Today Coach Shaunna and I are going to be covering the major signs that your ex is still attached to you after a breakup.

In all, we believe there are six core behaviors that most exes who are still very attached to you will exhibit,

The way your ex speaks to you
How much time they are investing into you
Find excuses to reach out to you
Having one of their friends spy on you
Trying to make you jealous
They’ll drop everything to help you solve problem

As always, we’re going to dive in a bit deeper so you have a greater understanding of what is meant by all of these.

Lets begin!

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Sign #1: Pay Attention To The Way Your Ex Speaks To You

As stated above, Coach Shaunna and I teamed up for this article and one of her contributions was pulling from her own personal experience in paying attention to the way your ex speaks to you after the breakup.

Using her exact words,

So I was thinking, the way your ex speaks to you can be indicative of a lot of things. Most people think it’s a bad thing if an ex is really angry with you but we’ve actually found that, that particular behavior usually shows that he still cares. On the other side of the coin, if he’s really nice to you and doing all these little sweet things it’s sort of like there’s a little remnant left over from the relationship that he can’t contain.

Shaunna continues,

I myself am an EBR success story, and pulling from my experience during the post breakup period. Well, my now husband and I, we obviously have pet names for each other and sometimes he’d accidentally call me by the pet name while we were broken up.

Essentially Shaunna’s argument is to pay attention to the way your ex is speaking to you when you’re communicating in the post breakup period. If they’re falling back into old habits, like names, certain turns of phrases, I guess, even like inside jokes would be included here.

One final thing I’d like to include here. If you ex is growing angry with you it doesn’t mean he doesn’t care. In fact, in most cases it’s the opposite.

Believe it or not, we’d actually much rather see that as a sign that an ex is still attached to you because usually the signs that an ex is kind of moving on from you are when they’re indifferent, or they are using their own indefinite version of no contact on you. Which I think is a really, really important distinction to make because the opposite of love isn’t hate its indifference.

But why don’t we move on to the next sign.

Sign #2: Looking At How Much Time They Are Investing Into You

If your ex is in a situation where they’re taking a lot of time and spending time with you then obviously there’s still something that they’re interested in.

In fact, in a weird way, paying attention to how long they’re spending in conversations with you is a good thing. I know this is kind of a loose connection a little bit but one of the things I’ve noticed is that exes who are really investing a lot of time energy into you, they tend to text you with longer sort of word counts and text messages.

So I actually think paying attention to stuff that most people would gloss over like,

Word count
Text ratio
The times they are texting you
How long the conversation goes for

All of that stuff is a good way of determining if your ex is still attached

In fact, Shaunna and I were actually doing a joint coaching call last week with someone and one of the suggestions we had was revolving around the importance of tracking text messages and things like that. So you can actually pay attention to this kind of stuff.

Let’s move on!

Sign #3: Your Ex Finds Excuses To Reach Out To You

This sign revolves around your ex making up ridiculous and sometimes funny excuses to reach out to you.

Again, this is one of Shaunna’s contributions so I’ll let her exact words guide us here,

So obviously, we encourage our clients to reach out during the texting phase but if your ex is reaching out to you on their own accord for seemingly minimal things then it’s time to pay attention to their behaviors. Pulling from a personal experience, when I was apart from my ex, obviously, the conversations that we’d be having were such that I’d almost question why my ex was even asking me about those things was. So it was things like, Oh, do you know what day one of our children had an appointment? And I was like, you already know, it’s that day. And then the next question was just so, trivial attempts to get a conversation going.

Shaunna’s answer her kind of triggered me because looking back at some of my breakups I’ve literally been in similar shoes where you run out of things to talk about. But you want to keep someone talking. So you’re just grasping for straws. And so you’re just throwing anything out there.

So, the big takeaway here is that if you notice your ex asking you;

Questions that they already know the answers to
Prolonging a conversation

Usually those are good signs.

Sign #4: Your Ex Having One Of Their Friends Spy On You

Sign number four revolves around your ex having one of their friends spy on you.

So, one of the things that we’ve been seeing a lot lately is the people undervaluing sort of the concept of sphere of influence,

The sphere of influence for an ex, or even for you are sort of these people that you surround yourself with, who influence your life in a positive way, they impact your life in a positive way.

these are friends
close family members
lovers
romantic partners
whatever

But these are the people that you’re surrounding yourself with that kind of shape the way you view the world and what’s interesting is that sometimes when you get into relationships with, you know, like an ex or something your sphere of influence and their sphere of influence almost kind of overlap a little bit.

And so there’s like this interesting overlap where maybe you have some mutual friends, but if, let’s say you do have a mutual friend with your ex, but that mutual friend goes back a little bit further with your ex.

One of the interesting things we’ve been noticing is that your ex will almost use that mutual friend as a way to spy on you, especially if you’re doing the No Contact Rule.

Or I guess in a weird way, sometimes some of our clients will block their ex is from seeing them on Facebook or what have you.

But that doesn’t mean that their exes aren’t interested in what you’re doing.

So, if you’re finding that all of a sudden this mutual friend that you were kind of cordial with but didn’t really talk to a lot with is talking to you and trying to ask you questions that are not part of the norm then they’re most likely being sent by their ex to pay attention to what you’re doing, and reporting that back to their ex.

I’ve actually experienced this firsthand with one of my very first breakups ever. All of a sudden, this girl’s best friend wanted to talk to me. And I think I was dumb enough to actually have like a three hour conversation with her I just poured it all out and of course, the girl went right back to my ex girlfriend and told her everything that I had said.

So yeah, basically, having one of one of your exes, friends or mutual friends spying on you is indicative of the fact that they’re still attached to you.

Let’s move on.

Sign #5: Your Ex Begins To Employ Jealousy

This one is super straightforward.

If your ex is trying to make you jealous then they are still very attached to you.

In fact, Shaunna herself has a specific example of this playing out for one of our clients.

Once again quoting her,

Yeah, we had one person post about how their ex worked with them, and they’d met someone else through work. And he made changes to spend time with this new person spending lunch with them. And obviously, the person in the group was really upset. Like he didn’t do these things for me. But we were like, yeah, they’re just trying to get a reaction. They want you to act.

Personally I think that there’s that aspect of jealousy go a layer deeper. Generally speaking, the rule of thumb when it comes to jealousy is again that age old phrase opposite of love isn’t hate, its indifference.

There’s almost like a certain revenge aspect to jealousy I’ve found. Usually an ex who tries to make you jealous, is trying to get back at you at some way.

They’re trying to kind of, for lack of a better word, sort of stick it to you like “win” the breakup in some way. They come away with the attitude of, “I’m going to show you how much better I’m doing without you.”

But in the end, it’s kind of a hollow pursuit. Most of the time it doesn’t seem help and so this is the difficult part I’ve noticed with ywith jealousy. The initially do it as some are sort of like a vengeance tactic to kind of quote unquote, win the breakup, but it is hollow I think in the fact that it’s usually only after the fact after the dust is settled that they realize how how immature it is and how ridiculous it is.

I’ve seen some really ridiculous really upsetting jealousy things like we once had someone in the Facebook group have their ex literally post a picture of him in bed with another woman to try to make the person jealous, which is just really wrong on so many levels.

But in a weird way.

It makes me also question the sanity of the girl that was willing to pose in bed with this guy because no I don’t think I don’t think any woman wants to be like a second wheel so it’s almost like are you still so hung up on your ex that you’re willing to do this so that’s why we say that your ex is usually still attached to you if you’re if they’re still hung up enough to want to get sort of this revenge through through jealousy but I’m just going on and on let’s move on to sign number six

Sign #6: Your Ex Drops Everything To Help You Solve A Problem

Once again, this was Shaunna’s contribution.

So, I’ll just quote her here,

So I was saying that if you needed help with something, advice or health care related and your ex drops everything to help you when they don’t need to it’s usually a good sign. Usually if they’re not interested they’d be like, nope, sorry, I’m busy. Whereas I found that with my situation, if I needed help, he’d be like, “Yeah, no problem on my way.” That’s been my experience.

Believe it or not but I think my wife, when she was really, really involved in the group, she sort of came up with this text message that was sort of coined the damsel in distress text message, which is to kind of like manufacture this purposeful situation where you’re almost testing to see if your ex is willing to jump through these hoops for you.

We’ve had some like, actually a godly amount of success with this type of a text message.

And I think what Shaunna is talking about here kind of harkens back to that concept of, you know, you’ve got this problem, and your ex really wants to help you solve it, they’re willing to jump through these hoops.

The post Signs Your Ex Is Still Attached To You first appeared on Ex Boyfriend Recovery.

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