So, you meet someone. You thought it was finally a good relationship. You flirted, they flirted. You both hit it off. You might have even thought, “Perhaps this person could even be “the one”?”
And then, out of nowhere, they want to break up with you.
I don’t know about you, but I hate rejection. It always catches me off-guard.
Nothing hurts more than having someone tell you to your face, or even perhaps by a cold text, that they want nothing to do with you romantically anymore.
Emotional pain can dig in deeper than anything physical because we can replay the conversation over and over again. And then torture ourselves with what we did wrong and how the relationship went off-course.
If you find that you are holding on, waiting for things to change, and cycling through this tormenting chain of thoughts, remember, it’s normal.
You don’t have to let go. You can enjoy the suffering.
But if you are ready to stop the pain, the first thing is to realize that it’s over.
I’ll take you through the top signs that your ex isn’t changing their mind and coming back. And this might help you to come to terms with the reality in front of you.
1) They told you they don’t want a relationship
As hard as it is to hear, when someone says that they don’t want a relationship, it means they don’t want a relationship with you.
You can try to rationalize why they are wrong. Why you are perfect for them. Why you are better than anyone else.
You can come up with a multitude of reasons that they do want you and they are just deluded.
You can start to pick apart what you did wrong and how you can make it better.
You can convince yourself that you are the perfect person for your ex and they just need to see what you see.
But the truth remains, if they brought up the breakup, they were probably wanting out for quite a while.
They might have moved on with someone else before breaking up with you.
Their timeline and your timeline for processing the split are much different.
But if someone breaks up with you, it usually means they’ve considered their options, are firm in their decision and it’s long over.
2) They stopped making an effort
When someone pulls away and stops putting any effort into your connection, the relationship is over. When we relate with others, we put in the effort. Usually, that person makes us feel good, needed, excited or wanted. But something can happen, even in a blink of an eye, when our belief about someone else dramatically changes.
In an instant, we can flip from attraction to repulsion. We can convince ourselves that our partner is not the one for us. That someone better is around the corner, or already awaiting our attention in our back pocket.
Usually, as soon as we shift our mindset, from a desire to attainment, we stop putting in the same amount of effort. We stop wanting something because we have it. And realize it’s not what we expected it to be.
As soon as we believe that someone is not suitable for us, we stop putting in the same amount of effort that we did when we were pursuing them.
If someone isn’t calling you, asking you how you are, making an effort to be near you, or suggesting plans to see you, it means the breakup is real.
They don’t need space or time to figure things out. They are already acting as if it is over. So I am afraid that it is indeed over.
3) They are with someone else
If someone is dating someone else, they aren’t coming back to you. People tend to be straightforward with what they want and what they are into.
If they are with someone else, and you think they want you, then they are holding confused or repressed emotions for you.
This is probably not the case.
When someone chooses someone else, It means that they don’t want to be with you anymore and your relationship is over. Even if you think that person is completely wrong for them. It doesn’t matter.
Sometimes we are compelled to like people who make us miserable or stressed or feel a diverse set of emotions that are familiar to us from childhood.
It depends on our conditioning. Surprisingly, we don’t always want to feel good in our romantic relationships.
A strange part of the human psyche is that we start to convince ourselves that what we want is the reality in front of us.
We drift. We justify someone’s decisions as incorrect and faulted. We rationalize that they just need time to explore with someone else and that they’ll be back.
The thing with relationships is that they are uncontrollable. They have their ebb and flow.
We can’t force or convince or even ask someone to be attracted to us.
If you try to contort or manipulate someone else to get them to see you as worthy and attractive, it usually brings out the worst in us and pushes someone even farther away.
So how can you deal with the fact that your rejection is final?
It can be as simple as looking to the root of how you seek love and connection in your relationships.
The free Love and Intimacy video by the internationally sought-after shaman Rudá Iandê is a great place to start. When I was going through my last breakup, I found it touched on some important struggles that I was experiencing but couldn’t quite vocalize.
I felt like someone understood my struggles to find love and desperately try to hold onto it. And he helped me to feel more at ease with the painful emotions that I was torturing myself with. As much as you probably don’t want to hear this, our relationships and breakups are great learning experiences.
They remind us that all of our struggles to connect start with our inner relationships.
Once you learn how to love yourself, engaging in love with someone else becomes a whole lot easier.
If you’re ready to go on a new journey of discovery, click here to watch the incredible free video.
4) You have different frameworks for relationships
Many people struggle with having different frameworks for relationships and it’s a certain indicator that a relationship is over.
For example, some people break up with someone the second they start to become emotional because they think it’s wrong to be attached so quickly. They want to date and be close, without emotional attachment and drama. So when the relationship crosses this line, no amount of words or logic can change someone’s mind.
Whereas, others have a hard time letting go after many years of being sexually intimate because they don’t want to end something that’s been such a part of their lives. They get used to having someone around because they don’t like putting effort into dating. They think relationships are for the long run, no matter how bad they can feel. They assume that if you are together, you are both happy, or even miserable, you are together nonetheless, and they won’t question the relationship at all.
When we are afraid of being alone or fear ending a relationship too early, we might hold on longer just because of our fundamental beliefs. If you have different frameworks, it can be a clear sign that you think about sexual interactions, intimacy, and commitment very differently and these can be irreconcilable.
5) You have different sexual needs
A clear sign that your breakup is final is that you have very different sexual needs from your partner.
This can be a deal-breaker for many, and sex is sometimes an issue that we don’t like to bring up directly with someone else. Many times it’s easier to make up another excuse than to touch on someone’s performance or style or lack of sexual rigor.
I have had people that I liked and even wanted to be around, but our sexual expressions were very different.
I went out of the way to try and make it work, and I put in a lot of effort. But no matter how hard we tried, there was always that friction because we didn’t want the same out of sexual interactions. Either someone wanted it more, harder, rougher, shallower, messier, kinkier, or less.
Some people want sexless relationships, they are happy with a deep level of intimacy and without expressing it all physically.
Others want sexual encounters with no emotional strings attached. They crave novelty and fantasy.
While others might want to explore new aspects of sexual play with one person whom they feel connected with and trust completely.
But for many others, the relationship is about being intimate with another person and sharing your life. Whether we have different sexual needs it’s usually a pretty clear sign that the relationship is over, because that tends to be the differentiating factor between romantic relationships from friendships.
6) You have different ways to form bonds
From an early age, we learn how to bond with others through the relationship that we had with our parents.
If you have misaligned attachment styles, then it’s a clear sign that your relationship is over.
For example, for some of us, our parents were never around. We were filled with a great deal of anxiety about their return and had to seek their attention and affection. This may have filled us with a sense of angst and the need to seek out someone’s affection in a way that is clear for us to understand. If you are in a relationship with someone who had a negative relationship with their parents, they may have wanted to avoid being close to them. They may have pushed themselves away from feeling close with anyone and this makes them feel uncomfortable.
So you can imagine if you pair someone who has an anxious attachment style and constantly seeks approval with someone who is avoidant and pushes away anyone close, the tension will build and bubble but never feel genuinely connected.
To have a strong connection with someone is long-lasting, this “give and take” of energy needs to be balanced.
A large part of relationships is finding the line between giving space and attention. We can try to adjust our expectations, but at some point, it might be that the style of relating feels too exhausting and it’s time to let go.
Sometimes we simply don’t align well with someone else based on the way we’re conditioned to give and receive love.
To be honest, these are the main reasons why any breakup is final.
The easiest way to handle these transitions is with an honest reality check with our situation, avoiding the quick emotional fixes, like substances, alcohol, new relationships, and that tub of ice cream, and exercising a great deal of self-compassion. It can hurt to have someone reject you. But the majority of romantic relationships will end with rejection. This is a natural part of the process of pairing up and parting.
We are all testing the waters and seeing which person, in which context, and in which time works best for our time and attention, and energy.
Sometimes breakups make absolutely no sense. You might think you are with the perfect person and they might be going through something that makes a relationship too difficult for them, like grief, job loss, stress, low self-esteem, or a deep sense of inadequacy.
The hardest thing in our relationships is that we share parts of ourselves that we don’t typically share with others. We let people close to our daily lives, our secrets and a certain way of thinking, and our bodies in ways that we don’t normally expose to one another. It’s a somewhat hidden, intimate, and unusual interaction. Which makes it all the harder to let go of.
But the real underlying question here is: “Why are you holding on to something so hard?”.
Are you looking for someone else to make you feel fulfilled or happy?
Because the sooner we start to accept that relationships are rather volatile, illogical, and transient, the easier it is to handle rejection and breakups. They are a natural part of relationships.
Breakups can start to have us question how close we can ever really get to someone else and how distant we are from them.
Just because you stop having sex with someone doesn’t mean you don’t care for them on some level.
The more vulnerable and open we make ourselves to the current of love, the more we are open to something larger than the person we think we are loving.
Breakups can point to important questions. Like how is it that we come to feel closer and, on the flip side, more distant from someone? Does a change in your behavior with someone mean that something is inherently lost? These can be hard questions to grapple with.
There’s a strong reason why you don’t ever feel fully connected and at ease in relationships.
If you expect someone else to make you feel validated and loved, then you are going to feel like you lost something when they are gone.
But if you feel empowered and confident and at ease with yourself, then you start to feel fine when life changes and shifts.
You know you are more capable of handling the next relationship better because you learn.
You know you are more capable of loving because you feel empowered from within.
You know you don’t have to lean on someone else to make you feel whole. This all comes from developing your sense of trust and inherent personal power.
You might even find that this love affair with your inner self is the one you’ve been searching for all along.
You see, we all have an incredible well of potential.
We’re all capable of achieving more than we realize, and having the relationship and feeling of connection, purpose, and satisfaction that we deeply seek.
We just look for it in all the wrong places. We tend to look for it outside of ourselves.
We search for the dream job, the dream home, the best looks, and clothing and distract ourselves with endless pleasures. But this can all turn cold and empty. Because it’s from outside sources.
These external pursuits have a knock-on effect on everything else in our lives, including our relationships.
I learned this important point from the shaman Rudá Iandê.
He’s helped so many people restore balance to their daily lives, connect with their inner essence, discover their inner power, and express an authentic passion at the heart of everything they do.
Rudá uses a unique approach in his exploration because he combines ancient shamanic techniques with modern-day wisdom.
In his excellent video, Rudá elucidates how you can create the life and foster the relationships you’ve always wanted, simply by trying a few easy points and his genuine advice.
It can be hard to accept the reality of a situation. The reality here is that the breakup is final because it was called for. If you take the emotions and feelings of attachment out of the situation, what choice do you have?
Someone, who you care for, has let you know they want out of the arrangement you have.
Asking or pleading or hoping that they will stay in it with you is fundamentally asking them to do something that they don’t want to do.
If you truly care for someone and yourself, would you want that?
You can’t force someone to love you.
You can’t control relationships and emotions and circumstances.
But you can decide how you would like to respond to this situation.
When you can start to get past the pain and think about what you truly want for your partner and yourself, then you would also like the relationship to be over. Because as it is, it isn’t working for both parties, which is why is over.
So it’s necessary to let it go.
From there, it might change or dissolve. Over time and perhaps with some distance, you might even find that you are back together in an intimate romantic relationship again with this person.
But it won’t be the relationship that you know because that relationship has ended its phase. It is over.
The only way forward is to make space for something new to grow, either with someone else or with this person later on in the future. But as you cycle through these different moments of connection and learning, the one person you will always have throughout is yourself.
So the question is, why not let this go?
By holding onto something that isn’t viable, you are keeping yourself in pain and misery.
You are keeping yourself from moving forward.
The only way past a breakup is through it.
It’s time now to accept the feelings you feel, and take in all the pain and misery and lost expectations.
Because the pain of rejection and loss is usually the feeling we don’t want to experience. The more you resist, the more it will hurt.
Take a deep breath. Be patient with your heart. And know that you will be ok because you are already ok. It will get better.
Can a relationship coach help you too?
If you want specific advice on your situation, it can be very helpful to speak to a relationship coach.
I know this from personal experience…
A few months ago, I reached out to Relationship Hero when I was going through a tough patch in my relationship. After being lost in my thoughts for so long, they gave me a unique insight into the dynamics of my relationship and how to get it back on track.
If you haven’t heard of Relationship Hero before, it’s a site where highly trained relationship coaches help people through complicated and difficult love situations.
In just a few minutes you can connect with a certified relationship coach and get tailor-made advice for your situation.
I was blown away by how kind, empathetic, and genuinely helpful my coach was.
The above link will give you $50 off your first session - an exclusive offer for Love Connection readers.