Taking the Right Action to “Attract Back” Someone Special

Photo by Metronome0, used under a Creative Commons License.

Do you have to take action to attract someone back into your life?  The short answer is yes, but not in the way you might think.  For that, you have to read the very long answer.

 The action that brings someone back into your life is a reflection of the action that caused them to leave.  They re-enter by the same door they exited.  Confused?  Keep reading. (Shoot, you might as well grab a cup of tea for this one….)

 One of the TV shows I loved as a kid was the original “Land of the Lost,” especially episodes written by D.C. Fontana.  In one of the last shows of the original season, the family could return home if they went back through a portal and something of equal mass entered (themselves, I believe, in a time loop…but it’s been many years since I watched it).  I always thought of it as a balance of energy (or matter), which is how I see this idea of “attracting back” someone you’ve lost.

 I’ve often heard it said that people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.  Sorry, but I can’t categorize that easily.  Seasons constantly change but the impact is always for a lifetime.  People have always come into my life for a  reason, and they’ve come back for a reason, too.  But can you do something—anything—to bring them back once they’ve come into your life and left, or do you just have to categorize someone as a “season” if they don’t spend consecutive years by your side?

 It’s a heartfelt question from many of my readers, judging by the popularity of a handful of essays I’ve written here.  Literally 5% of the essays I’ve written for this site attract 95% of its traffic.  Surprised?  You shouldn’t be—the heart is involved, and we all want answers that don’t come quickly. But the first question after “is it possible to attract someone back?” is usually “what do I DO to attract someone back?”

 In other words, what action can you take beyond the visualizing and believing part of the Law of Attraction?

 As many deep-feeling women do, I have occasionally written letters, pouring out my love to someone who’s left my life…or more precisely, left my proximity. I told a counselor friend years ago that I planned to write a letter to someone I couldn’t have a personal conversation with, and he recommended against it.  He told me that if even once he’d heard that letters “work,” he would have said to give it a try.  I didn’t send that letter.  I still have it, and in reading it years later, I know now that it would have been the worst possible strategy for bringing this man back to me. Unlike with personal meetings or telephone conversations, such letters are generally blasts of emotion, sent one way without an immediate balancing of that energy.

 That’s not to say that you should never write a letter to someone who is currently remote.  In my experience, there has been little harm done in occasionally letting someone know that you’re still open to their friendship.  Even among friendly holiday letters that have gone unanswered, I’ve later learned that my letter arrived at a time when the recipient needed to hear whatever it was I had to say, and it left a marker in the path for a future re-connection.

 One reason the letters (emotion-bombs) I used to send never worked (I’ve lived long enough now to see several decades of this pattern) is that the other person wasn’t ready to respond and nothing could be done by me to force that situation.  Ultimately, it was alwaysalwaysalways better that it wasn’t forced because they needed time to grow, change, experience new things that they could bring back into the relationship. Some just needed time alone to heal. The door they’d exited through was not yet open for them to re-enter my life.

 Of friends and romantic interests who have left my life and returned, I’ve had the opportunity to ask why they didn’t respond to my letters or attempts to reach out.  In almost every case, they “thought it was for the best.”  They either felt awkward, embarrassed, or ashamed at how they’d left our friendship and didn’t know what to say or they felt that it would actually be harder and even more painful to be long-distance friends when their jobs or spouses had moved them to the other side of the country and that only nostalgic sadness linked us now. As they each reach a more serene place in their lives, they become ready to make contact again.  I’ve seen it time and again, but other than remaining open to them and loving them as they are, there’s little I can do.  The action that must be taken to attract them back really depends on the action that took them away.  Sometimes I can take action and sometimes I have to wait for the Universe to take its course.

 There have been friends, relatives, and romantic interests whom I have deliberately cut off.  No number of letters or contacts from them will cause me to reconnect until whatever reason I left has been resolved.  In some cases, that’s their extreme neediness or need to control me.  Or maybe they no longer deserve my trust.  Or maybe they did something underhanded.  Those are all doors by which I left the relationships.  To reconnect with any one of them, I have to be ready to go back through that same door, knowing that something has changed and I won’t want to flee the room again.  There is nothing they can do to drag me back through that door.  Even if they can find a way to force physical proximity, they can’t make me reconnect emotionally with them until I’m ready. 

 There have been friends, relatives, and romantic interests whom I have walked away from because of something I needed to work on in myself.  That was the door by which I left, and sometimes I re-entered it with a shinier glow and a heartfelt regret so they’d know I wanted to reconnect if they were willing to give the relationship a new try. There was nothing they could have said or done until I was at a “good place” myself.  I needed the time to grow and live without them, even if they disagreed.

 There have been friends, relatives, and romantic interests who have left my life because of personal issues that had nothing to do with me.  Those were the doors by which the left and they cannot be attracted back to me until they have found their own resolution.  These have typically been people with addictions, insecurities, issues.  When I was less secure in myself, I often mistook what caused them to leave my life abruptly for something I’d done.  That was probably a little arrogant on my part to think that I was their reason for being miserably off-kilter.  These were people who took a while to reconnect, to re-enter my life through the door they’d left, because they had a lot of loose ends, internally and emotionally, to tie up.  I kept loving them through it all, and instead of wondering when they were coming back into my life, I focused on making my own life better, to the point where it didn’t matter if they came back or not because I would be happy regardless.  I know it’s said that the best way for someone to manifest back into your life is if it doesn’t matter, and there’s truth to that, but the truth is not in the not caring if they return but in the caring more about your own self.  So while they’re off growing and changing and hopefully becoming better versions of themselves, you’re growing and changing and becoming a better version of your own self, too.  This way, when they are finally ready to reconnect and if you still are open to a reunion, there will be no emotional barriers to a new relationship, of whatever sort that may be.

 I will admit that in several cases of romantic interests, their growth process wasn’t fast enough for me, and by the time they reconnected, I was no longer the same person with the same desires and goals.  In these cases, before they reconnected, I’d already made the decision (or was close to it), that I was not interested in a reunion.  These became new relationships—either as platonic friends—or, if they weren’t happy with being rejected after coming back through the door by which they’d left, some became more enemy than friend.

 There have been friends, relatives, and romantic interests who have left my life because of external issues that had to be resolved before they could return. These are often painful and take precedence over all friendships.    These tend to be abrupt, turn-on-a-dime-never-saw-it-coming partings.  

 In my own life, these usually happen in one of two ways:  family or job.  I have had good friends who disappeared suddenly with a single phone call to let me know that a close relative was terminally ill and they had to had to go…immediately.  In those cases, I occasionally sent a card, a care package,  or cheery balloons to let them know they were still in my thoughts.  In most cases, none were answered but were very appreciated.  Later, after the death of a loved one, they returned to my life, bringing new knowledge and new experiences with them, and they returned just as abruptly as they’d left.  The other way this manifests for me is through turbulence in their careers. 

 Usually, it’s a sudden job loss or a spouse moving almost overnight to a different part of the world.  And later, just as suddenly, they come back into my life through another job fluctuation, often as painful as the one they exited through. One friend of mine left suddenly after being fired, moved to the big city, got fired when her company merged with another and she didn’t have seniority, moved to another city, got laid off within a year, and moved to a new company that was almost immediately bought out, with her division being closed down.  But the last of these catastrophes is sending her back…to my home turf…all within a few years’ time.  She has had incredible experiences and growth opportunities she would never have gotten if she’d stayed put.

 In these cases of leaving for external reasons, there is nothing I can do and usually nothing the other person can do.  The Universe seems to tear apart and put back together, but in the meanwhile, there is incredible new experience that we both bring to the new relationship. As I’ve said before, this doesn’t mean the relationship will be the same.  All relationships are changing, but when there’s a separation, the people are changing, too.  I am not the same person I was 3 years ago, and certainly not the same as 5 years ago.  It frustrates me when someone from my past reconnects and tells me how they’ve changed and still look at me as if I’ve been cryogenically frozen during their absence.  And if I’m not the same person and they’re not the same person, the relationship won’t be the same either.  That happens when couples stay together, too, but it’s more noticeable when there’s been a separation and reconnection.  It may come back together as friendship or romance or simply a business or social acquaintance.  It never returns to being like it was because we will never be what we were. 

 And regardless of how we “merry meet” and later “merry part” with someone, the only way to “merry meet again” is if they come back through the same door by which they left, a door which you cannot force someone through…but you can always leave it cracked.