Hey, Tripp love all that you do. I am 31 years old and I got divorced last year after discovering my
wife's infidelity. Immediately after my ex-wife and I split up, I started hooking up with a girl
I met on Tinder. I was upfront early on with her about my situation and how I was only looking for
a purely physical relationship at the time. But I still ended up hurting her. I guess we
both started to have feelings for one another so I ended it. Fast forward a year later and I reached
out to her saying I wanted to see her again. She still has some feelings for me, but wants
to start as friends. I'm not putting all my eggs in one basket, but I can't get her out of my head.
My question is, is it possible to start as friends with somebody you used to have a relationship with
on the way to starting things up again? Or am I just wasting my time? Thanks. I love the podcast
and I'm considering doing some coaching. Cool man. I hope that you do end up doing coaching.
It'd be awesome to work with you. And if you do, just remind me that this question has been
answered on the podcast so I know who you are. First off, I want to say it's ballsy of you to
go back to the girl having the fact that it sounded like you ended it. And now you want to
see if you can start things up with her again. I will say this one... for the girl's sake
and to lessen the drama in your life, if you're going to do this and go for this, make sure that
this is someone you're actually interested in a relationship with, or else you're just going to be
messing with her head and it's not going to be pretty and I can speak for a lot of guys here when
I say no one likes to go through the process of hurting somebody. It's just a very tough process
to go through. So be really clear on yourself. Is this a woman that you want to try and see again?
And start something with and not just hook up? First think about that.
Now that you're seeing her again, can you start as friends? Yes, you can. In fact,
I think this is one of those different friend-zone situations. This is not the friend-zone situation
that most guys get into when they literally start as a friend and never had anything else.
That is, you're really swimming upstream with that one. That's tough. But you guys once had an actual
sexual relationship and there was attraction built. Because of that
I believe it's still there in a seedling form. In fact, dude, she said she still has
feelings for you. I think she's trying to almost slightly reject you by saying like,
I'm not going to give it all to you. This is not a friend-zone situation. One of the
very small exceptions where if you start as friends, I think you have a very high
probability of becoming something more. One, because it was there, two, because she still
said she has feelings for you. And three, once you get into a situation like this,
what ends up happening is, even if she's being so honest with you and her feelings are very small
and she's basically like, I want to be this guy's friend, she's going to remember who you once were,
all those feelings will be rushing back. If you go into this the same way that you
went into it the first time, whatever you did to build attraction, which is probably some
form of TED because that's how attraction works. TED being my system for attraction,
even though it's my system, I did not create it because it's just the way that attraction works.
Yes, I believe it's possible, I don't believe you're wasting your time.
However, here comes the however, I don't like that you're going back to this woman.
Something says to me the fact that you're going back and you're doing what I call strategy mode –
strategy mode is when you have one woman and you're thinking of all these different ways
and strategizing on how to get this one specific woman – because you're in strategy mode, I almost
equate it to you, or anyone else, being in a scarce mindset. It's like, why
at that time, and I know you just broke up with your wife, but still why at that time were you not
that interested in her to be in a relationship to begin with? Is there something about her that you
were unsure about? Are those things important? I want you to think about this for a second.
Are there any other reasons, besides you just weren't looking for a relationship at the time,
is there something about or are there many things about this woman that you just are not sure about?
But now you're just lonely and you're in scarce mentality and it's hard to meet more women,
you said you're considering coaching so it sounds like you don't have the most abundance of women.
I just want you to think about this. This is a question for you. To throw back to you –
are we truly interested in this woman or are we just scraping the bottom of the barrel?
And I did a whole episode on this recently too, scraping the bottom of the barrel.
I want you to be clear for yourself. Why you going back into this? What's the reason?