Your Chances of Getting Your Ex Back

You want a number. Almost everyone who lands here does.

There isn't one. Not a real one. Anyone who gives you a percentage is either guessing and dressing it up, or selling you something on the back of it — and usually both. Nobody can see how another person will feel in six months, least of all a stranger who has never met either of you.

This page used to have a quiz on it that scored your odds. It's gone, and the rest of this explains why, and what the question underneath is actually asking.

Why there was never a number

A score needs something to measure. The honest problem is that the thing you want measured — whether one specific person will want you again — sits almost entirely outside you, in someone else's life, on a timescale nobody controls.

So any quiz that gives you odds has to measure something else and call it odds. Mine measured whether you were following a plan, whether the plan was paid for, and whether you had a coach. Then it told you those things raised your chances. Which was, when you look at it plainly, an advert with a progress bar.

It's worth saying what's true instead: people told they had no chance have reconciled, and people told they had a great chance haven't. That was true on the old page too. It just sat underneath a scoring machine that contradicted it, which is a strange way to say something you believe.

What you're actually asking

"What are my chances" is usually a stand-in. Underneath it, the question is one of these:

• Am I allowed to keep hoping?
• Am I wasting my life on this?
• Is there something I should be doing that I'm not?
• Will someone please tell me it isn't over, so I can stop feeling like this?

Those are better questions, and unlike the odds, they're answerable — by you, mostly, and not today.

The pull toward a number is worth understanding rather than satisfying. A number would end the not-knowing. That's the appeal. But a fake number doesn't end it, it just moves it: you get a result, feel briefly settled, and by the evening you're recalculating. If you've taken quizzes like this before, you already know that's what happens. If the checking has got hard to put down, that's worth looking at in its own right.

What you can and can't affect

You can affect how you handle this. How much of your life you keep, whether you're contacting them constantly, whether you're looking honestly at your own part in what went wrong, if you had one, whether you're someone you'd want to be around in a year.

You can't affect their side by doing those things harder. Nothing on your side works as a lever on theirs, and none of it runs on a schedule. The work is worth doing because it's your life, whatever they decide.

Sometimes the honest answer is no

Most advice about getting an ex back can't say this, because saying it costs the sale.

Sometimes a relationship is over. Sometimes it should be — because of what it did to you, or what you did in it, or because they've been clear and the clarity isn't a test. "You always have a chance, as long as you're both alive" is the kind of line that sounds generous and functions as a leash. It can keep someone trying for months, sometimes longer, on something that was over almost from the start.

If you've been given a clear signal, believe it. Not because hope is bad, but because you can't run a life on a maybe that you're the only one holding. The honest read is sometimes that this isn't retrievable. If that's your read on an ordinary day, when you're not arguing with yourself, take it seriously.

That's not a verdict on your situation. Nobody here knows your situation. It's permission to reach that conclusion if it's yours, without feeling you've failed at something. If you're there, moving on well is where this goes next, and it isn't the runner-up. If you're not sure yet and want to weigh it up properly — whether you'd want it back, not just whether you could get it — start here.

If being with them meant being frightened, controlled, or made responsible for their temper, that isn't a chance to calculate, and wanting them back doesn't make it one. Talk to a domestic abuse service, or someone you trust, before anything else. Your safety outranks everything on this page.

If it's more than a bad day

Turning this over, even for weeks, is part of it. But if you're not sleeping, not eating, can't get through work, can't see a version of yourself on the other side of this, and it isn't easing, that's past what a page can help with. See a doctor or a therapist, and tell someone close to you what's going on.

If you're thinking about hurting yourself, don't wait: contact a crisis line or emergency services now.

The move to watch for

You may be tempted to take "there's no number" and turn it into good news. Nobody can tell me it's over → so it isn't over. That's the same wish the quiz was selling, just wearing an honest sentence.

Ambiguity is genuinely ambiguous. Nobody being able to say it's over isn't the same as it not being over; it only means nobody can say. If the only way you can hold "nobody knows" is by hearing it as "so there's a chance," you're not holding it — you're using it.

You're allowed to hope. That's yours, and nobody gets to take it off you. What doesn't hold up is hope you've worked out from nobody being able to tell you otherwise. The first is a choice you can make with your eyes open. The second is a reading, and there's nothing there to read.

I can't stop you making that move. I can only tell you it's the move, so you can catch yourself making it.

If you want next steps

The free material on this site is the free material; it isn't a lesser version you take because you couldn't afford better. If you don't know where to begin, start with rebuilding yourself.