Name: The "No Contact Rule" Explained | Matthew Hussey
Uploaded: 2026-03-31T07:42:55.000Z
Duration: 24 min 49 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The imperative

To-infinitive

In this video, I want to talk about what the No Contact Rule is, why it's important,

and what do you do if you're doing no contact but the person who broke up with you reaches out to you during the no contact period.

Of any program I have ever created, the idea of the no contact guiding principle after a breakup is probably the idea that elicits the most questions from people who have the program.

There's a particular program I created called Get Him Running Back to You, which James and I still find to be a questionable name for the program.

In fact, the program itself is one that I had to have a giant debate within my own mind and with my team about whether we were going to create in the first place, because the idea of any kind of program that helps you win someone back just seemed icky.

The problem was, of all the questions I get, a staggering number of them are to do with how to get someone back after a breakup.

What I realised was, people are going to try and get someone back anyway, so if they're going to do it, I want them to do it in the most healthy way.

I want them to do it in a way that doesn't do anything special to get someone back.

In fact, I want it to be all about their growth, so that even if that relationship doesn't rekindle—because let's face it, a lot of people break up for a reason—they can move on strong anyway.

And I wanted everything in this program to be something that helped people move on strong no matter what happened with that person.

In this program I spoke of, I talk about a 21-day no contact period, which is designed to be more of a principle in practice than a rule.

What it's really about is having 21 days of a true break from this person, which is a funny thing to say in a situation where someone has broken up with us.

We would say, "You've been given your break.

There's a breakup." But we all know that in the wake of a breakup, it's rarely clean.

We may find ourselves reaching out to them.

There are all manner of ways that we try and engage with each other.

The 21-day no contact period is about detoxing from this situation for 21 days, giving 21 days of space.

The hard thing about this idea of a no contact period after a breakup is that I'm well aware that if you're watching this from a place of crushing pain right now, it is the last thing you want to hear,

In the days and weeks after a breakup, we are a kind of—I would say we're a living zombie,

We're this zombie that's incapable of doing very much at all in our lives.

We're lucky if we can get out of bed, but it's fully capable of feeling to the extreme.

Now, why is the 21-day no contact period important?

Well, firstly, so that we can get space, so we can begin the healing process.

It's certainly not going to take 21 days.

It's likely to take significantly longer than that.

But the space at least means that we aren't consistently reactivating that wound every time we talk to someone.

The second reason is so that we don't do something impulsive that we'll regret.

In the immediate aftermath of a breakup, we are in a highly emotional, highly volatile state,

and we're liable to say and do things that we will later wish we hadn't done.

Number three, when we do things like that, we might push someone away at the very time where, deep down, we would like them to be reconsidering the relationship.

The more we lay all of our hurt, all of our panic, all of our anguish on somebody, all of our fears, the more likely we are to push them away, not bring them closer.

Number four, the no contact period leaves room for mystery.

You may be having your own painful journey,

but the space away from someone allows them to have to think about where you are, what you're doing, the manner in which you're moving on.

And when someone breaks up with you, they're not entitled to know everything about what you're feeling every day, about what your journey is.

It's a separate thing, and that mystery can actually be a good thing.

Number five, it raises the stakes for the person who broke up with you.

A lot of the time, in order to break up with a person, we—if we're the person doing the breaking up—have to psych ourselves up for that moment.

We may not be entirely sure whether it is the right decision.

So what we have to do is get to a place of real certainty where we know, "Okay, this is the right thing.

I need to do this." And then we break up with someone.

After a breakup has happened, if the person we've broken up with stays in our lives, is calling us constantly, texting us constantly, answering our messages constantly, we're not actually feeling the pain of that breakup.

but we don't feel the stakes of having made that decision because there are no consequences right now to having made that decision.

And that actually starts to warp the effect of the breakup.

Or perhaps a more important word to use would be it dilutes the effect of the breakup.

Someone, in a sense, gets to have it both ways.

but I don't even feel the consequences of that, not the true consequences.

And if I don't feel the true consequences of that, then I'm not even getting a chance to evaluate truly whether this was the right thing or not because I haven't really lost it.

What we have to do if we're on the receiving end of a breakup is go through this period of space of no contact so that the other person actually feels the magnitude of what they've done.

They actually understand viscerally that there is a person in my life I have lost.

There is a relationship that is no longer there because of my decision.

When we—because of our own fears, because of our own need to hang on, and

because thinking that hanging on is the best way to keep someone around—when we do this, we are removing the emotional fallout of the breakup from that person.

And in doing so, we're not actually giving them a clear picture of what their life is going to be like without us in it.

It doesn't hurt to send someone a message or a letter accepting their decision.

In the Get Him Running Back to You program, I call this a goodbye letter,

but the way I think about it today, it would be more apt to call it a "I'm taking your decision seriously" letter.

When you send this text, what you're really saying to someone is, "I, as you know, don't think this is the right thing.

I think that we're awesome together, and I think that we would have an awesome future together.

I'm prepared to work on the things that aren't working right now.

I'm prepared to do the things to make our relationship amazing.

and that means someone who's willing to work on them with me.

And you obviously are not because you've decided to end it.

So while I think that this is the wrong thing, I have to respect that you've made this decision,

and I wish you the best." If you think about it, in a breakup, one of the repellents is neediness.

And that's a sad truth because that's exactly what we feel in a breakup.

We feel probably the neediest we've ever felt in our lives.

We feel the most desperate we've ever felt in our lives.

We're like a junkie who just needs their fix.

I'll do anything to keep you." And it's precisely that energy that has the potential to push someone away.

I wish we lived in a world where saying to someone, "I'll do anything.

I'll do anything to keep you." I wish we lived in a world where that was an aphrodisiac,

What it does is put an immense amount of emotional weight on someone at exactly the time where they have decided, for whatever reason, that they need to break up, break off.

So putting that amount of pressure on someone may have the effect of eliciting tremendous guilt.

It may have the effect of eliciting an avalanche of sympathy,

and that may even be something that makes them buckle and take you back for a moment.

It will only be until their sympathy subsides and the original reasons they decided to do it reappear.