Make An Avoidant Chase YOU (Even If They’re Pulling Away)

If you want your avoidant ex back, you need them to chase you.

They need to think getting back together is their idea.

And that starts with giving them space.

This is true for most exes, because being chased after a breakup just isn’t attractive. Imagine you’ve just ended a relationship that wasn’t working, and all you want is some peace. But your ex won’t stop reaching out — they’re texting, flirting, asking about the breakup. You’d feel pressured and uncomfortable, right? You’d probably start pulling away even more.

So that’s why chasing a normal ex doesn’t work and this effect is especially strong with avoidants because of how their attachment style operates.

Avoidants feel threatened by closeness at the best of times — and after a breakup, that fear is magnified.

So now when you reach out to them, not only do they feel everything that a normal ex feels, but they also feel this fear and that’s what’s going to drive them to pull away, go cold and avoid you at all costs.

So chances are, if you’ve had any contact with your ex following the breakup, even if it felt minor, then this is why they’re now pulling away from you.

But there is hope. Because it’s not so much your presence that’s triggering these feelings in your ex. It’s your approach. The fact that you’re the one reaching out, being clingy and not getting the message is feeding into a new dynamic between the two of you.

You’re saying, “I need you more than anything else. I’m lost without you. You need to give me attention and affection. You need to answer my questions and reply to all my messages.” And you’re saying this at a time when what your ex needs most is to be left alone.

And this is making you feel like a chore and a threat to their recovery and their peace.

How To Make An Avoidant Ex Chase You

So if reaching out to them is going to scare them away and they’re not reaching out to you, then how can you stay in their life? Is your only option to keep your distance and slowly fade out of their awareness—out of their life—forever?

Well, you’re actually on to something. But the truth is that keeping your distance from an avoidant doesn’t mean that you won’t be in their life anymore because you’ll still be in their head. And your presence in their thoughts is actually only going to get more pronounced up to a point.

And that’s because avoidants live a lot of their life in their heads. It may seem like avoidants aren’t thinking deeply about a lot of this stuff because they don’t like to share their emotions or participate in emotional conversations. But actually the opposite is true.

It’s because they have no outlet for these feelings that they keep them inside and tend to obsess over their problems, their past and—of course—their regrets.

So if you talk to them after the breakup, you end up becoming a threat to their peace. But if you avoid them, they still think of you as the person that they broke up with.

And the thing about avoidants is that they have big feelings about breakups. Because avoidants often don’t think through their breakups as much as they should. They tend to break up as a reaction to uncomfortable feelings, rather than as a carefully made decision.

So they experience closeness and intimacy—that feeling of being known—and alarm bells start to go off. And because talking about their feelings feels even more threatening, they don’t know how to say “let’s slow down and set some boundaries.”

Instead, they respond by pulling away, taking space and—eventually—ending the relationship. Now they might do this directly or they might take the indirect route: ghosting you, or just treating you poorly until you end it.

But either way, now that the relationship is over, that fear quickly fades away. Since you’re no longer there threatening them with closeness that they’re not ready for, they no longer feel scared.

They just feel lonely. They remember all the good things you brought into their life and now they feel lost without you.

And so you become one of their biggest regrets and regrets like that are only going to get worse as time passes.

And, if you keep staying away, eventually they’re going to want to escape this regret by reaching out to you and reconnecting.

So this is why I recommend that you stay away from your ex following a breakup. Don’t answer most of their calls, don’t reach out and really don’t communicate with them in any way. Make them feel maximum regret and they’re going to have incentive to chase you.

But just keeping your distance isn’t always going to be enough here. Because avoidant exes can be extremely stubborn. Remember, this kind of emotional stuff is overwhelming for an avoidant and so they might need more motivation to break their silence.

Make Them Worry They’ve Lost You

Going No Contact is going to give your ex a chance to miss you, but if you want them to worry that you’re really not coming back, you need to take it a bit further. Avoidants aren’t going to act until they’re really worried that they’re going to miss their chance with you.

The first thing I recommend is to ask yourself a question: “what would I do if I was actually over my ex?”

So chances are you’d move on and to do that you might start changing your life, filling it with all the things that you’ve been missing without them around, or even things that you missed out on because they were in your life.

So I had a client whose partner didn’t like him skateboarding. She felt that it was dangerous and he’d get hurt and she’d have to look after him if anything happened. It didn’t lead to their breakup, but it created a lot of tension in their relationship and, eventually, he decided to give it up so that they could be together.

So he was surprised when I told him that now that they were no longer together, he needed to get back on the board. He worried that this was just going to be another reminder of the issues that they’d had and it would keep her from coming back.

But he trusted me enough to give it a try. This was one of his main hobbies during No Contact and he actually got pretty good at it. He ended up making some new friends and getting some exercise but the biggest difference it made was in his ex.

When he posted a video of himself at the skate park she immediately reached out to ask him about it. She seemed annoyed at first but that quickly fell away and they got back to talking like they used to.

Over time, they reconnected and successfully restarted their life together. And he told me that she admitted that when she saw him on that board, that was the moment that the breakup really sunk in for her.

That was when she realized that she might have actually lost him forever and so she decided to reach out before it was too late.

So you need to find your own skateboard. What’s something you’d want to do if you knew that you and your ex were never getting back together? Be bold here. Be uncompromising.

Remember, they chose to end things so they have no right to be mad if you go dancing with your friends or get a new job or even start dating someone new.

Yes, dating after a breakup is a hard step to take, but it’s going to make your ex extremely jealous and it can often be the push they need to start talking to you again.

Because not only does it make them fear that they’ve lost you, but it also creates a ticking clock in their mind. They’ll immediately realize that if they don’t come back, someone else is going to take their place.

Maintain The Mystery

Our third tip here is going to be for after you reconnect with your ex. It’s easy to get excited and show your hand or otherwise just fall right back into the dynamic you had before the breakup.

But both of these are going to be a mistake if you want to win their heart.

When your avoidant ex finally reaches out, it’s fragile — they’re testing the waters. What you do next will determine whether they stay or retreat again.

Because even if your ex reaches out to you after No Contact and says a lot of positive, kind things, it doesn’t mean that they’re 100% sure about their decision to reconnect with you. Avoidants in particular can be hard to read and so you want to be careful not to get too friendly and scare them away.

So instead of baring your soul and telling them how much you love them and need them, you need to go in the other direction. You need to keep the mystery alive so that they’re not sure how you feel.

This works particularly well for avoidants, because big displays of emotion and vulnerability are overwhelming to them. This is why avoidants are so good at chasing early in relationships and then tend to pull away once they’ve caught you.

They’re better in scenarios where emotions are muted and intimacy is not guaranteed.

So essentially, if you want them to chase you, you need to let them chase you. And you can do that by keeping your feelings and intentions a secret.

RELATED: How To Make Your Ex Commit To You

So this means no gushing about your feelings and how much you missed them, no big speeches, no tough conversations about the past and the breakup. Keep it cool and live in the moment.

You basically want to give them a taste of their own medicine: flirt and give them attention and then pull away. Don’t respond to their messages right away to give them the impression that you have better things to do or better people to talk to. Make them WORK for your attention and your affection.

And this goes hand in hand with keeping your whereabouts and your plans for the future to yourself. So don’t tell them every thought you’re having or everything you’re doing.

Give them a chance to wonder who you’ve been spending time with. If they’re wondering about you, they’re thinking about you and so you’re living in their head all the time. But this only happens if you’re able to really keep this mystery alive in a real way.

So that is how you can make an avoidant ex chase you, even if they’re pulling away. You start by going No Contact. Then you act like you’re moving on so that they fear that they’re going to lose you. And when they reach out, you need to keep the mystery alive to keep their attention.

It’s simple, but it’s not easy. So don’t half ass this: stay vigilant, and maintain your focus and soon they’ll come back around for another chance.

Brad Browning

Brad Browning is widely regarded as the world's most trusted breakup experts, boasting over 12 years of experience working with clients from around the world. Brad's #1 best-selling breakup reversal guide, The Ex Factor, has helped more than 130,000 people from 131 countries to re-unite with an ex. Brad is also the author of Mend The Marriage, a comprehensive self-help guide that teaches married couples how to save their dying marriage and prevent divorce. Brad’s YouTube channel has over 400,000 subscribers and 50 million views, and he has been featured in a number of well-known media outlets and industry journals.