My Girlfriend Kissed Another Guy While We Were Broken Up

Some things to consider if your girlfriend kissed another guy while broken up before you got back together.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a woman who dumped her boyfriend after he neglected her for a year and half. They are both avid readers and students of my work. They basically became roommates. He completely stopped dating and courting her and communicating with her properly and refused to change until she left him.

They are now back together, but she kissed another guy while they were broken up and before they became exclusive again. When he apologized and asked for another chance, she agreed they could work on it. He assumed they were immediately exclusive again. He is devastated over this. She asks my opinion if it’s salvageable. My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of her email.

It’s kind of like a he said, she said type of thing. In his mind, he probably made assumptions because I know how guys think, because I’ve been doing this a long time. He just assumed they were exclusive and back together, but if he was really a good student in my work, then he would know that it takes time for women to fall in love with a man and he obviously did the things according to what was in the book in the beginning.

I mean, she lays out what a great courtship it was in the beginning, but like as soon as he felt like he had her hooked and she moved in with him, everything completely stopped. He had excuses and rationalizations on why he was not going to continue dating her, in essence.

It takes time for a woman to fall in love. It took time for her to fall out of love. She stuck around for a long time and nothing would change. So she finally got to the point where she had enough. Her feelings were gone and she left. In that case, she dumped him because he refused to treat her the way she wanted to be treated. Supposedly, as a student of my work, when he’s absolutely refusing to do the things that women need in a relationship, he should not be surprised that he got dumped. It’s inevitable as the sun coming up in the east and setting in the west.

When you stop dating and courting your girl and you refuse to do it and you refuse to communicate with her, eventually she’s going to leave you. Eventually she’s going to start dating somebody else, and that’s what basically happened.

So he came to her and says, “I want another chance. I’m sorry. You were right. I’ll fix all these things,” and at first she wasn’t too excited about it. A couple of weeks in, she’s warmed up to the idea. She gave him a chance. Then she committed to being exclusive, but obviously he’s still got an issue with her kissing somebody else.

In any situation where the ex is coming back into the picture after dumping you, you don’t go from being broken up for a month or two to now all of a sudden you’re back in a relationship. It doesn’t work that way. It’s like you’re restarting the courtship and it takes time for her to get to the point where she falls back in love and wants to be exclusive. There is a process to that.

Just because you dated before and were in a relationship before or lived together or whatever, there’s still a process to the courtship to get her to the place where she feels safe and comfortable. Especially with this guy who fell down on her for a whole year and a half and absolutely refused to do anything to fix it until she finally left his ass. Then on top of that, he’s not doing the things that are in the book, so she writes in.

It’s a good email, because you really get a good feel for what the woman is going through. In this case, because she’s familiar with my work, she knows what the guys should be doing. Plus, she knows what he’s been taught and he’s not doing what he’s been taught or what he learned. He literally refused to do it.

Viewer’s Email:

Hi Coach Corey,

My boyfriend Bob and I are going through a bit of a struggle right now and looking for your thoughts. We both listen to you and respect and value your opinion.

Well, I appreciate the fact that you guys put your faith and your trust in me.

To provide a little backstory, my boyfriend and I met in North Carolina, where I am from, and worked with each other for 2 years before getting together. About a month into our relationship, he asked me to move to Seattle with him so that he could work at his family’s company.

That’s pretty quick, but they knew each other for two years. I don’t know what the interactions were. Maybe they were in relationships with other people, I don’t know, but today, for 30 days it’s like, “Hey, why don’t you move with me?” Obviously they worked together for two years, so there was a lot of rapport that had been built.

At the end of the day, she was obviously feeling it. So that’s why she left, because her interest was high enough that it felt safe and comfortable for her to do that. So that was a credit to him in the beginning that he did the right things.

I moved with him, making it only 4 months into our relationship that we were living in an apartment together.

In the beginning months of our relationship, Bob was amazing at courting me. That part of your book, he has read many times.

Well, the book has pickup skills, dating skills, relationship skills, and you’ve got to successfully transition through all three of those phases and understand them, because at various points you’re going to bounce back and forth. Guys that screw up and make mistakes, they’ll read the book a bunch to learn the pickup and the dating stuff, and then they start getting laid regularly or they even get into a relationship and they’re like, “I don’t need to bother with the relationship stuff. I got this. She’s totally crazy about me. What’s Corey talking about, 10-15 times? It’s absurd. No man, nobody needs to read a book 10-15 times.”

It’s the kind of things that they tell themselves until it’s a problem. Until things blow up in their faces, and it’s usually what happens.

He was always in his masculine, pulling out all the stops, planning great dates. We fell in love pretty quickly after we started dating and it was magical. Fast-forward to moving in together and that was all gone.

Well, this is a big complaint that women generally have. “Why are men romantic at first and then they stop?” In other words, guys are romantic and they date and they court the girl, but once she falls in love or they get married or they move in together, all that stuff stops because in the guy’s mind it’s like, “Hey, she’s mine now. She ain’t going anywhere. We live together. We got a lease. We got a 30-year mortgage. What’s she going to do?”

No dates, no magic. Every day was just hard for him. Work was stressful, not making it to the gym was stressful, his family was stressful, I was stressful. Life was so overwhelming to him that, while he said he loved and appreciated me, there was no action behind the words.

You look at what people do, not what they say. It’s nice that he was probably saying, “I love you,” and all that, but if he just stopped dating and courting her and refused to do the things that he did before, that’s on him. There is a chapter in the book, it says, The Courtship Never Ends. Never. Women want to be in a love story. If you don’t date and court your wife or your girlfriend, eventually some other guy will.

Women are not going to just stay loyal and faithful to you because they were a virgin when they married you or some of the other stupid shit that you hear going on with these Red Pill dunces that don’t know their assholes from a hole in the ground. That’s just a fact of life.

Although we both work and have full time jobs, he begged and pleaded for me to do 100% of the grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, planning, driving, etc. He would want breakfast to be made and on the table each day before he got out of bed so that he could get more sleep. He didn’t want to go on dates. Basically, time that he could be putting towards work or his health would be wasted on dating.

In other words, he wanted to work out, he wanted to focus on his mission and purpose and completely neglect his girl. Have her be a stay-at-home roommate when he’s available so he can have sex anytime he wants. Other than that, he didn’t really have to do anything to contribute to the relationship.

Communication was stressful and unimportant. No matter how much I would try to come at things in a positive light and hope that we could work on it together, he wouldn’t want to listen and would tell me I’m being too needy. And unfortunately, I caught him in a couple of very intentional lies during his nights out with his friends that also started to erode my trust in him.

Love cannot exist where there is no trust, and if you’re going out and lying to your girl about it or you’re promising to do things and then you don’t follow through, she’s simply not going to believe you after a while. She’s just not going to believe what you tell her. She’s going to have zero faith in you, and love cannot exist where there is no trust. It’s just not going to work.

I don’t know what this dude was thinking, that he could just stop dating and courting her when there’s a chapter in the book that he supposedly has read and is very familiar with, it says The Courtship Never Ends, and think that he can just end the courtship and he’s going to be different and special and everything’s going to be fine.

I broke up with him in May after 2 years together for all of the reasons above. I moved out and got my own apartment in the city. A couple weeks later, he came to me and took full responsibility for all of the things listed above, told me he could be a better man for me and wanted to get back together. I was hesitant.

Literally for a year and a half, she pleaded with this guy to get his shit together, and he just flat out refused. It wasn’t until she left that he realized, “Oh, she’s serious. She’s not going to just stick around.”

I loved him but it had already taken me 6 months of wasted time to find the strength to break up with him and I didn’t want to waste any more of my time or his. I thought dating other people might help. I wasn’t sure. I told him that we could work on it, but soon thereafter I went to Chicago to visit my brother and kissed another man.

So when she says we can work on it, in other words, she’s basically saying, “Hey, I’ll give you a trial period here. I’ll give you the opportunity to win me over through your actions.”

In his mind, like most guys, because he’s obviously not a good communicator and didn’t take the time to really say, “What do you mean? What does that look like? What is working on it look like?” Probably never brought up exclusivity. He made an assumption that they were exclusive, but if he was really familiar with my work, he would understand that it’s not his job to get her back into a relationship or convince her to be back in a relationship. His job is simply to create the next opportunity for sex and to hang out, have fun and hook up. Basically courting and dating properly.

When she feels safe and comfortable enough and he’s rebuilt trust through his actions over many weeks and months, and she feels safe and comfortable with him, that he really, truly has changed and he is a man of his word, then she’ll bring up exclusivity. That’s how it works.

This is what I teach, but I don’t see this guy as being a great student in my work. He looks like a typical guy that cherry picked enough information in the books and the videos to get some success in the beginning and then he just stopped and he refused to do anything differently.

I don’t know what his reasoning was. Maybe he got into some of the Red Pill stuff. I just see that a lot in my work, and that’s why I bring it up because I’m constantly hearing it when I’m doing phone sessions. I see it in the emails all the time and I see it in the things people say, whether it’s in their emails or in their comments, and they’re repeating all these stupid platitudes that they’ve memorized and they don’t really understand what they mean. I don’t really see a positive influence from the overwhelming majority of dudes that claim they’re part of the Red Pill community.

It was nothing more, just a kiss, but Bob was broken. A month later, and we are officially back together exclusively and trying to work things out. Things are actually going really well and I’m starting to build back trust and some feelings of love that were lost along the way, but he is hung up on the kiss.

Well, he’s going to have to get over it, because you guys were not together. If he assumed you were exclusive and didn’t actually talk to you and communicate with you and explicitly agree to terms of what that was, that’s on him.

He’s supposed to be the leader. He’s the one that came to you saying, “I’m going to change. I’m going to do all these things. You were right. I should have done this. I should have continued doing this,” but he didn’t. This is part of being a man.

As Jocko Willink says, “It’s taking extreme ownership.” It’s like, “Yeah I fucked up, but I’m going to fix it. I’m man enough to fix it and follow through.” That’s what a woman wants to see. Say what you mean and mean what you say, or get the fuck out of my face.

I told him that I wanted to work on it with him, which he took as exclusivity and I did not. I regret the kiss and want to give Bob the space to process it, but I also want to move on.

Again, he should look in the mirror if he wants to blame somebody. If he was vague in his communication, that’s on him. He fucked the relationship up because he didn’t date and court her and she left him. He went and apologized and wanted to work things out and fix the things that he had screwed up. She’s willing to give him a chance, but she’s going to be strictly looking at his actions.

I feel a little frustrated that after the year and a half of him being a self-admitted horrible boyfriend to me, I’m suddenly the only bad guy. Do I belong to the streets??

Nothing that I’ve seen would tell me that. I can understand why he’s upset, but if he was vague and unclear on what the terms of working on it were. I mean, he’s got a track record of being a shitty communicator, so I’m going to have to assume that’s on him. It was obviously probably not discussed. He made an assumption and she made an assumption.

Her assumption and the way she says, “We’re working on it,” she didn’t say, “We’re back together,” “We will work on it.” He took it as she’ll only work on being with him. As she said, she’s open to dating other people and seeing what happens, but he did a good enough job when he came back to after a few weeks she’s like, “You know what? I am willing to be exclusive now.”

I’ve always been a loyal person, and want to make it work but is this fixable?

Thanks Corey, I appreciate any feedback even if it’s the kind we don’t want to hear.

All the best,

Jessica

I mean, you’re really not going to know for 6-12 months, because maybe he hasn’t learned his lesson. Maybe because the same thing might happen again in the future. You might get back together and he’s great for six months and then he just slowly reverts right back to the same way. These are things that you should discuss with them.

I assume you’re probably both are going to be watching the video anyways, but you know, I wouldn’t believe a word he says. If I was you, I’d be looking at his actions. If he says he’s truly going to be a changed man, the courtship never ends. If he stops dating and courting you again and you remind him of his promises and then he refuses to do it, then the only other solution you’re going to have in the future is to leave his ass again, but not give him another chance.

If he’s not willing to actually be congruent with his words, he’s falling down on you as a man. You’ve got to be able to rely upon what a man says. Men who have honor will keep their words and their commitments. Men that don’t, they’re not going to keep them. It doesn’t matter.

It’s not your job to fix this guy or to be his mommy or to turn him into a good man. He’s come to you, said he’s going to make the changes. You need to see the changes and they need to stay that way. Any time he falls off the wagon, throw it in his face in a loving way, you’ve got to remind him. You just say, “I agreed to get back together because you said you were going to date and court me properly and you were going to communicate properly. Right now, we haven’t been on a date in a month or you have been refusing to communicate and talk this issue out,” or whatever happens to be. “You’re not holding up your end of the bargain.”

See what happens in 6-12 months, because he did it for about the first four months of the relationship, but as soon as he felt like he had you, he literally refused to do what he knew he was supposed to do, but more than likely he was cherry picking and never really took the time to learn and understand the philosophy. That’s on him.

Hold the dude accountable. Hold him accountable to his commitments to you and see where you are in 6-12 months if he’s consistent. He’ll either be consistent and truly a changed man or within 6-12 months of you getting back together and being exclusive, he’ll go right back to the same behavior. If he goes right back to the same behavior, I wouldn’t give him a third chance. I would dip on him.

So, if you’ve got a question or a challenge and you’d like to get my help, go to UnderstandingRelationships.com, click the Products tab at the top of your screen and book a coaching session with yours truly.