Calculate 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.

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 doing the work on whatever went wrong on your side, whether you're someone you'd want to be around in a year.

You can't affect their side by doing those things harder. Doing your own recovery for real may well change how you come across to people, your ex included — that's true and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. It isn't a lever, it doesn't run on a schedule, and it isn't why the work is worth doing.

Sometimes the honest answer is no

Most advice in this category 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 keeps people trying for a year on something that ended in the first week.

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, and if that's your read at 3am when you're not arguing with yourself, it's probably the accurate one.

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.

The move you're about to make

You're going 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. It doesn't resolve in your favour because it can't resolve against you. 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.

I can't stop you doing that and neither can this page. 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. Start with rebuilding yourself if you don't know where to start.