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She Broke Up with Her Boyfriend & Told Me (Does She Like me?)

By: Author Jeff Campbell

Posted on Last updated:

Categories Relationships

It’s a common scenario. Boy likes girl, but girl has a boyfriend. Or maybe she’s currently your platonic best friend. But if they break up, why would a girl tell you she broke up with her boyfriend?

A girl may tell a boy she broke up with her boyfriend because she is interested in him romantically and is hoping he will ask her out. But it could also be she wants attention and validation as a distraction from her broken heart.

So, it’s best to take things slowly and recognize that even if she was the one who did the breaking in her past relationship, her emotions could still be raw and all over the place.

But also remember that her ex is out there, probably trying to get her back.

And she may have lots of guy friends all hovering around her hoping for their shot. So if you like her and don’t want to just be her backup plan, it’s crucial that you do the right thing and avoid making the mistakes many guys make in this situation.

So in this article, I’ll look at all the possibilities for why a woman would tell a guy that, why women don’t usually just communicate directly, and how you can best forge a healthy relationship with her if that’s what you want.

Let’s dive in!

If a Girl Tells You She Broke up With Her Boyfriend, Does That Mean She Likes You?

Rarely are we able to comprehend the psychology of women.

That’s because a woman always responds to how she’s feeling at that exact moment. You may have been together for a decade and been the best partner ever. But screw up today, and that mistake is all she will focus on, not the 10 years of greatness.

So always look at a woman’s actions and not her words. And don’t take things personally when at all possible.

However, the truth is that she might not be urging you to step up and fill the void as a sort of rebound or saying that she likes you.

She might have been inspired by a variety of things that were only known to her, including:

  1. She needs someone to confide in or talk to. You are the ideal person at the ideal time to hear her thoughts and feelings or to hear a portion of her troubled mind if she has been holding in her emotions.
  2. She needs someone to advise her.
  3. She needs comfort and consolation during her trying and hard times.
  4. She tells almost everyone who will listen about her secret.
  5. It might have merely been an emotional outburst. She simply blurted it out in that situation, perhaps accidentally or without thinking it through.
  6. She might consider you a friend. 
  7. She might be giving you a cue and expecting you to respond. She may not have ever been in a relationship in the first place, but all she wanted was for you to take a risk that you had been avoiding for a while.
  8. She wants you, likes you, and wants you to know she’s open to dating.
  9. She is doing it for thousands of other reasons.

Whatever the cause or driving force, the crucial question of “why me?” still stands.

Why not another person? Here’s where the topic of the dialogue is raised. Sometimes the reason why we find something about women puzzling is that we don’t talk about it, which causes problems when there aren’t any.

Send her a text message, give her a phone call, or schedule a date. Just engage her in conversation and try to understand her perspective.

And if you’re interested in her, distract her from her ex-boyfriend and previous relationships. You can accomplish this by focusing your conversations with her on subjects that interest you both.

Politics, adventure, business—anything but the discourse about romantic relationships, shall we say.

How Does Her Attachment Style Affect What She Wants After a Breakup?

There are 3 main attachment styles:

  • Secure – Where you feel whole and complete by yourself and don’t need anyone’s approval to validate your self-esteem
  • Avoidant – When you keep everyone at arm’s length and avoid being emotionally vulnerable in order to feel safe
  • Anxious – When you cling too tightly due to a fear of abandonment

Ideally, we all want to be in the secure phase. But the reality is that’s often not the case, both for her and for us.

And even more, ironically, anxious attachment guys and avoidant attachment women are often drawn to each other. This is despite the fact that an avoidant woman will likely feel smothered and controlled by the anxious guy.

All that aside, an anxious attachment woman and an avoidant attachment woman will often fear being alone and want to jump into new long-term relationships quickly after a breakup.

Whereas a secure attachment woman will be more likely to wait and heal before jumping in again.

How Long After a Girl Breaks up With Her Boyfriend Should I Wait to Ask Her Out?

Assuming you figured out the earlier puzzle to mean that she likes you or that you simply have an interest in her, the next puzzle or question is: how much time do you need to give her after her break with her boyfriend before asking her out? Short time? Long time? Or even a lot of time?

Well, to begin with, breakups signify the end of an era, which may or may not be for the best. It marks the end of good or perhaps hard times.

The end of a short- or long-term relationship.

The end of a good relationship or bad relationship. An end to the best thing. An end to love—whether true love or artificial. Breakups, regardless of the era they close the chapter on, are undoubtedly heartbreaking and difficult.

A rebound relationship is one in which you ask her out or start dating her soon after they break up, and these relationships are infamous for being unhealthy.

Although the other post-breakup tenet holds that the greatest way to get over someone is to go under somebody else, the reality is that, for your best interest and hers, you might want to give the girl some space to recover.

Processing the breakup, mourning her loss, and choosing lessons or evaluations that are essential for a successful relationship in the future are just a few of the many activities that make up the healing process.

Sometimes she might have to wait till she is in the correct state of mind to start another date.

However, the definition of “sometimes” in this case depends on the facts of each case or degree. It relies on a variety of variables, like the length of the previous relationship (the longer it lasted, the longer she would need to heal), her recovery or rebound rates, etc.

But how long is the right amount of time to wait before dating after a breakup?

You might want to check out one of my recent articles, where I covered this subject in great detail as a whole, to learn more about this. Additionally, you will learn the inescapable reasons why one must wait a while before entering another relationship following a breakup.

Just click that link to read it on my site.

What Are the Cons of Dating a Girl Who Recently Broke up?

Sometimes a relationship after a breakup could be better for us.

People differ, and so do the coping mechanisms they use. Breakups are painful and stressful in and of themselves. Thus she can occasionally require someone to take away her pain and tension.

To help her through the healing process, you enter the picture as her Messiah. As was already mentioned, the other post-break dating tenet is that you need someone else to make you forget about the previous person.

To put it another way, she needs to trade one thing for another to heal quickly.

It’s usual for our friends, especially our best friends, to try to talk us out of things or to protect us from slipping quickly into another relationship after a breakup because of the effects it has on someone’s psychological health.

They worry that a rebound relationship might not last long and might end up hurting us more than helping.

But in an interview with the BBC, Claudia Brumbaugh, a psychologist at the City University of New York who studies adult attachment, criticized this stereotype for lacking empirical support, saying:

“People who start new relationships quickly have better romantic life feelings… They felt more confident, desirable, and loveable. Possibly because they had proven it to themselves. They had more feelings of personal growth and independence. They were moreover their ex, they felt more secure. There were no cases where single people were better off.”

What Are the Cons of Dating a Girl Who Recently Broke up?

It might not be a good idea to date a girl who recently broke up with her boyfriend. ‘

Such a rebound relationship will undoubtedly be different from other relationships. Your romantic life will undoubtedly not resemble other love tales, at least initially. The explanation seems plausible.

Breakups are never a simple thing to deal with.

The rate of healing varies for each individual. Before moving on or fully healing from a breakup, one needs time to process the breakup, assess, analyze, and draw lessons from the experience.

A situation that is challenging and tough to handle could result from interfering with this process. You could also want to schedule a therapy session with a counselor for her so she can get well quickly. An online counselor should be sufficient in cases where physical therapy sessions are not an option.

The following are often some cons or drawbacks of dating a girl who recently broke up with her boyfriend:

Difficult Conversation

In your first few months with her, you might have to have uncomfortable conversations with her. She might not make the conversation all about you, not because you both or one of you is bad at talking, which could make it tough for you to talk to her.

She might only talk about her ex-boyfriend and previous relationships. Of course, if you’re the kind of person who is kind and encouraging, you two will get through this phase together. The issue arises, however, when you fail to recognize the stage she is in and react angrily or compulsively whenever this “ghost of the past” enters a conversation in this way.

Commitment

She could be hesitant to give the relationship her whole attention. She requires as much time and space as she can obtain to commit to the present and let go of the past. You need to be patient with her as she travels through this difficult phase.

Other cons of dating a woman who just dumped her boyfriend include the possibility that she is not truly interested in you, the possibility that her ex is still present in her life, and the possibility that it will take her a lot longer to recover from the breakup due to the interruption in her healing process.

How Often Do Girls Get Back with Their Exes?

Breakups do occur for a variety of reasons, some of which can be resolved while others cannot.

Exes have in the past reconnected after settling their differences and, for the most part, eliminating the issues that caused the breakup.

Breakups are not always the end of the road for both parties because a second chance is always possible. Although there are no reasons why most ex-partners reconcile peculiar to one gender alone, a girl may choose to reconcile with or welcome her ex back into her life for one or more of the following reasons:

She wants them both to sort things out, misses her ex-boyfriend, is still in love with him, feels lonely, or does not want to live with a guilty conscience.

While it does happen from time to time, the frequency of this occurrence cannot be easily ascertained.

According to a study, about 15% of individuals get their ex back and stay together in the long run, whereas 14% of people get back together but break up again. According to the same survey, 70% of people never get to try again with one another.

So why would people stay single after a breakup?

I went into considerable detail about this in a recent article. Nearly 80% of divorcées result in subsequent marriages.

And 6% of them remarry their ex-spouse after divorcing them. You might also want to read some of the insightful advice in that piece on how to negotiate the fears, headaches, and singleness that come with a divorce.

Just click that link to read it on my site.

How to Know if She Just Sees You as a Friend

You might want to revisit the sixth reason I listed as a potential explanation for a girl telling you she just dumped her boyfriend.

Yes, she might only view you as a friend rather than as a prospective new love interest or a new partner. 

Whether you intended to ask her out or you both saw her as just a friend will determine how much that hurt. Whatever the situation, you have a right to know whether she views you as a friend or as something more meaningful.

As was already mentioned, women constitute a crucial component.

It is challenging to understand women’s psyches or how they think at any given moment, so you might have been misreading her the entire time.

Despite the fact that she is a puzzle piece, certain behavior patterns that she has developed through time give a clear hint that she only views you as a friend when they apply to you.

Some examples include when she frequently talks about her love life with you, prefers that you hang out in a group, refers to you as bro, buddy, or friend, shows you that you are just friends through her body language, attempts to set you up with someone else, etc.

How to Get a Girl After She Breaks up With Her Boyfriend

You may have had a crush on her for a while then all of a sudden, she announces that she and her boyfriend have broken up.

Even though you might feel the temptation to go ahead and ask her out right away, you should consider the downsides of doing so.

You might appear to be:

  1. Insensitive
  2. Unsupportive when support is what she needs the most
  3. A fleeting rebound fling

She needs time to acclimatize and prepare mentally for a new relationship.

While waiting to ask her out could be risky and dicey because she might end up moving on with someone else, you can establish yourself in her life to develop the necessary bond before you do so.

Establishing yourself as the person she needs to forget about her ex-boyfriend or the person she needs to unconsciously swap her ex-boyfriend with is the first thing to do, so don’t rush to ask her out.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but the best way to begin is by showing you are there for her during her difficult times. Be encouraging. Give receptive ears. Care. Find out how she is doing. By keeping your lines of communication open and being available for conversations, you can present yourself as open and available.

Do offer support, love, caring, and a shoulder to cry on.

But you don’t want her to mistake you for just being a friend. Make it clear you have a romantic interest. But also make sure she knows you aren’t just there for a hookup.

To put it briefly, you might not pronounce the words. Simply fill the vacuum left in her heart by her ex-absence boyfriend to take the place of her partner.

Conclusion

Women are like puzzle pieces; the more you try to comprehend them, the more convoluted they become.

It’s not always a sign that a woman who told you that she recently dumped her boyfriend likes you; there could be a myriad of other factors besides liking you.

Assuming it’s an expression of love interest for you, it’s not always advisable to ask her out immediately because you need to consider the benefits and drawbacks of asking a girl who just ended a relationship. Even so, it’s crucial to know how to approach her when she’s finished recovering so you can ask her out.

But what if she merely views you as a friend and doesn’t like you or have any romantic feelings for you? Maybe you’re Mr. Nice Guy, maybe you’re not. The good news is that by keeping your distance from her, you might be able to change this narrative.

Have you considered the potential that occasionally ignoring girls can have? 

You might wish to read this recent article of mine in greater detail. No contact gets talked about a lot. But there’s a right and a wrong way to make it work to your advantage.

Just click that link to read all the details on my site!

Image by Serhii Chernetskyi from Pixabay

Jeff Campbell
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