relationships, one open the other secret, and you are devastated that the one on the side wants out of it without even considering the real one. I would be more concerned about losing her if I were you. Yeah, I’ve got nothing else to say.
I want to add that the day of your breakup is not the day your ex told you she/he wanted to breakup or even the day of the big blowup fight where your exes decided that they are done with you.
The day of your breakup is the day you went no-contact. Why? Because prior to that day you were not giving your ex the breakup they said they wanted. You were still communicating one way or another. Sometimes that is because the ex kept in contact with you. The day you went no-contact is the day they began to experience life without you and that is the date you should measure the progress from.
She definitely won’t contact you based on a comment she made in the heat of the moment? I disagree. Just that comment alone “Ban yourself.” lacks rationality. That is not how no-contact is initiated.
Usually if you annoy your ex enough, she will just block you without saying a word of warning. Even that block is usually just temporary because it was in the heat of the moment where she just wanted a break to clear her head and gain control of the situation. Your ex didn’t even do that. She said “Ban yourself.”
If my ex ever said that, I would have a hard time taking her seriously in regards to the breakup. I mean she is perfectly capable of blocking me herself, and she did just that after a heated exchange where I said things I regretted. Within 4 months I was unblocked. It’s not just her, it happens in worse breakups than yours all the time.
My advice to you, Lee, is to try to stop seeing it as negative. You seem to be seeing things as worse than they are. Don’t take everything she said as how she will always feel. What is said in the moment often isn’t how they really feel in the long term. However, how we continue to respond to it determines if that momentary feeling becomes long term.
Yes, your ex really does want a lot of space at the moment and no-contact is going to have an affect on her too, but my impression based on what you said is that she has left the door open as she isn’t sure she wants the breakup permanently. So let’s let her see that life isn’t all that great without you and how mature and strong you are by staying full no-contact until she is ready to reachout to you. I predict that will be within 4 to 6 months, based on what you shared here.
Both of you should continue to focus on yourselves and try to not think of them too much. A watched pot will not boil. Your exes will contact you when you are not looking.
