The Inferiority Gap: How Conventional Ex-Back Advice Fails You
Conventional ex-back advice has many drawbacks. This article points them out, argues why they’re bad, and provides a better alternative.
This article is based on one of the key lessons in my Radical Re-Attraction Course. If you like it, consider purchasing the course.
If you think about conventional “get your ex back” advice and how it expects you to interact with your ex, you repeatedly see the same types of behaviors being encouraged:
- Impress them.
- Tell funny stories.
- Make them jealous.
- Never text twice.
- Never text or call first.
- Use this pre-prepared text/call script.
- Handwrite them a letter.
- Only talk about lighthearted topics.
- Always act indifferent/mysterious.
- Always end the conversation first.
- Always approach them at an angle.
- Play hard to get.
- Make it seem like you’re living your best life.
- Use reverse psychology.
- And more…
These are what I call “ performance behaviors,” and they all follow the same formula: Do behavior X, and you’ll become attractive, and your ex will like you again.
Funnily enough, you can get your ex back through performance behaviors. You can learn all the right lines. You can develop an unerring sense of when to pull back and when to push forward. You can learn all of this like you would learn how to cook, read or code. Performance, at its core, is a skill.
That said, there is a dark underbelly to performance.
For starters, performance is not authentic to who you are, and it implies that you’re not good enough for your ex as you are. If you feel like you need a funny line, a certain job, or a specific amount of personal growth to get your ex back, what you’re implying to yourself is, “I’m not good enough for them. I need me + X to get them to like/love me.”
What you’re essentially doing here is putting your ex on a pedestal. Worthiness-wise, your perception is: my ex is above me; I’m below them. And so, there’s a gap between your perceived worth and their perceived worth.
I call this gap the inferiority gap.
Now when a person cultivates such a gap, they consequently begin to place a higher priority on their ex’s perception of them than their perception of themselves. They essentially start to care more about what their ex thinks, feels, believes, needs, and stands for than what they think, feel, believe, need, and stand for.
And this gap always leads to the same result: a need to perform. Then the performance leads to even more feelings of unworthiness, creating what’s in psychology known as a downward spiral: the more you perform, the more unworthy you feel, and the more unworthy you feel, the more you feel like you need to perform.
But this is just the effect the inferiority gap has on us. There’s also its impact on our ex that’s worth noting. But to understand it, we need to grasp some fundamental knowledge of what makes a person attractive.
To make a long story short, the one trait all men and women across the board find attractive — regardless of culture or time period — is the perception of social status. And the way people judge and determine social status is by looking at one’s behavior.
So your ex will mainly look at your behavior to judge how much or how little social status you have. But how can you know what behavior then determines how much status you have? Well, chew on the following example.
If you feel like you need to impress your ex, show off, or display all sorts of behaviors inauthentic to what you really think and feel, just to make them more attracted to you because you don’t feel good enough for them, what does that imply? It implies you’re performing.
So eventually what happens is that they detect you’re performing. Because let’s be honest, it’s not hard and your ex isn’t stupid. Next they notice that you’re not being real, that you’re not being true to yourself, and that you don’t ultimately feel good enough for them (otherwise, why perform in the first place?). And what does that imply? It implies you’re needy.
And what does it mean when you’re perceived as needy? It means you’re almost certainly displaying needy and unattractive behavior which will inevitably squash your ex’s attraction and get them to reject you.
This, dear reader, is the whole irony of conventional “get your ex back” advice:
The more you perform, the more inauthentic you are, the wider your inferiority gap gets, the more needy behaviors you display, and the more unattractive you come across. Whereas the less you perform, the more authentic you are, the narrower your inferiority gap gets, the less needy behaviors you display, and the more attractive you come across.
And no, you can’t hide the fact that you’re performing. Your ex isn’t stupid. Eventually, they’ll detect it, and lose attraction for you.
So now the question is, how do you close your inferiority gap and stop performing all the damn time?
For starters, change how you see and respect yourself in relation to your ex for the better and pick an approach to re-attraction that doesn’t involve performance. I suggest you try out what I call “ self-improvement approach “ — an approach based on investing in and focusing on yourself rather than obsessing about your ex and acquiring more re-attraction tricks, gimmicks, and techniques.
Next, make it a habit to respond to any instance of neediness appropriately. That is, by standing up for yourself, calling your ex out on their bullshit, rejecting them altogether if they can’t give you what you want, or simply not displaying a particular behavior you know is unattractive.
Last, and most importantly, cultivate a healthy dose of vulnerability. Because when you’re vulnerable, you remove performance, imply that you’re of equal status to whomever you’re interacting with, and reinforce to yourself that you are worthy, adequate, and should feel that way. So, in a way, your inferiority gap will start to close as soon as vulnerability enters the equation.
Now the way you start being vulnerable is by opening yourself up to your ex’s rejection and disapproval. And while I have written an entire article on the topic, here’s a few tips to get you going:
- If you still love your ex and want them back, tell them you still love them and want them back.
- If you aren’t happy with how they’re treating you on a date, tell them to show some respect or else you’ll go home.
- If they keep placing you in the friend zone, tell them you don’t want to be friends and want to see them romantically.
Let your true intentions and wants be known. Be clear about them and don’t make it a big deal. And stay unattached to whatever response your ex gives you in return, including silence. Paradoxically, it’s this boldness that makes you come across as more attractive and awards you with the best chance of forming a healthy and lasting relationship with your ex — or anyone.
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Originally published at https://maxjancar.com on August 23, 2021.
