When you’re trying to figure out what to say to get your girlfriend back, the first thing you have to ask is, “why did she leave?”  If you’re thinking you have any chance at all, it’s because you did something boneheaded.  If she left “for cause,” as the lawyers say, you have less of a chance.  That is, if it’s a structural problem—you have seriously different values, she wants to live in the city and you’re a farm boy (or the other way around), or she dumped you for the professor, I’d usually suggest a different response (see “how do you get a girlfriend?” will b).

Presuming the reason falls generically under the “you did something identifiably boneheaded,” then, the answer to “What do you say to get your girlfriend back?” is usually, “I’m sorry.”

90% of the time, saying “I’m sorry, and it will never happen again” will get your girlfriend back, IF anything’s going to work.  However, if you’re reading this article, you probably tried apologizing already.  Now you’re wondering, “why didn’t it work?” or “what else can I do?”

(I’ll write more soon about how to think through whether or not you really want to get your girlfriend back, but for today, let’s allow that trying to repair your current relationship is the right decision to make.)

Why didn’t saying “I’m Sorry” get your girlfriend back?

Here’s where people get “apologizing” wrong:

Did you make a mistake, or was what happened really the result of a choice?

A “mistake” happens when you did something wrong, but you didn’t know before hand that it was going to turn out wrong, and most reasonable people in your shoes / your age would not have known it was going to turn out wrong.  You spilled something on her dress, for example.  You broke the lamp.  You ran over her dog, when he ran out in front of the car.

Mistakes are often forgiveable.  Sometimes, your apology should be accompanied by a check.  “Here—let me replace it.”  (This will not work if the dog died.)

Effective apologies have an understanding of personal responsibility attached.  If your apology in some way passes the buck, or worse, points the finger at her, just save your breath.  “I’m sorry I made you cry,” for example, is not apologizing for what you did; it’s really putting the blame on her for reacting the way she did.

Where we get into to trouble is when we confuse “mistakes” with “choices.”  A mistake is an outcome that turned out to be wrong.  A choice, on the other hand, is when you took a course of action of your own free will, and the consequences were bad.  In addition, pretty much anyone of sound mind could have predicted the consequences, given a hypothetical question about the choice you made.

While I don’t normally quote Dr. Laura, I have found this one sentence of hers invaluable:  “Our problems are usually the inevitable and predictable consequences of our own actions.”

You vomited on her dress, because you were toasted, again.  You broke the lamp, because you shoved her into it during a fight.  You’ve promised to be true, and she caught you with her girlfriend.

Once you’ve ever been too drunk, drinking too much is a choice, not a “mistake.”  (12 Step programs understand drinking and choice a little differently, but they don’t let you off with a “mistake” apology, either.) (By the way, saying “I’m sorry I did that” when the foul was sleeping with her girlfriend will not only not get your own girlfriend back, but will also offend her girlfriend.)

Bad choices are corrected with amends, not apologies.  You have to make it right.  Merely promising “not to do that again” is not sufficient.  You have to also fix what you broke and restore what you destroyed, whatever that takes (cleaning the carpet?  detailing the car?  Those are easy compared to restoring trust), and implement a behavior change that will prevent the same bad choice again.

The fact is, there may be nothing you can SAY to get your girlfriend back, if she left because of your poor decision.  You can only DO something—live a new life, one that makes amends for the damage you caused, and that demonstrates you won’t make that choice again.  Don’t be sorry–be different.

Good luck.

He’s Just Not That Into You.

Greg Behrendt.

Get it. Read it.  Apply it.

If you’re searching Google for dating advice to women from men (which I suspect because that’s how you found this post), Greg has most of what you’ll need.  Unless, of course, you’ve already read it and you were hoping to hear something different?

I’m sorry.  I can’t help you with that.  I was pretty much partnered by the time I found He’s Just Not That Into You, but I could see how and why it was such a dose of salts to a lot of women.

If you were ten years older and looking for someone, in the time of classified ads in the freebie papers and before the internet, The Rules, if taken with a grain of salt the size of the rock of Gibralter, covered much the same ground without a sense of humor, only those books were written by women.  Far more women than will admit it in public found at least one suggestion in that book that helped their dating outcomes, whether or not they ever wanted to be “a ‘Rules’ girl.”

Both The Rules and HJNTIY turned into publishing empires, with lots of products you can spend money on.

Or you can get the books at the library and  spend your money on dates.

My suggestion?  Read the books.  Decide whether any of what the authors say is relevant to your dating history, and the disasters you’d rather not remember.  Implement guidelines for yourself that prevent known problems and protect you from your own weak spots.  For me, the most useful take-away was “never have two meals on the first date.”  Even if I thought we were hitting it off, even if I was kinda hungry, I left.  Walking away gave my unconscious mind a chance to process any signals that couldn’t cut through the conversation.  Walking away also allowed me to end the date at a time when no-one got his feelings hurt that it didn’t run  very much longer.

You may have your own challenges.

BTW, I’ll write more about this in a different post, but if in any way there is an undercurrent of fear in your question, read The Gift of Fear, by Gavin de Becker.  His message is about trusting your intuition, and he has a lot to say about what the first signs of trouble look like.  Better yet, if there’s any element of fear in your question, dump the guy now, and get Gift on your way home.  (If you have children, as many of my clients do, you should also read his book Protecting the Gift, which is about teaching your children how to be safe in the real world.

For every 300 people who search the the internet for “fun love quiz,” two people look for “accurate love quiz.”

We all did the “name game” quiz back in 7^th or 8^th grade, and it was fun, and gave us a giggle.  Now it’s on the internet, and you can still try out as many variations on both your names as it takes to get the answers you want.  Fun, perhaps.  Meaningful?  If you’re over 13, not very.

What is it that the two groups of people want, when they go searching for either “fun love quiz” or “accurate love quiz?”

First, do we all agree, the searcher is female?  Men do not type these search terms.

When you’re looking for “fun love quiz,” let’s guess:  it’s a new relationship, and you’re hoping a little inconsequential test will confirm the giddy feeling—

• He is a good catch
• It’s meant to be
• Someone writing on a website or in a magazine knows something better than you do that confirms your wishful, hopeful state of mind

It might be that you have a doubt or two, and you want to quash those negative feelings (not a good idea, by the way), but mostly, you’re coming from a happy place and you want more of the happy.  Have fun.  There are plenty of sites, most enticing you with the quiz to look at the advertising.  Some of them are amusing enough, if you don’t catch the PC-equivalent of a nasty virus from a pop-under ad.  (By the way, they probably want your email address to send you “offers you just can’t refuse.”)

“Accurate love quiz,” on the other hand, speaks to more doubt.  Women (as opposed to 12-year old girls) look for an accurate love quiz when there’s a bit of a gap:

• He’s telling you that you’re really special, but you don’t feel it in your bones (or gut, or heart)
• You’re telling yourself that you like him, but the relationship sure takes a lot of work
• Your friends think he’s a great catch and you’re crazy for wondering, but they’re not the ones dating this guy
• Whether literally or figuratively, you smell another woman’s perfume on his clothes

If you’re searching for an “accurate love quiz” because  you want to make that nagging uncomfortable feeling go away, you’re better off taking a good hard look at what it is that is bothering you.  Intuition, grounded in rationality, is a powerful early warning system.  Pay attention.

How can you keep track of your date-to-date response to more than one candidate-for-partner, over time, while meeting the on-going obligations of your life and work, and remembering everything else you need to keep track of?

In two words, “you can’t.”

Very few people are in a position to put their work and life on hold while they look for a partner through online dating services.

It’s not that hard for spreadsheet-literate people to figure out how the basic system works. What IS hard is duplicating the functionality of the Love Calculator Toolkit in your own mind, on the fly, whether or not you’ve had a drink or two.

It’s widely understood that the average human mind is good at keeping 7 +- 2 items in short term memory. Phone numbers, at least long enough to write them down. Grocery lists for single people. Errands to run on the way home from work. Simple stuff, and ideally, items that don’t have a huge downside if they fall off the list. (Forgetting dry cleaning is a significantly less important error than forgetting to stop at the day care center.)

What we CAN’T do is compare two slightly different, mostly acceptable, options, particularly when the choices are separated in time. (A brief excursion through three of my favorite behavioral econ books yields ideas for 10 additional posts about dating and economics, but no clear reference for this position.) The power of the Love Calculator Toolkit is that it allows you to document your experience when it is fresh, when you are thinking of only one candidate for your heart. When you have a date with someone else, you use the tool again. In time, the Toolkit accumulates relevant data for you, and you can make a clear decision.

Experienced card counters (a non-zero subset of my clients) may be able to create a similar system that they run in the back of their mind. However, the literature suggests that good card counters spend their free time keeping their card counting skills sharp. They don’t dilute their focus. Furthermore, while the theory of card counting systems is fairly simple, its actual application, in the heat of the game, is vastly different, and is only mastered after hours of rehearsal in simulated conditions.