How to Get Over Your Ex (& Stop Thinking About Her in Bed with Other Men)

A reader writes to ask:

I'm always reading your articles and everything and I know I should probably move on. I have not been talking with my ex for one month. But I keep myself often obsessed with thoughts of her sleeping with someone else. It just kills me and makes me sad. I don't know how to deal with it and what would you recommend.

First off, this is an incredibly common problem for guys.

You break up with a girl, it’s over, but now your thoughts are haunted by visions of her writhing in pleasure beneath the heaving, sweating naked body of another man.

Your precious baby doll, being sullied and violated by someone else. You feel sad, angry, jealous – even a sense of betrayal. How could she do that with him when she had you?

But there are two things to realize about why you feel this way:

1. Mentally, emotionally, intuitively, you still ‘claim her’ as yours, and

2. You have not yet rebounded hard enough to move on.

I’m going to show you how to fix both of those in this guide.

First, however, we are going to go deep into the psychology of why women and men treat ‘moving on’ so differently. (That said, if you don’t care at all about the psychology, you can click here to jump straight to the practical part.)

 

Most women go through a period of emotional dissociation in the runup to breaking up with a man. You’ve probably seen the signs:

• She is less and less interested in sharing her life with you.

• She is less and less emotionally connected to you.

• She is less and less affectionate with you.

• Sex increasingly feels like something she treats as a chore.

• She is drier and drier and less and less aroused in bed.

• She is busier, with less time for you than she used to have.

• She is working on herself (instead of the relationship) more: gym, clothes, hair, makeup.

• Her social life is suddenly getting active again – and not including you.

By the time she finally breaks up with you, she may well make you dead to her entirely.

To men, these behaviors may seem fickle or cruel, but they’re very important for allowing a woman to fully move on. Scientific studies find that women move on more completely from their breakups, while men in general never fully move on.

The guy you definitely do NOT want to be is the guy this woman is talking about in the comment section of that Daily Mail article:

I believe there are biological reasons why women move on completely but men do not.

I’ll lay them out for you here – but then we are going to talk about how to turn the tables on biology, and become the guy who fully moves on from his exes.

As we’ve discussed on Girls Chase repeatedly, women operate from shorter timetables than men.

I know plenty of men who’ve started families in their mid-40s, their 50s, even their 60s. A woman who wants to do this typically requires extensive amounts of time and money plowed into in vitro fertilization. Unless she froze her eggs in advance, she won’t even be having her own biological offspring, either.

Human women are among the handful of females in the animal kingdom to undergo menopause. The leading theory as to why is the Grandmother Hypothesis: rather than continue to produce children until she’s on her deathbed, a human woman dials down and halts her own reproduction around midlife to shift over into caring for her offspring’s offspring, which historically will just start being born around that point.

 

The Grandmother Hypothesis

The average age of mothers at first birth across the past 250,000 years has been 23.2 years (for fathers the age is 30.7 years). If a woman gives birth to her first child at 23.2, and that child is a daughter who also gives birth at 23.2 years, the grandmother is 46.4 years old; if the child is a son who has his first child at 30.7 years, the grandmother is 53.9 years old. The average age of menopause is between 44 to 56 years old – exactly in this window.

To be concise: women do not have nearly as large of a window to have children during as men have, and need to make decisions quicker and not get pulled into men’s “drag things out until I’m 100% sure” paradigm, which is great for the male who wants more time to play the field and make up his mind, but is terrible for the woman whose biological clock ticks louder every second that passes by.

By the time she reaches her middle 40s, she has entered grandmother territory; she needs to have her children already before that point. She can’t wait around the same way a man can.

For this reason, it appears, women need to move on FASTER and MORE COMPLETELY:

• They need their tighter timetables to exit relationships:

  • Friend-with-benefits to boyfriend-girlfriend in 3 months or she’s out
  • Boyfriend-girlfriend to living together or engaged in 2 years or she’s out
  • Living together or engaged to married in 2 years or she’s out
  • Married to first child in 3 years or she’s out

• They need to cut the guy off emotionally so they don’t keep going back to him and getting dragged back into a relationship that isn’t going anywhere

Men will hear this and say, “Women are so disloyal!” Maybe so – but it was your ancestors who bred them to be it.

Imagine two ancestral women:

• Woman A is unconditionally loyal, attaching herself to the first man she loves, never leaving him no matter what. He delays things with her, wanting more time, not feeling certain whether he is “ready to commit.” Because she is so unconditionally loyal to him, she does not leave, nor does she challenge him on this. Years pass, he never makes up his mind about her, then in his late 30s he meets a beautiful young woman, falls in love, and runs off with her. In her late 30s as well, Woman A fails to find a mate who will commit in time, and does not pass on her genes. Her DNA encoding for unconditional loyalty to her man gets wiped out of the human gene pool.

• Woman B is loyal as well, but her loyalty is conditional. If certain conditions fail to be met, a “loyalty termination” cascade is set off in her mind, causing her to remove herself from the relationship. Those conditions include all the relationship progress steps we discussed above; they also include displays by the man even inside the progress windows that demonstrate sufficient unacceptability or negligence. Woman B finds herself with a man behaving the same as Woman A’s, seeking to delay things with her for “more time to make up his mind.” This triggers her loyalty termination cascade to set off, causing her to begin pulling away from the relationship. At this point, her man either progresses things with her out of the fear of losing her, or else she leaves completely and finds a new man who is more likely to progress things. Ultimately, she successfully mates, producing offspring that carry her DNA encoding for “conditional loyalty” forward in the human gene pool.

If men did not so often seek to delay commitment to women because they “aren’t ready yet” or “want to improve their positions first” (i.e., see if they can become more successful and hence attract higher quality mates than their present girlfriend), women would not need to operate with conditional loyalty. But men do, because just like conditional loyalty is more advantageous to female reproductive odds, the “wait and see” commitment game is more advantageous to male reproductive odds.

(The “wait and see” game allows men better odds of investing in offspring with the highest quality potential mate, rather than simply the first mate who comes along. Meanwhile for women, “conditional loyalty” allows women to avoid having all their time wasted by men who aren’t excited enough about them to commit quickly, reducing the odds they get used and discarded for a different woman without having reproduced.)

 

Why Women Move on but Men Don’t

The Grandmother Hypothesis helps us to understand why women so often completely move on.

They have to, to not get sucked back in repeatedly by a man who won’t sire their children.

But why then do men remain so hung up on women, even long after breakups? Well, as any guy can tell you, women sometimes come back. They don’t always stay gone. This isn’t true only for playboys; it is true for every kind of guy there is. Grandmother Hypothesis or no, sometimes women will fail to find a suitable replacement mate – then decide to ‘check back in’ to see whether the guy they left has had a change of heart and is now ready to reproduce.

Cases in point:

• The girl who breaks up with her bad boy boyfriend then comes back. She dated a nice guy, but the nice guy just didn’t do it for her. He simply couldn’t make her FEEL what the bad boy did. So she goes back to the bad boy, exploring whether he “wants to get serious” now. Sometimes he does; sometimes he doesn’t. (A surprising amount of these reunions end up with the bad boy ex quickly impregnating the returning girlfriend, just anecdotally – I have seen it happen a lot.)

• The girl who breaks up with her nice guy boyfriend or husband then comes back. Generally this happens when either a.) the boyfriend/husband does not want to have children, or b.) the boyfriend/husband is just too boring and she wants to find someone more stimulating. She may return to see if he’s open to children now; she may return pregnant after her lover left her, seeking to get back with the dependable ex to raise the child he didn’t want to give her himself; she may return after trying out a few sexy bad boys but finding out they would not commit to her. Once again, a surprising amount of the time, the nice guy boyfriends/husbands are willing to take the woman back.

Why do men accept these women back?

Why don’t they fully move on too?

Because from an evolutionary perspective, giving up on willing, pre-vetted wombs is just dumb. Twice as many women have reproduced historically than men. Most men died without passing on their genes. That also means the average successfully reproducing man did so with two women. It didn’t really make sense to ‘shut the door’ to a woman historically, since you could always welcome her back and have children with her too if you were successful enough to provide for multiple wives.

There’s another consideration, as well: the bad boy consideration. Let’s say you’re the sexy ‘good genes’ bad boy who just won’t commit. She’s madly in love with you but she has to leave to find a guy who’ll stick around. However, once she finds her nice guy husband, who’ll commit and provide, what if he just doesn’t do it for her from a sexiness standpoint? What if she still feels your genes are much, much better?

In that case, she is somewhat likely to seek you out for some illicit liaisons, and if you accept, you are very likely to get her pregnant. Research on sperm competition has found that women basically shut off their ability to become pregnant by their husbands while having affairs, meanwhile “open the gates wide” for their affair partners to impregnate them.

Is knocking up your ex who is now married to some poor, clueless guy moral?

Not at all.

But nature is red in tooth and claw, and “all’s fair in love and war.”

The man who accepts his ex-girlfriend back into his bed, cuckolds her unsuspecting husband, and impregnates her with his seed, affair offspring to be raised by her new husband and her, successfully passes on his genes – genes that code for “don’t move on completely from a woman, because she may return for impregnation with your offspring later on.”

Women must jealously guard their wombs to not have men ‘run out the clock’ on them – but men are free to take all wombs back that return to them, often at little or no cost.

It’s more costly to have two wives than have one, but not as much of a cost increase as it was going from no wife → one wife; there’s virtually no cost at all to impregnating an ex who comes back to you while married to another man.

However you dice it, from an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for men to always keep the doors open to returning women. A womb, after all, is a valuable reproductive resource – especially a womb belonging to a woman the man has already properly vetted and decided is worthy enough of commitment for him to enter into a lengthy relationship with.

Thus, men come preprogrammed by evolution to never fully move on.

 

It’s been my observation that most men emotionally ‘claim’ an ex as ‘theirs’.

Psychologically, this makes things like “having sex with your ex even though she’s married to another guy” feel more justified. After all, “she’s still my girl, even if she married some other chump.” It’s not bad to do (the mind tells itself) because she never stopped being yours.

This is also why guys (such as our commenter from the start of this article) feel pain imagining their ex-girlfriend or ex-wife with another man. “She’s sleeping with him, even though she’s MINE!”

A lot of irrational behavior springs from this possessiveness toward a woman who’s no longer yours. I once had a girlfriend I’d broken up with, who started seeing a nice guy as her rebound lover. At some point, I got back with that girlfriend again (I don’t get back with exes anymore, but this was before I’d learned that lesson). I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay with her; a lot was unclear then.

Well, one day, we ran into the guy she’d had a rebound fling with. Until that moment, I had zero emotion about the guy. I didn’t care about him. She needed a shoulder to cry on and he was there. Good for him. Any guy would do that for a smoking hot girl, newly single, in need of a rebound. But when I encountered him face-to-face, suddenly, adrenaline surged through my system and it was everything I could do to not clobber him.

The guy clearly felt it too; he began very visibly trembling in front of me and trying to get away. The experience was surreal. I’ve only been in a handful of fights in my life and am normally pretty detached. Not that time though.

How did that even happen to me? It was like some outside force took control of my adrenal system. Immediately after that I re-broke up with the girl, wanting to remove myself from a situation where my emotions were clearly going haywire.

That happened because, deep down inside, I had never stopped seeing that girl as ‘mine’, and somewhere in my head it was written that “This man fucked a girl who is mine.” Encountering him triggered a territorial reflex in me that made me want to crush this guy who was an interloper on ‘territory’ that ‘belonged to me’.

Any or all of these things can happen when you view a girl as ‘yours’ who no longer is:

• You’ll feel hurt that she’s with someone else, even though she’s ‘yours’.

• You’ll feel betrayed by her for going ‘behind your back’ with another.

• You’ll feel vengeful toward her, or her lover, or both, for their indiscretions.

• You’ll feel lost and adrift, not knowing how she could ‘hurt you like this’.

• You’ll be paralyzed, unable to move on with other girls, because you ‘still have a girl’.

These are all counterproductive mentalities because they prevent you from moving on even as she – your ex-girlfriend – moves on with abandon.

If we want to set you free, we need to get you to relinquish your claim on her – so she stops being ‘your girl’ in your head and becomes just another woman out in the world.

 

Mental Renunciation of Your Ex-Girlfriend (or Ex-Wife)

When a woman parts ways with you, the first order of business for you is a kind of psychological recalibration. You need to take the emotions toward her you’ve formed and reinforced over months, years, or decades, and demolish those. You must replace them with new perspectives.

That doesn’t mean you stop caring about her or she becomes nothing to you.

But it does mean you need to mentally renounce her.

After a breakup, repeat these things to yourself as often as you need to:

1. “She’s not my responsibility anymore.” Women in relationships work very hard to impress upon you that you are responsible for them. That you need to take care of them, provide for them, etc. Even independent women do this. Dependent women do it MORE. But look: if she is capable of going out on her own, she has already announced, “I take responsibility for myself again.” She’s an adult woman. You are not her Dad. Especially if she is the one who chose to leave – even if you urged her to or orchestrated it – she can manage. Again, she is an adult. If she has it too bad, she’ll find another man – you can count on that. She is no longer your responsibility. You are FREE now. Keep reminding yourself of it.

2. “She’s actively pursuing new cock.” This is important to acknowledge. It’s important to make it VISCERAL for yourself. She is not some piece of driftwood floating along, being picked up by the first guy to stumble upon her. She is ACTIVE in her pursuit of new men to get boned by and snuggle up to. She is putting on makeup, dressing sexier, going to the gym, going out to socialize, swiping on apps, all to try to find new men. The clearer you grasp that she has agency in her pursuit of new men, the less she is going to feel like she is ‘your possession’.

3. “I need to find a new girl for myself.” This is the next important mentality. It’s not that you are just ‘single and free’ – you are going to REPLACE her. Maybe not now; but eventually, you will get another girl in there who takes her place. That new girl will be the one you claim. Meanwhile, this old girl you renounce your claim to.

4. “She is my secondhand good.” Finally, you are going to start thinking of her as a secondhand good, like some old clothes you donated to the Salvation Army. That was very kind of you, donating those clothes. Now someone else needier than you can enjoy them. Some other guy gets to enjoy this girl you enjoyed for a while. Heck, maybe he will make her his wife! Good for him! Good for her too! They can be happy. You, meanwhile, have ‘been there, done that’ – and now you’re onto newer goods and fresher adventures.

If you experience any mental resistance to any of these frames (i.e., any cognitive dissonance), GOOD. That is your possessiveness trying to fight the frames. It will fight them with thoughts like:

• “But how can I relinquish responsibility for her? She needs me!”

• “She’s still pining for me. Other men are just moving in like vultures!”

• “I don’t know if I could ever find a girl who could really take her place.”

• “It’s so disrespectful to think of her as a ‘secondhand good’!”

Realize those thoughts for what they are: justifications for mentally retaining possession of her.

You need to let her go, my friend.

You need to renounce your claim on her.

In so doing, you will set both her and you free.

Tell these to yourself as many times as you need to, as long as you need to, until you stop feeling resistance thinking them, and start just thinking, “Of course!”

 

Staying Renounced

Especially if she still sees value in you (e.g., lover value, or provider value, or both), and doesn’t immediately find a perfect replacement, a woman may continue to hang around in your periphery.

She will do things to try to keep you in her back pocket, even if she isn’t actively trying to get back with you right now. It’s like keeping you in cold storage in case she needs you later.

READ MORE: Women’s Back Pocket Mentality

The ways she will do this include:

• Hanging out in the same social circles as you.

• Posting things on social media for you to see.

• Messaging you to chat.

• Sending you photos of herself.

• Hooking up with you because “she’s lonely/horny.”

Any of these can trigger feelings of possessiveness to resurface, especially if you aren’t fully over her when it occurs.

The solutions are straightforward:

• Do not be around her socially, unless you have no other choice.

• Don’t have her on your social media (block/unfriend her).

• Don’t allow her to message you (block her if she won’t stop).

• Don’t let her send you photos (block her if she won’t stop).

• Do not sleep with her once you’re broken up.

You don’t have to ‘play games’ here. You can just tell her outright: “Hey, for us to both heal fully, we need to not be connected on social media or messaging each other or meeting each other socially. It’s better for both of us.”

She may try to fight this – generally, because of the differences in breakup psychology, it is much easier for women to already be dating/sleeping with new men while still keeping their old man around, on the hook, in their back pockets. In fact, this is preferable to them, generally. He serves as a kind of ‘safety cushion’ in case things really go off the rails.

You though will just hold to the frame that, “I’m doing this for the both of us, so we can move on.”

If she tries to argue there’s no need to cut everything off, you just hold to it: “Yes, there is. Yes. Either we’re together, or we’re not. And since we’re not together, we need to get EVERYTHING separate.”

Then cut her off. Completely.

More advanced guys may want to keep her around as a friend-with-benefits if she’s still open to casual sex and the advanced guy is actively taking other girls.

But this is still playing with fire, in my experience.

If you do it, you will (most likely) get burned.

The safer strategy is to do to women as they do to you: dead them out.

Do it nicely and considerately. Explain your logic if need be. Frame it as doing it for them, so that they can move on.

But cut them off, completely.

You want it to be a total mystery what they are doing in their lives.

I can tell you, once a girl has been an ex-girlfriend of mine for more than a few years, I have absolutely no idea what she is doing after that. Generally I will still hear from her occasionally for a few years, or will have mutual contacts update me for a while, but eventually she’ll be fully moved on and that’ll be that. I’m not on social media at all (except for business), which I recommend; there is zero chance of me accidentally (or not so accidentally) stumbling on some ex’s profile and going down that rabbit hole.

I imagine we’ll all meet in the afterlife, souls freed from the human condition, everybody syncing up on good vibrations, and we can all catch up then and have a blast reminiscing without bodily motivations driving attachments, distress, etc. Until then – they’ve got their paths in this life, you’ve got yours, and never the twain shall meet!

 

I know, I know… your ex-girlfriend / ex-wife is amazing.

But you know what else I know? It’s utterly impossible to be hung up on her once you nail a girl who is even better.

The catch is that what’s ‘better’ is extremely variable from man-to-man. For me, for example, it is raw sex + personality appeal: if she has a better face and body than my ex, and her personality is compatible with me, and she passes my other quality screens, I am going to be content with that. I’m simple like that.

However, I know from operating this business and community that a lot of guys aren’t quite so simple. For instance, I have had men tell me:

• They’ve gotten girls much hotter than their ex, with great personalities, but they still pine for their ex because they really miss the emotions their ex made them feel (like being in love, out of control, addicted to her, etc.).

• They’ve gotten hotter girls with compatible personalities but they miss certain commonalities with their ex, like that they loved the same shows or had the same hobby, etc.

Thus, rebounding is not necessarily about “land yourself a hotter girl.” It is actually about “land yourself another girl as good or better at whatever you really care about.”

Though beyond that, the old pickup artist breakup mantra still rules supreme:

GFTOW.

 

How Do You Know What You Want?

It’s a stumbling block for a lot of guys figuring out what they really want in a girl.

The simplest solution is for guys like me, who are satisfied with a girl hotter than their ex, so long as she is also a personality match. Men like me are ‘easy to please’. Just level up your game skills a bit, go get yourself an even hotter girl than last time, and we are good.

Guys who have some other criteria are harder, because they are not operating this ‘standard’ way, but often assume they should be, or try to push themselves into that to conform. The fact is, if ‘hotness’ isn’t what you really want, you’ve got to be honest with yourself about that if you want to move on.

Relationship psychologists broadly break men down into two (2) camps: satisficers and maximizers.

• Maximizers are the ones like me, who are happier if our women are hotter.

• Satisficers are a bit more complex; they are really looking for a spectrum of emotional comfort and coziness. Interestingly, psychologists find that the uglier a satisficer’s wife is, the happier he is – the exact opposite of a maximizer.

As a matter of fact, I polled our audience on X and it turns out 60% of men (at least on X) are satisficers, with only 40% of them maximizers.

So the ‘satisficer’ is really the more ‘standard’ way than the maximizer is. However, in the seduction community, maximizer mentalities tend to be ascendant. (On X, it is the reverse; plastered all over ‘red pill X’ is the advice that “hot girls are for sex, average girls are for marriage” and “go for the girl who loves you, not the girl you love” and other things that sound very off to maximizer ears but are music to the ears of the average satisficer.)

This leads to situations where over the years as I’ve worked with students, I have repeatedly heard things like, “I don’t know, she’s much hotter than my ex, and she’s so great, but I just still miss my ex just as much.” As a maximizer, you’ll be scratching your head, but when you realize the guy is a satisficer it makes sense.

Back in the day, a buddy of mine broke up with his hottie girlfriend and ran off to Hawaii with a short, fat, ugly, dull kindergarten teacher, who nevertheless was very nice and domestic. They got married and last I heard had three kids. He is very happy. My other friend and I couldn’t square the circle on what the heck got into him, but now I realize: he’s a satisficer. Switching from the demanding hot girl to the submissive, domestic, round girl made him happy.

You need to be very honest with yourself about what you REALLY want – not what you think society wants or what the ‘cool guys’ want, but what YOU want:

• Do you really crave a girl who is even hotter than your last girlfriend?

• Or do you actually crave a girl who makes you feel cozy and attended to?

• Or are you looking for a girl you deeply bond with and have a ton in common with?

Figuring that out is how you start targeting the right girls, instead of getting caught up chasing after women who never move the needle for you on moving on.

 

GFTOW

‘GFTOW’ is an acronym from the early seduction community that stands for either ‘Go fuck ten other women’ or ‘Go fuck two other women’, depending on whom you talk to. I’ve always defined it as ‘ten’, personally.

The thinking is (and reality often backs this up) that by the time you’ve fucked 10 women, you are not going to be hung up on your ex anymore. That’s because a few things happen in the process of shagging more women:

• You reorient yourself into a ‘going out to socialize’ headspace

• You meet many more women, have all kinds of experiences, and ‘re-expand your world’

• Because you are playing the field so much, you start to FEEL free and unattached

• You end up sleeping with a bunch of women, further reinforcing the freedom/lack of attachment

• Somewhere among those ten new conquests, you are somewhat likely to run into another new girl you like a lot

Now GFTOW doesn’t always work, especially for guys who get a bunch of low quality lays in a hurry. I have seen it backfire, for instance, when:

• A guy goes out and bangs 10 fat girls he picked up from bars

• A guy gets on apps and lines up 10 lays with chicks from apps he isn’t really into

Often this even makes it worse, because if he’s comparing his new low quality lays to his higher quality ex, it makes girls like her feel even scarcer and now he wants her back even more.

So I would caution that when you’re doing GFTOW, you need to be focused as much on quality (however you define that; see the satisficer vs. maximizer discussion above) as you are on quantity.

If you’re trying to stop missing a favorite food you just cut out of your diet, the worst possible way to do that is to go cram your face with a bunch of crap you don’t even like the taste of.

Instead, you need to go out searching for some new favorite food, trying a bunch of potentially tasty dishes, and trying to enjoy the process as you go.

It’s ‘GFTOW’ with a catch:

You must actually be trying to get women who could actually be quality replacement girlfriends in the process (your ten new lays don’t all have to be high caliber girls, but at least some of them should be decent quality, and you need to be meeting women in ways that allow for you to net some quality gals).

Do that, and you’ll be able to get over your exes even while other guys stay hung up on theirs.

 

Getting over your ex-girlfriend or ex-wife is well within your control – if you want it to be.

Many men don’t; not really. They unconsciously sabotage their own efforts to move on, and keep themselves hooked to the old ball-and-chain… even if she herself is out there rebounding with abandon.

However, you now know how to get over your ex, and can do it if you want to:

1. First, renounce your claim to her. You can do this by:

   • Mentally renouncing your claim to her (do so as often as necessary)
   • Cutting her entirely out of your life so you can stay renounced

    

2. Next, figure out what you want, then GFTOW. Basically:

   • You need to know if you’re a satisficer or maximizer, plus what you desire
   • You need to pursue & bed enough new girls to reasonably find a replacement

    

Do those, and you’ll find it’s much easier to move on from women, fully and completely, than most men are ever able to.

In fact, you’ll feel enlightened; as if you’ve ‘beaten biology’. You’ll notice most men around you never fully move on from their exes, and it’ll mystify you a bit, because you always do.

It’s not that you’re better, necessarily; just freer.

What do you do if your ex comes a’knocking after you’ve fully moved on, by the way?

Well, if you do what’s in this article, and the other things on this website, you should be enjoying so many options with girls her level or better that taking her back will be the furthest thing from your mind.

Instead, you’ll ask how she is, give her some dating advice aimed at helping her land the man of her dreams, tell her it was great to hear from her, and wish her well.

Chase Amante