You’re in a relationship, but you don’t really want to be in a relationship, so you’re constantly going out with friends (or telling your significant other that you’re going out with friends). But what you’re really doing is secretly making yourself available so you can look for something better, look for a replacement for the man or woman that you’re with.

Have you ever been on a date that’s not going really well, but you see someone else you’re attracted to sitting by the bar? So you sneak away—just for a second—to go flirt with the person at the bar so maybe that can be your next date…

We’ve all done this from time to time. We’ve all performed the “sneak around.” Whether we cheated on our significant other, we were out on a date and secretly talked to someone else we were attracted to, or just plain and simple we did not want to be in the relationship and avoided our partner instead of confronting the issue.

The Cheatanator

Isn’t it amazing how many things we do instead of just being honest? You realize what a waste of time the “sneak around” is. You’re in a bad relationship, yet you’re sneaking around hoping any issues will miraculously be solved. You don’t have the balls to get out of the relationship, so you spend all this time and effort lying, sneaking around, daydreaming about living a different lifestyle and not living your own life freely and openly, and not living your life so you are truly enjoying yourself.

Think about all those things that you do in life in order to avoid hurting your partner, even if you don’t want to be with them anymore. But in reality, you’re going to end up hurting them in the long run by sneaking around and prolonging the inevitable, and not being open and honest with them. And in the end, you’re not facing your own issues head-on, and you’re actually really hurting yourself.

After my divorce, I remember my buddy Rich and I went out to a bar. I was standing in that bar drinking a Margarita, and all of a sudden I realized I was “him.” I was that older guy in a bar full of 20-somethings, nursing a drink and looking at women. At that moment I realized that those days were over for me.

Do you want to be ‘that guy?’ I never wanted to be that guy standing in a bar. There wasn’t any joy anymore being in a bar. I wanted to meet real women.

I didn’t want to get involved in idle chit-chat about nothing, meet somebody when they were drunk, call them the next day and have to remind them of the conversation we had. I was past that point in my life. I wanted to meet someone real.

So let’s talk about what to do after you get divorced. The first thing you need to do is make sure you clear your mind. Don’t go out and start trying to meet women just because your wife has left you (or because you left your wife).

Spend some time with yourself. Get to know yourself again.

Start to think about what YOU really want. What are you looking for in life? With what type of woman do you want to spend your time? What did you learn from your last relationship?

Think about how you feel right now. Are you happy? Are you sad?

Spend time by yourself. Take some time to hang out with friends and get to know them again. Spend some time doing “guy things.” Enjoy yourself and don’t even think about women.

Once you’ve done this, then the next step is to actually go out there and start meeting women doing things that you enjoy. You don’t want to be that guy standing in the corner of a bar or nightclub wondering if you’re going to meet women.

Instead, think about what you like to do. Make a list of five things that you really enjoy doing — five things that are really important to you and five places you’d like to really be seen.

I remember doing this exact exercise when I was 35 years old. I found that I really enjoyed meeting women when I was “out and about.”

I enjoyed meeting women in supermarkets because I always had something to talk about with them (since food is a passion of mine). I enjoyed meeting women at coffee shops because I enjoy drinking a cup of tea. I really enjoyed meeting women when I was working out. I enjoyed meeting women when I was at the movies if I was able to talk to them before the movie or after the movie.

I wanted to meet women who shared the same interests as me. I wanted to meet a woman who was really like me — someone who likes to travel, eat great food and stay healthy.

That’s important. You want to really start figuring out who you are and what you’re all about. That way, when you are out meeting people you won’t make the same mistakes.

In all my years of coaching men in dating and relationships, I’ve found that men who jump back into the dating world too soon after a breakup or a divorce tend to find the same woman over and over again (and tend to marry the same woman again). They do it because that same woman is what they are used to.

So learn from your experience and from your last relationship. Embrace all the lessons from that relationship so that you can go out and find what you really want. You deserve it. Whether your last relationship ended because she left you or you left her, you deserve to be able to get back out there and find what you want.

The first story I saw was about a catfight between Kate Hudson and Cameron Diaz. Cameron Diaz is apparently now dating Alex Rodriguez (aka A-Rod). I think that Cameron Diaz and Kate Hudson used to be friends, but according to this article they now hate each other because A-Rod is Kate Hudson’s ex-boyfriend and she is angry that Cameron Diaz is now dating him.

This story got me thinking. Why do we feel the need to be possessive about our exes?

This isn’t just a celebrity thing either. In my business, I get tons of emails from people saying things like, “Boy, I really like a friend of mine’s ex. They broke up a year ago and I’d really like to start dating her, but I don’t want to ruin the friendship with my friend.”

I don’t know about you, but if any of my friends want to date one of my exes then my feeling about is “Go for it!” I love my exes. I love my friends. They are all great people. So it would be wonderful if they got together.

I’m friends with both of them. Even if I wasn’t friends with both of them, my exes aren’t my possession anymore.

So many people, though, act like their exes are their possessions. Their feeling about anyone going out with one of their exes is, “How dare you date my ex! I won’t be friends with you anymore if you date my ex.”

I grew up in a divorced home, and I remember how my parents’ friends took sides after my parents got divorced. They became either “Mom’s friends” or “Dad’s friends.” My Mom and Dad could not both be friends with any of them. Don’t forget that we’re talking about a bunch of adults here.

One of my best friends lost a friend he’d had for thirty years after his divorce. That friend decided he could only be friends with one of them after the divorce, and decided to be friends with my friend’s ex-wife.

Your exes are not your possession. You have no right to them, and no say about whom they date or what they do. They can date whomever they want.

Granted, it would not be great if your friend started dated your ex the day you broke up. If they run into each other three or four months later and felt an attraction to each other, though, then they may be a match and should be able to date each other.

Why are you going to ruin it for them? You don’t own your ex (or your friend), and you have no right to tell either of them that they can’t date each other.

As we all know, chemistry is hard to find. Great love is hard to find.

So if your ex falls in love with your best friend, can you be mature enough to still be friends with your best friend or would you tell your friend to choose sides like a five year old? You’ve heard my thoughts on this, and now I’d like to hear from all of your thoughts on this.

Think about your past relationships at the point they were ending, or at the point when you and your partner were “on the outs.” All of a sudden you get to a point in the relationship where you’re having sex, you’re fighting, and you’re not really connecting.

Then one day you’re angry because you haven’t had enough sex, so you beat off. You think to yourself, “This isn’t bad. I can do this again.” The next time you fight with your partner and have sex, you realize it’s not really working at all. You jerk off again.

Pretty soon you are jerking off a couple of times a week. You start to not care anymore about having sex with your partner. You are able to fight with your partner without any emotion.

You become a lot more mellow because you’re not dying for them. You’re not relying on them sexually. You’re not needing them sexually anymore. You’re just basically alright with wherever you are.

It’s the weirdest thing, but if you think about it there is almost a cycle to masturbation.

When you first meet a woman (or a man), you’re really hot for them — and even have sexual fantasies when you think about them — so you masturbate.

Then you start having sex with that person all the time, and you don’t need to masturbate anymore.

You will masturbate for fun, like if you masturbate together. You show each other how you touch yourself. You turn each other on that way.

Maybe you will masturbate alone if you’re not with your partner for a week. You’ll always tell your partner about it, though, and turn each other on by doing that.

At some point in the relationship, you start masturbating two or three times a week, and are hardly having sex anymore with your partner. You start to think, “What went wrong here?”

What went wrong is that you’re not connecting anymore. What went wrong is that you’re not sexually turned on by that person anymore.

At that point, you realize that it’s not worth it – what you’re going through in that relationship — because you’re not connecting and you’re fighting all the time. Looking at when, how and why you’re masturbating in a relationship is usually an indication of what’s going on in that relationship.

You have already made a determination that they don’t understand you, that they will never understand you and that the relationship just won’t work out with them. So, all of a sudden, the incredible anger that were starting fights decrease.

You start walking away from them. You used to feel like she was busting your balls or like he was riding you and not understanding you. Now the minute you get into a fight, you just walk away from it.

The fact that you are on opposite sides of the bed, which used to bother you and keep you up at night, turns into the natural way things are and you are able to sleep with no problem. You go to your side of the bed, they go to theirs, and you both just go to sleep.

You are not up for four hours every night thinking, wondering, feeling and missing them. You just want to go to sleep.

When it hits this point, i.e., when it hits the breakup point, then you need to face the business of breaking up. You know breaking up sucks, but there is only one good way to do it.

When you think you might have hit that breakup point, you must tell the person that you’re disconnecting from them. You need to be honest and raw.

If you don’t think the relationship is going to work or you know you’ve already disconnected based on how things have been going, then you might want to consider walking away for a week. Spend a week without that person.

Go visit some friends or family. Really think about what life would be like without that person. How would you feel without them being there?

When you’re in the thick of things, they never seem to be able to work out. So take a break. Take a walk. Take a week long walk.

Take that week to ask yourself some questions. What does your life look like without them? Do you like and enjoy the way it feels?

Then, after you’ve taken this time, go back and either take a stand for the relationship or break up. Whichever decision you make, you need to be honest with yourself.

Life is too short! There are a lot of wonderful, amazing people out there whom you can meet.

When you take this time to think, be sure to think about what it was like when you first met this person. How did you feel about them before things got so frustrating? Did you feel like they were your soulmate and the two of you were meant to be? You’ve got to dial back into that.

A friend of mine said to me one time, “Pretend you just got amnesia and all of a sudden someone told you the person with whom you are living (or in a relationship) is the person you are going to marry. You would have none of the bad feelings and none of the fights. What would you do in that situation?” What you would do in that situation is try to get to know that person again without all the anger, fights, frustration and history getting in the way.

So maybe take a week to yourself and then a week with that person. Get to know them again and remember the reasons why you fell in love. If you guys can do that, then you might be able to save your relationship.

The crazy ones I let go into the Universe. I said goodbye.

The ones with whom I had a bond, I absolutely kept the friendship going. I love the friendship I have with some of my ex’s. They were great friends to begin with, and I see no reason to throw a five year friendship out the window just because I am no longer romantically involved with them.

We have talked about this subject before, but I really and truly believe that if you are on good terms when you breakup that you can stay on good terms with them for the long term.

It’s important to stay on good terms with people, because you never know where you’re going to be, to whom you are going to need to reach out, and what you’re going to need. Ex’s are good people, so don’t throw them all out.

A lot of you have been in multiple relationships. I would say all of you have probably been in at least one relationship. No matter in how many relationships you’ve been, however, all relationships have what I call a breaking point.

You may have been in a four year relationship, but you might have hit that breakup point at year two. It’s like the television shows that “jump the shark” according to that website, meaning a good show stops being good but remains on the air for one or more seasons after that.

Every relationship has a breakup point. The breakup point is the point in the relationship where the fighting escalates to a place where you no longer feel like you’re understood by your partner. All of a sudden the sex stops, the communication stops, and you are living like roommates.

You get into that dynamic when you’re at the point in a relationship where you are trying to understand each other, but then you get so frustrated because you feel like you just don’t understand each other anymore. When that happens, you end up just kind of coexisting in that new dynamic.

It is this dynamic which leads to a lot of the parts of your relationship deteriorating. The sex decreases. The communication decreases. Maybe you stop kissing each other goodbye or stop texting each other during the day.

However it manifests itself, when you get to this place you are at the breakup point. It is the breakup point because the longer you stay in that dynamic after the sex, communication and tender moments stop, the harder it is to regain the original dynamic in that relationship and, eventually, it can’t be regained. That’s why I call this the breakup point.

I know I’ve been there in relationships. I know couples who haven’t had sex in years, and they can’t even imagine getting back to having sex with each other because they’ve hit the breakup point.

In the beginning of a relationship (which I call “the honeymoon stage”), you are learning about each other and making efforts to create romantic moods and nice evenings. When you’re in that stage, you are really working at building your relationship.

Then, at some point, you start to bump heads with each other and the dynamics change. You take away all of the nice things that you were doing the first year and a half or two years (or for however long it was), and then you move into a new dynamic moving forward. That is the breakup point.

The longer you stay in that dynamic and the further away you get from the dynamic you had during the honeymoon stage, the more likely it is that you’ll ever get it back (and, after a point, you won’t). You’ll never go back to the original dynamic, resentment builds and you get in your head too much.

You are no longer about feelings, and you start really punishing each other. “Well he hasn’t done this for me, so I’m not going to do this for him” are the kind of thoughts that take root.

When your relationship gets that way, you hit the critical point or you hit the breakup point. The critical is point is where one of two things will happen.

You are going to get back to the way things were by immediately forgiving, forgetting, loving and becoming aware of it, or you are going to continue the relationship with the bad dynamic in place and wait for the time years down the road when you realize you were at the breakup point years before that.

So if you are going through this right now, you need to look at your partner and think to yourself “Do I want to get back to the way we were, or do I want to realize two years down the road that we were at the breakup point now and did nothing about it?”

When you are in this place do you stay in ego, finger-point and defense mode? Look back at your last two relationships, and think about how they ended. What all of you are going to discover when you do that, is that you hit the breakup point in each of those relationships long before they actually ended.

Now, let me be clear about one thing. I am not telling you to quit a relationship simply because things get frustrating.

There comes a point, however, where the endless battle can’t be won. That is the point where neither one of you are willing to understand, fully compromise and do the things necessary to move forward.

That is when you stop caring. That is when you sleep on separate sides of the bed. That is when you reach the breakup point.

We don’t cover breakups enough here in the blog. In another blog, I am going to talk about the art of breaking up with someone.

For those of you who seem to have trouble with relationships from start to finish, check out my Dating Principles For Great Relationships product.

Anyway, do you want to know how I feel about being friends with an ex? Then you need to listen to today’s podcast.

I’m going to share something with you that’s so different from anything you’ve heard on this topic. I’m also going to tell you something about how I feel about ex’s that will lead to you (and any person you’re dating) to never again dread breaking up.

They say that ‘breaking up is hard to do,’ but I say that breaking up is amazing. Listen to the podcast now to see what I mean by that . . .

Click Here to listen now:

Click Here To Download It Now!

I am not talking about a case of the swine flu. I am talking about heartache. We don’t ever really talk about heartache.

Do you ever get into a huge fight with your significant other, and you just feel like it’s the end of the world? How about if your significant other breaks up with you, or you break up with them?

You get that deep, heavy heartache feeling. You experience that wave of emotion where you feel like nothing in the world is going to snap you out of it.

That is really hard. Heartache is tough.

Heartache, however, also makes you grow. It makes you stronger as a person. Let me explain why.

You went through a tough time with a relationship. Your heart aches and your heart hurts.

That means that you are actually fighting for something you believe in. It means that you are fighting for the sake of the relationship, because love takes time and it hurts at times.

Heartache is tough. Nobody wants to feel it.

I remember when I was 17 years old and my high school girlfriend broke up with me. It felt like the end of the world. I felt like I was going to just keel over and die. I couldn’t eat or sleep for days, and every breath I took hurt.

So here is a word of advice I want to give everyone who has ever suffered from this type of heartache or who is suffering from it right now. It is actually some of the best advice (and maybe the only good advice) my Mom ever gave me.

She looked at me when I was 17 years old and my girlfriend had just broken up with me and said, “Remember how much you loved this person today. She is not the person for you. All the pain and suffering you are feeling right now is just temporary. It is growth. It is you learning and processing the relationship. It is okay to grieve a relationship. When you are finished grieving it, make sure you learn each lesson from that relationship so you learn more about yourself and don’t repeat things.”

We never talk about heartache here in the blog, but I know a lot of you have emailed me over and over again about relationships ending and about the pain that you feel associated with that. So to all of you, you need to know that the heartache you are feeling is just growth.

Keep you heart open. The longer you keep your heart open in life, the less your heart is going to ache.

You are going to grow, so push yourself through that heartache when you feel it. Realize that amazing thing will come through you if you remain strong.

One of the best ways to get through the pain of heartache is to take time to really reconnect with yourself and who you are as a person. I recorded my own personal journey through this process. CLICK HERE if you’re a man and CLICK HERE if you’re a woman to listen to this.

Whatever it was that they did, has that ever caused you to basically mirror that behavior back to them? Then you start blaming them for being the way that you are at that moment. You start getting angry at them for making you this way.

Sometimes you just can’t handle the way someone is processing something because it is not the way you would process it. They might process things negatively. They might process things positively.

There are so many different ways that people process things. If your partner processes things differently than you do, however, it might freak you out because it will feel like the person you’re with is disconnected from you.

It doesn’t mean that they stopped loving you. They might be unable to show you love at that moment or give you the love you need at that moment, but that doesn’t mean that they ever stopped loving you.

It’s just that right at that moment they need to process something in an entirely different way than you do. They are not getting space, but they really need space.

It is so important to give someone space in this situation. I know it’s hard because they might act mean or might be irritable. You’ve got to realize, though, that if they are taking the time (and the space) they need to process something, it is because they love you and want things to work out with you.

Now, there is a distinction between needing space to process and pulling back. If someone acts like this — mean and irritable — for weeks and weeks, then it’s not processing. It’s pulling back.

When someone’s actions cause you to feel stress, pain and anguish, what do you do? Most of us tend to mirror that person’s behaviors. You give them a taste of their own medicine and you act the way they’ve been acting.

You basically give them back what they’ve been giving you, and you rehash everything. The problem is that rehashing is poison. It is not healthy at all.

It is not healthy to rehash with all the “You-did-this-No-you-did-that” kind of talk. All you’re doing is rehashing the poison.

Maybe they didn’t do things the way you wanted to do it. Maybe they didn’t process things the way you wanted.

They may not come around until a day or two later, but isn’t love about forgiving? Isn’t love about understanding each other and being able to handle each other in ways that get us outside our comfort zone?

Love is about being able to say in that moment, “That’s just Bob (or Mary), and I can see by their behavior that that this is how they handle things. They’re trying to work on it but, in the meantime, it might still happen again. Nobody’s perfect.” Think about all of this for a minute.