Today I’m going to teach you everything you’ll ever need to know about male psychology during the no contact rule.
Now if you aren’t familiar,
The no contact rule is a period of time where you purposefully ignore your ex with the intent of outgrowing them. By doing this you’ll find that they end up missing you more.
But what if I were to tell you that there’s technically seven stages that your ex boyfriend will go through during a no contact rule and understanding these seven stages will give you supreme clarity on how your ex functions during the no contact rule.
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The Seven Stages Of Male Psychology During No Contact
It’s best to consider these seven stages similarly to the five stages of grief. After all, that’s what we’ve based them on and like the five stages of grief every man will have a unique experience as you use a no contact rule on him.
In other words, some men will go through each stage like clockwork. Others may skip a few stages but stay true to the core of the idea. While others may jump around the stages out of order or even regress.
So, what are these seven stages?
- Calm And Assured Of Their Decision
- Worry After They Don’t Hear From You
- Anger Once They Realize They Are Being Ignored
- Stubbornness About Contact
- Finding A Way To Prove They Aren’t Bothered
- Confrontation About What They Lost
- Holding Out Hope For Contact
Let’s expand!
Stage One: Your Ex Boyfriend Is Calm And Assured Of Their Decision
Everyone who purchases The Ex Recovery Program or coaches with us will gain access to our private facebook support group.
Every once in a while when I’m writing an article like this I’ll poll the private facebook group to gain information about their situations. One of the first questions I ever asked our facebook group was who broke up with who.
According to our research 90% of our clients are the ones who have been broken up with.
I cite this statistic because it quite obviously ties to this stage of male psychology during no contact.
Most of you are probably the ones who have been broken up with by your ex boyfriends which means that at first they are going to be happy with their decision.
Not enough time has passed for nostalgic reverie to kick in.
In fact, when you initially implement a no contact rule on your ex it may take them a while for them to notice you are ignoring them since they are creating this narrative in their heads that they made the right decision.
Don’t worry though because they will eventually notice.
Stage Two: They Become Worried After They Don’t Hear From You
Here is where the recognition that they are being ignored comes into play.
In addition to creating this narrative in their head that “they made the right decision” they begin to build on it. This is where they actively begin thinking that you must be missing them since they were the ones to break up with you.
Drawing from my own personal experience I remember every vivid detail after one of my first breakups ever.
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I broke up with her and actively believed that she would contact me first.
“She’s going to be so depressed after this breakup. After all, we talked every day and suddenly taking that away has to be driving her crazy.”
Of course, as the days dragged on and I didn’t hear from her I began to actively worry that something was off.
My ex girlfriend was not the type of person to suddenly disappear.
Was something wrong?
Stage Three: Anger After They’ve Realized They’re Being Ignored
There is a psychological component to ignoring an ex that describes this sudden outburst by your ex boyfriend.
It’s called reactance and I suggest you read about it here.
In short it states that when a person perceives one of their behavioral freedoms as being taken away they will react in a way to try to re-obtain that freedom.
So let’s break this down from the lens of the no contact rule.
By ignoring your ex you are quite literally taking their behavioral freedom of talking to you away so it makes complete sense that they are going to react upon realizing this.
Of course, there is only one reaction ex boyfriends tend to have at this stage, anger.
This is when you’ll most likely receive that angry text in an attempt to guilt you into responding,
The big fears our clients have typically come during this stage.
“Isn’t the fact that he’s upset going to make him hate me?”
“What if I lost my chance at a reconciliation?”
Let’s play devils advocate for a second and say that you use the no contact rule on your ex boyfriend and he goes through the first three stages that we have already talked about and sends you that exact angry text you see above.
Isn’t responding to him simply going to reward his manipulative behavior?
Essentially what you are doing is losing whatever leverage you have created through the power of silence and don’t worry this roller coaster ride isn’t over for your ex.
Stage Four: Stubbornness About Contact
Where stage three is all about the initial anger of being ignored stage four is all about vengeance through silence.
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It’s at this point where your ex boyfriend will literally think to themselves,
Fine, if she’s not going to respond to me I’m going to show her what it’s like by giving her a taste of her own medicine.
This is the famous point where your ex boyfriend decides he isn’t going to contact you until you contact him first.
But perhaps the most interesting thing about this isn’t the fact that your ex suddenly becomes this stubborn individual. It’s the fact that sometimes you’ll find ex boyfriends will entirely skip stage three and jump right into stage four.
There’s almost this synergy between stage three and four because it’s the ultimate anger that leads them to become stubborn in the first place, isn’t it?
I estimate that roughly half of ex boyfriends will skip stage three and just jump into stage four.
Jessy, our first marriage success story ever experienced this with her ex boyfriend,
It wasn’t until she saw him again and asked him what he was thinking during the no contact rule that he told her,
I wasn’t going to contact you until you contacted me first.
He didn’t throw a tantrum.
He didn’t try to guilt her into responding.
He opted for the stoic approach.
Silence speaks louder than words.
Now, I’m going to have a lot more to say about “who contacts who” during no contact at the end of this article but let’s move on to stage five next.
Stage Five: Finding A Way To Prove They Aren’t Bothered
This is the distraction portion of no contact. Essentially your ex boyfriend, realizing that you are ignoring them now will do everything in their power to prove they aren’t bothered by it.
Now, I’m going to level with you. Most exes won’t do anything crazy.
For some simply sticking to their convictions in stage four is enough. However, others will overcorrect.
This is where they go on a date with someone new and post it all over facebook or instagram to shove it in your face.
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I believe this is also the point where they think to themselves,
“I’m going to win this breakup”
There are two distinct stages where we see our clients fail the no contact rule.
- Stage three after their ex exhibits some guilt or anger
- Stage five after they are worried they could lose their ex forever to someone else
The irony is that your ex is counting on you getting worried.
On some level it is a manipulation to get you to break your own convictions during no contact.
Stage Six: Confrontation About What They Lost
Assuming you did indeed stick to your own convictions and saw the no contact rule through to the end this is where the real fun begins.
From your exes perspective they haven’t heard from you in ages.
- They’ve yelled at you through text
- Tried to guilt you through text
- Tried to make you jealous
- Posted things on social media to get your attention
- Blocked and unblocked you
Nothing has worked.
A part of them probably believed that after this breakup you’d be the one struggling eating a tub of ice cream in front of the tv crying your eyes out.
But that hasn’t happened.
Instead it looks like you’ve thrived after this breakup and they, well, they haven’t.
At this point your ex boyfriend has to face the uneasy reality that they may have lost you forever which leads them to…
Stage Seven: Holding Out Hope For Contact
In an odd way they’ve always wanted you to contact them.
I mean, if you really dig into the psychology of what is going on here with the no contact rule the theory of reactance is all about one person trying to re-obtain their behavior freedom.
That behavior freedom of course is you. Your ex wants to talk to you.
However, in this odd paradoxical way they haven’t been able to admit it to themselves. Well, here that changes.
For the first time they admit to themselves that they want you to contact them.
This is important because what I’m about to say next is going to be controversial.
The reason our version of no contact is so effective is because we understand these stages and we actually do recommend women to reach out first to their exes after no contact.
It makes it so that instead of breaking no contact early to talk to your ex where they are in an angry state of mind you are timing things so you are talking to them when they actually want to hear from you.
Understanding The Attachment Psychology Of An Ex Boyfriend During No Contact
Thus far we’ve talked about the stages of no contact and how they relate to male psychology but there’s a crucial aspect of male psychology that we haven’t really talked about yet, attachment styles.
First things first though, what if I were to tell you that contrary to popular belief it is NOT common for an ex to contact you during the no contact rule.
In fact, a recent poll of our private facebook group indicated that there’s a 63% chance your ex won’t reach out to you during no contact at all.
Why?
Well, we believe that it’s because most ex boyfriends tend to have an insecure type of attachment style with a leaning towards avoidant.
Now, if you aren’t familiar with attachment style theory let me give you a quick crash course.
There are four types of “core” attachment styles.
- Secure: Someone who is emotionally stable and handles breakups in a healthy way
- Anxious: Someone who is overly anxious and is likely to nit pick or beg for their ex back
- Avoidant: Someone who avoids talking to their ex or goes into their shell during emotional intimacy
- Fearful: A combination of both anxious and avoidant
Now, we know that our average client will tend to be very anxious by nature and this makes complete since if you use common sense. It’s likely the anxious people that are going to go online and search for ways to get their ex boyfriends back.
What’s interesting about people with anxious attachment styles is that they tend to attract avoidant attachment styles to them which ends up being a recipe for disaster.
Setting out to prove this very concept I ran another poll in our private facebook group asking our members what attachment style they believed their ex was.
- 65% say their exes are avoidant
- 19% say their exes are fearful
This might explain why we are finding ex boyfriends who broke up with you aren’t contacting you during the no contact rule.
According to Free To Attach, exes who have an avoidant attachment won’t begin to long or romanticize their partner until they believe that partner doesn’t want them back anymore.
It’s crazy, right?
But makes total sense because typically the no contact rule is being initiated very closely to the breakup. Not enough time has gone by for an ex to believe you are completely over them.
And then you have the whole time dilation concept to consider.
People experience the length of no contact differently based on their attachment style.
Let’s say you are implementing a 30 day no contact rule on your ex boyfriend.
- If he has a secure attachment style that 30 days will feel like 30 days.
- If he has an anxious attachment style that 30 days will feel like 60 days.
- If he has an avoidant attachment style that 30 days may feel like 10 days.
Chances are your ex boyfriend has avoidant tendencies which means longer periods of no contact can actually benefit you.
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