In this video, we're going to be discussing a few lies and myths about breakups and getting
back together. And some of these can be kind of nightmarish, at least in terms of the consequences
that they have on your life and the choices that they are unfortunately causing a lot of people to
make. But before we go ahead and get into all of that, my name is Clay with modernlove.life,
where we help you get the great, loving relationship that you're looking for,
without having to play mind games, without having to play hard to get, and without having to pretend
to be someone or something that you are not. Because you, of course, deserve to be loved
for the unique, amazing, and wonderful person that you are. And if you agree with me, please
help me out with this YouTube channel by hitting that thumbs up button for the YouTube algorithm,
by subscribing to this YouTube channel down below and also leaving a comment as well,
letting me know what sorts of myths or lies about breakups that you've heard in the past.
Anyway, let's go ahead and get into all of this. But first, before we do that,
I did want to let you know that we do have our course called Effortless Connection, which
helps you to communicate better with your ex. If that is something that you need some help with,
Effortless Connection is a good place to go. This specifically covers communication strategies for
romantic relationships. Works great for people that are going through breakups and wanting to
get back together with their ex. And it helps you to build more cooperation, communication,
and consistency in your interactions with one another. But all the information for that is
down below. If it's right for you, feel free to sign up. If not, no worries. Let's go ahead and
get into this. I've been around helping people with breakups for quite a while now. This YouTube
channel is going to be 10 years old later on this year, which is really crazy to think about.
And our main course, the Ex Solution Program, is almost 10 years old as well, which is
quite stunning. Of course, I was helping people out a little bit before that, a few years before
that, before we kind of solidified everything into ESP. But let's go ahead and get into some of these
crazy things that I've heard, maybe you've heard as well too. The first one is that if you really
love them, let them go. If they came back to you, they loved you all along. If they didn't,
they never did. That quote, whoever said it, I don't know. You've probably heard it a bunch of
times. It's a well-intentioned quote. It's also kind of a do nothing quote as well, too. It says,
"Hey, if someone broke up with you and you want to make things work with them, do nothing.
And if they come back to you, they loved you all along. And if they don't, then they never did."
I mean, I guess that could work. But the problem is it's so conservative that you're
not going to have very good results, I don't think. A lot of times, there are people who
are in situations that can be saved, relationships that can be saved. But because they're following
some advice that they've heard somewhere else, that's just crazy conservative, they end up
not taking action. They end up not going for that relationship, and that relationship slips through
their fingers. There are a lot of reasons why your ex might really actually love you a lot
and break up with you and then not come back to you. They might do it because maybe they
feel bad for hurting you in the first place. And they think, "That breakup was so messy,
and I hurt them so much. Who am I to go back to them and say, 'Hey, I made a mistake.'
I just don't know if things could be any better. I just feel so embarrassed about this. Or who am I
to go back to them after hurting them," or all of these other sorts of things that they might say.
And so, yeah, if you want to play it super, ultra safe, you could just go follow this, and
maybe your ex comes back to you. But the thing is, is that you're not giving them a good,
compelling reason to come back to you. Obviously the two of you broke
up for some reason. Obviously something in the relationship wasn't working out for someone.
And so the breakup happened. But if you want to actually get back together, they need to see that
something's going to be fundamentally different. They need to see that somehow whatever caused that
breakup to happen in the first place is no longer a concern, it's no longer a major obstacle, or
whatever the case may be. And so that is probably going to require more than just passively waiting
to see if they come back. It's probably going to involve you going out there and demonstrating
to them through your interactions that this is an entirely different dynamic between the two of you.
Number two, time heals all wounds. We've heard this before as well too. I think this one is
a pretty bad one as well, because time does not necessarily heal all wounds. I know some other
dating and relationship coaches as well too, and we talk sometimes. And this is a
fortune cookie advice phrase that gets on the nerves of, well, me, and also some other people
that I know as well too. Because we've worked with people who've been hung up on their ex
for years and years and years and years, decades even in some cases. And I know that there's
all these things out there about breakup math. Like, "Oh, if you were together for X number of
years, then it's going to take X number of months to get over your ex," or something like that. Or,
"The only way to get over your ex is to just date as many people as possible," or whatever the case
may be. Maybe that's helped some people somehow, but is it going to help you? Not necessarily.
If you're just waiting for time to pass and hoping that it's going to heal all of your wounds,
you might be waiting for a long time. That is to say you could be like some of these people
that I've heard of who have been hung up on their ex 30 years after a breakup. Clearly, the breakup
math isn't working so well for these people. What would that be? You'd have to be hung up on
your... What is 30 years? That's 360 months. It's like 7,000 months together in a relationship. No,
it's not going to work out that way. Breakup math doesn't work out that way. If I'm doing my math
right, anyway, on the spot. But also, time heals all wounds also causes people to do some really
unproductive things. They think that they just have to wait it out. They just have to hold their
breath, distract themselves from the pain that they're going through, big red flag right there,
and just wait out a certain period of time, and boom, they're going to be over
their ex. But the truth is that you don't want to be distracting yourself from your feelings.
What's going to help you to heal your emotional wounds is to actually get real with your feelings,
get present with them, feel them through all the way to the end, not just sort of
shove them away and say, "Okay, I'm just going to go run on a treadmill until I feel better,"
or, "Okay. I'm just going to go, I don't know, learn Spanish until I'm fluent, and then I'm
going to feel better," or something like that. No, you need to actually go out there and confront
your emotions directly, resolve them and deal with them. Sure, if you want to run on a treadmill or
learn Spanish or anything else, sure, go ahead and do it. But don't think that it's somehow
going to help you to heal from your breakup. The third lie or myth that I've heard is that
once you break up with someone, you should just never look back. Breakups happen for a reason.
Just never look back, never take an ex back. It's called a breakup because it's broken,
and all of that stuff. And yeah, sure. It is a breakup, and it did happen because
something wasn't working. Whether it's broken is debatable. But something wasn't working for
someone in the relationship. And to think that it's always going to be that way, or, "Hey,
it broke up for a reason. You should never go back to your ex," or something like that,
says... First of all, that's a very static view of the world. That's what a lot of personal
development people these days might call a fixed mindset, which is to say if it didn't work out,
it will never work out. There's no opportunity for improvement. There's
no opportunity for someone to grow or someone to change or someone to improve something, or
for a relationship to grow or change or improve in some way. Obviously, that's not true.
Obviously it is definitely possible for a relationship to improve. I mean, I think most of
us can agree that it's possible for a relationship to decay. When you got together with your partner,
things were probably great and wonderful. And then when you got to this point where you broke up,
things probably weren't so great and wonderful. So, obviously it's possible for there to be this
decay, this decline, but it's also possible for there to be an improvement. If it's possible for
things to get worse, it must be possible for things to get better as well, too. And so,
if you truly believe that your breakup happened and you should never look back
and get back together with an ex, I mean, that's fine. Once again, that's some sort of
super ultra conservative kind of advice out there. Yeah. You're probably less likely to be hurt
if you just float from one relationship to the next, never bothering to look at why it broke up,
or learn anything from it, or make any improvements. Yeah, you might be less
likely to be hurt, but are you likely to end up in a successful and thriving relationship?
Probably not. Most relationships, most strong relationships, hit some point of conflict at
some point in their lifetime. It's just how it goes. You have one person with one worldview and
another person with another worldview. You put them together, there's going to be some rough
edges where they don't quite align all the way. And so you're going to have to work through those,
or just have a string of breakouts behind you, whatever you want to do. But if you never look
back, sure, maybe you keep yourself from being disappointed or hurt or something like
that. But you may also be losing out on a great relationship that could have been saved and could
have been worked out if you had been willing to change the dynamic that you had between
one another and change things moving forward. The fourth one we want to talk about here today
is that no contact is your only tool. Again, I've been on YouTube for almost 10 years.
And when I first got on YouTube, there were really only two other people on YouTube making
YouTube videos. One of them has stopped. And as far as I am aware, she has gone on to study art
or something like that. The other guy, his video channel actually got taken down or something like
that. He never put any of these watermarks up in the corner, and so I think a lot of people
just ripped his videos and uploaded them and pretended they were their own or something. And
they tried to get his channel banned or something like that. So, it kind of went away. But yeah,
that's what the state of YouTube was like back in 2011 when I got started making breakup videos.
And so I've seen a lot of advice. And I remember back even before all this YouTube stuff,
when I was going through my own breakups and trying to figure out how to get my ex back,
people were always talking about this no contact thing. And I've seen lots of so-called experts
come and so-called experts go, and I've heard them all basically say the same thing, "Do no contact,
wait for your ex to miss you, have them crawl over broken shards of glass to
be back in contact with you. Get together with them. The two of you fall back in love again. And
you're back together." You've probably heard this in some form or other. And the main tool
that they all are encouraging is no contact. Now, of course, no contact does have its time
and place. We've talked about this before. We have an entire playlist on what I would consider the
appropriate way to do no contact. Please check it out right up there. But not everyone needs to do
no contact. And oftentimes, if you're following some of this other advice out there and you think
that no contact is your only tool, it's going to cause you to retreat into no contact whenever you
might need a tool. But there's often times when you might need something other than no contact.
The truth is no contact can be a very challenging thing. It can be a very difficult thing. Because
if your ex is in a place where they're looking for a relationship and things are a little bit rocky,
things are a little bit rough, things aren't going as smoothly, and you just
retreat into no contact, you're sending a very dangerous message to them that says,
"Hey, when the going gets tough, I run away." And if they are in a place where they actually
want a great committed relationship, that's probably not a very strong relationship signal
to be sending to them. Hey, here's someone who's, when things get challenging, they're going to run
away. That's definitely relationship material right there. And when we have our first child
and we're both stressed out, and we're at our wits end because we haven't slept in weeks or months,
and there's a pile of dishes in the kitchen, and all of these things are just going out the wayside
as we struggle to adapt to this new life, you run away. That's not a very powerful message. So,
there is a time and place for no contact. It should not be your only tool. There are
so many other tools. We have advanced relational skills. We have communication
tools. We have all these sorts of things that we teach people in our courses, by the way.
No contact does have its time and place, but we don't want to use it as our only tool. Because
as they say, if the only tool that you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.
Same is true with no contact. If the only tool that you have at hand is no contact,
every problem that you encounter starts to look like an opportunity to withdraw contact,
to somehow punish your ex or something like that. Again, is this really a strong relationship
signal to be sending out? Probably not. The fifth one we're going to be talking
about today is that you have to pretend like you don't care. This kind of builds off of that whole
no contact thing. But there's a lot of people on the internet that will tell you that you have to
show your ex that you don't care, that you're not that interested. And this can be useful at times,
if, like we were talking about in a previous video, the social interactions are way out of
balance. But you want it to come from a place where you're actually genuinely more invested
in your own sense of yourself than you are in someone else's opinion of you, rather than like,
"Okay, I actually care about you a lot, but I have to pretend that I don't care about you so that you
actually like me," because we all want what we can't have, or whoever cares the least controls
the relationship, or some other BS like that. Again, the truth is that you can care a lot about
someone, and you can show that to someone, and that can bring the two of you closer together.
If you have to pretend like you don't care in order to get someone to love you,
chances are that person is probably not going to love you for who you are. And chances are you're
probably going to have a very, very hard time having a great relationship with that person.
So, if you need to pretend to be someone or something that you're not in order to get
a commitment from someone, chances are you're just going further down the path on the wrong path.
So, what we want to do is we want to find out sooner rather than later if we have the capacity
to show up as the person that we are by expressing ourselves in positive and genuine sorts of ways,
like what we talk about in some of our trainings, that are intended to express genuine emotion
and authentic feelings that we have for someone, rather than putting on a mask and pretending to be
some aloof, indifferent sort of person. If you can be with someone and they love you
for who you actually are, then you know at the end of the day that they actually want to be with you.
You can lie next to them in bed at night and knowing that they actually love you.
They're not just loving some act that you put on. And you don't have this second guess in your mind
like, "Why are they actually with me? Is it because I just pretended to be hard to get,
or is it because they actually want to be with me?" And I think that's a much better place to
be in than wondering about that sort of stuff, is knowing that they actually want to be with you,
that they love you for who you are. So anyway, this has just been a taste
of a few lies and myths of breakups. Again, if you do want to learn more about communication,
we do have that Effortless Connection course. Feel free to check it out down below
if that is something that you want to learn more about. And if you have liked this video, please
like the video for YouTube. It sends a message to the algorithm that
these videos that I make are pretty good, and that YouTube might want to show them to
some more people. So help a guy out with his YouTube channel, hit that thumbs up button,
subscribe to the channel, and leave a comment down below letting me know what sorts of myths,
lies, misconceptions, et cetera you might have heard about when it comes to breakups
or relationships in the comment section. Anyway, please take care. And if you want
to learn more about that no contact rule that I was talking about before, please feel free
to check out this video series over here on our take on the no contact rule. Or check out this
video right here. But thank you so much. Please take care. And I'll talk to you next time.