Does my ex want me back?

You are asking because the signals have been mixed, and mixed is the worst kind, because a clean no would have hurt once and been done with. Does my ex want me back is the question people type after a like on a photo from two years ago, or a message at midnight that said nothing, or a mutual friend passing on that he asked how you were, and I want to be honest before anything else: I cannot tell you what he wants, and neither can a card, and neither, I would gently suggest, can he right now, or the signals would not be mixed.

What can be answered tonight is the question you have not been asking, which is what you want, and on what terms. That one has an answer, it is in the room with you, and it turns out to be the thing that decides what all of his signals are worth.

What mixed signals usually are

Here is the least flattering and most useful thing I know about them. A mixed signal is very rarely a coded message. It is usually a person who has not decided, reaching for the comfort of you without the cost of you, and reaching is not the same as wanting you back, though it feels identical at the moment of the notification.

The late message, the reaction to a story, the birthday text that arrives warmer than it needed to be: these are cheap to send and they keep a door ajar without anybody having to walk through it. I do not say that to make him small. Most people do it after an ending, on both sides, and you may have done a version of it yourself. I say it so that you stop reading a two second gesture as though it were a letter.

Does my ex want me back, and why the signals cannot settle it

Because the evidence is symmetrical. Every sign that he might want you back is also a sign of something duller. The message at midnight is longing or it is loneliness or it is three drinks. Asking a friend how you are is missing you or it is manners. Even the plain version, I have been thinking about you, is a sentence people send when they want to feel something for an evening and have no plan for the morning.

You could collect these for a year and get no closer to does my ex want me back than you are tonight, and some people do. The only thing that lifts it is a plain question asked in daylight, and I will come to that, because whether you ask it depends on the answer to yours.

The question that has an answer

What do you want. Not what would you accept, which is a different and sadder question, and not what would you take if he turned up at the door, since almost everybody would take almost anything at the door for about a week. What would you want on a Tuesday in March, with the relief worn off and the same two people in the same kitchen.

People skip this because it feels like getting ahead of themselves, and because wanting something you may not be offered is uncomfortable. But the order matters. If you work out what he wants first and what you want second, you will build your answer out of his, and that is how people end up back in the exact arrangement that ended, slightly more tired.

So do it on paper tonight, two lines. What I want is, and what I would not take back. The second line is the important one and it is the one people find hardest to write, because it means admitting that there were terms, and that the old version broke some of them.

What people find when they write the second line

It is mostly one of three things, and I have seen each of them more than once. Some find they want him back on any terms, and the honest thing to do with that is to notice it without shame and then read the attachment piece, because on any terms is nearly always a pattern rather than a decision, and patterns can be looked at.

Some find they want a different relationship with the same man, which is the hardest position, because it needs him to want that too and it needs both of you to be able to say what was wrong out loud, in the same room, without it turning into the old argument. It is possible. It is not common, and it does not happen by text.

And some find, to their own astonishment and often in tears, that they do not want him back at all. They want the not being alone, or the person to tell things to, or the version of him from the first summer, and none of those is on offer. That discovery is not a betrayal of what you felt. It is the beginning of the thinking belonging to you again.

If you decide to ask him

Then ask in daylight, in one plain sentence, and not as a test. Do you want to try again, or are you keeping in touch because it is easier than not, is a fair question to put to somebody who has been sending mixed signals for two months, and you are allowed to want a real answer rather than a warm one.

Be ready for the answer to be I do not know, because it might be, and I do not know from a person you have asked directly is worth more than a hundred likes. It tells you that he is, by his own account, exactly where the mixed signals suggested, and you get to decide what you do with somebody who is standing in a doorway, which is not nothing, though it is not a plan either.

The will he come back page reads this stretch honestly if you want cards for it, and the no contact piece is for the version where you decide to stop answering the doorbell for a while.

What is yours here

The terms are what is yours here, and that is more than it sounds. Whether he wants you back is his to decide and I cannot see it from here, but you decide what back means, what it would have to include, and what you will no longer wait up for at midnight. Write the two lines, keep them where you can see them, and the next signal that arrives will land on a person who knows what she is looking at.

Come back and tell me what the second line said. That is the one I would want to read.

Clara