If you’ve ever wondered why exes can seemingly just fall in love with someone else so quickly after a breakup, then you came to the right place because that’s what we’re going to be talking about today.

I’m not going to lie. It took me a while to find my footing for this one but ultimately decided that the best way for me to provide value to you is to talk about the following things

• Answering if they are legitimately in love with this new person
• Talking about the perpetual honeymoon chaser concept
• Showing you a real example of it playing out
• Answering why “self confidence” might be the key to them moving on so quickly

This one should be a great one so let’s dive right in.

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Are They Legitimately In Love With The New Person?

The answer is complicated.

I think they convince themselves they are in love with the new person, at first. But their version of love isn’t maybe “love” in the strictest sense. (More on this in a moment.)

The long pole in the tent is that it’s not anything personal towards you.

It’s not any kind of slight toward your character; it’s more their way of coping with grief and loss.

* Now, the one caveat I want to say here is that sometimes them moving on and seemingly falling in love with someone else can be healthy, especially if you’re dealing with a relationship where you and your ex were together and it was a rather toxic environment. Either they were too codependent with you. You were codependent with them. They were narcissistic. You get the idea.

But situations where maybe that wasn’t the case, maybe your relationship was rather good and then seemingly out of nowhere, out of the blue, they break up with you and move on to this new person and are doing all of these things with this new person that they didn’t do with you.

Well, it can be hurtful.

It can be painful.

But I believe it’s important to recognize that a lot of individuals who are in these type of relationships are kind of caught in an endless monkey branch loop.

So essentially what they are is the perpetual honeymoon chaser.

Understanding The Honeymoon Chaser Concept

We deal with a lot of breakups obviously here on Ex-Boyfriend Recovery, and most of our clients, when we have polled them, believe that their exes are avoidant.

Now, if you know anything about attachment styles, you would know that avoidants tend to be pretty dismissive.

They also tend to be very, very independent. In fact, anything in a relationship that threatens their independence will cause them to end up leaving the relationship.

I talk about this a lot on my YouTube channel:

And it’s this core wound they have that really informs a lot of their actions in the post-breakup period.

So, what I have found to be particularly interesting about individuals who have an avoidant attachment style is that an ideal relationship for them is one where they don’t have to lose their independence.

And really, when you enter into a new relationship with someone else, you go through this period of euphoria, this period that is also referred to as the honeymoon period.

Now, if you actually think back on your own relationship experiences, you’ll probably realize that usually during the honeymoon period you’re just basking in its warmth.

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You’re not usually making any very big commitments.

And usually, if you are talking about big commitments that would potentially threaten an avoidant’s independence, they’re kind of done in the far-off future.

You know, like, ‘Oh, maybe one day we can do this later.’

Most of the time though, you’re just basking in its brilliance.

And for an avoidant, this is arguably the best thing possible.

They are experiencing a relationship where they are getting all of the benefits of the relationship, but they’re not having to make deeper commitments. Yet the thing about the honeymoon period is it inevitably will wear off.

You can actually see that play out in my avoidant death wheel graphic right around stages three and four.

• Now, sometimes it wears off in a couple of weeks.
• Sometimes it wears off in a year.
• Sometimes it could be six months.

It’s variable based on the relationship you are in with the person you are in the relationship with.

So, when this honeymoon period starts to wear off, the avoidant’s attention span for being in a relationship with you kind of ends. They start to notice any kind of anxious tendencies or they start looking for any kind of excuse to end the relationship.

(Once again look at stage three in the graphic above)

And ultimately, they do end the relationship.

(Look at stage five)

And what do they do next?

They start looking for a way to cope or ignore their grief by entering into another relationship where they can bask in the honeymoon period again.

And so, what you tend to see happen is they are jumping from relationship to relationship.

And like I said, it can be a little hard to sometimes pinpoint how long this lasts because the honeymoon period can last sometimes for years for an avoidant.

Usually, we find that around six months is a nice sweet spot.

But really, what they are doing is they are jumping from relationship to relationship, chasing these honeymoon period experiences because it does not require a deeper commitment from them.

And I actually was looking in our private community for a real example of this playing out.

And I actually found a better example on Reddit, of all places.

A Real Life Example Of This Playing Out

So, there is this really great post on Reddit called, ‘Hey, if your ex moved on fast, it isn’t personal. Take it from me.‘

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And it basically is the entire story of this woman who went through this really awful breakup.

But what she learned at the end of this experience is basically what I just said, her ex is a perpetual honeymoon chaser.

So, let’s give a quick synopsis of this situation:

Her ex breaks up with her and she’s devastated because very, very quickly after her ex breaks up with her, this ex moves on to someone else.

And she felt, when she saw this new person that her ex had moved on to,

‘Well, no wonder he had moved on to this new person. This person has a better body. They have cooler habits. They have a better career. They’re just simply better than me.’

This causes her to spiral down to a really dark place

She kept coming back and obsessing over the fact that the ex had moved on so quickly from her. And this is such a stark contrast to what it was like for her in the relationship because he would say things like,

• You’re the only one for me.
• There’s no way I would ever look for anyone else.
• You are the one and only.

You know, the typical things they say that make you believe that you are special.

Oftentimes, these things are being said during that honeymoon period.

But over time, naturally what happens is, while time doesn’t heal all wounds, it certainly helps a lot of them. So she starts to move on from her ex.

Maybe a year goes by.

And after this year, she realized she finally over him, but she still wasn’t over the fact that he had moved on so quickly until pretty recently.

And I’m going to actually quote from her here because I don’t want to mess up any of the details:

I mentioned in my last post that I found out, on our breakup-versary, that my ex and his not-so-new girlfriend had broken up. I don’t know the details, I just know that they broke up sometime during the first week of March. Recently, I re-joined my college friend group’s Facebook groupchat. My ex is also in the groupchat, but I felt that I was ready, and I missed interacting with my friends. We broke up on decent terms and acknowledged that one day, we would likely be in a situation where we had to interact for the sake of our mutual friends, and that we would be mature about it.

Not long after I joined, he sent some screenshots to our groupchat of his conversation with some random girl he had DM’ed on social media that he was trying to pursue; she rejected him. Our friends offered some support, but he said he was fine, and was “shooting his shot” and DM’ing other girls, too. It surprisingly didn’t bother me too much, and I felt strangely better than I had in a long time. Then, the reason why hit me. I checked my calendar and realized that it had only been two or three weeks since he and his (new) ex-girlfriend had broken up! He was already trying to get a new girlfriend— and he might have started even sooner, since he had apparently been doing the DM’ing thing for a while.

What strikes me as really interesting about this situation is the prevalence of negative self-talk the original poster engaged in, especially when comparing herself to the other woman.

One of my primary goals when working with clients is to help them avoid doing this.

But what I like about the fact that she did compare herself to this new woman was the realization that despite how the original poster placed the “OW” on a pedestal her ex did the same thing to someone that was seemingly ‘better’ than her, and I’m using air quotes to kind of really describe that because I don’t think that’s the case at all

It just proves this honeymoon chasing, monkey branching approach that some people tend to have exists.

And I think there’s a lot of different reasons for why exes will move from person to person.

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The Role “Self Confidence” Has

I think a lot of it has to do with it gives them a lot of self-confidence.

Claudia Brumbaugh, who’s a PhD, a social personality psychologist, basically was arguing in an article on Hello Relish that individuals who are in rebound relationship experience increased well-being and self-esteem.

And I feel like this is right on the mark with what I think happens when exes move on very, very quickly to other people.

And it’s not that they can’t absolutely fall in love with other people.

I just think that usually when they move on very quickly to someone else and are very quick to say that they love them, it’s not necessarily about you, it’s about them.

They need confidence.

They don’t want to deal with the grief of a breakup.

They don’t want to deal with the depression revolving around a breakup, so they are actually going to use the honeymoon period they’ll experience with someone else to help them distract that and also gain self-confidence.

But there’s also an ingrained habit at play here.

They’ve done this so many times throughout their relationship career that this is the new norm for them.

This is how they’ve learned to cope with the breakup.

They don’t handle the grief head-on.

They may say they do, but their actions almost always tell a different story.

Instead, they’re more confident or happy moving from honeymoon period relationship to honeymoon period relationship to honeymoon period relationship, all as a means to gain self-confidence, because of how bad the breakups make them feel.