Benny Lichtenwalner got married young. The father of four—who spoke to me from his Kansas City home in a salt-and-pepper beard and a pair of translucent, milky-white eyeglasses, and with the tiny outline of a heart inked at the tip of his right cheekbone—was raised in a devoutly Catholic family. His parents encouraged him to settle down with his first wife fresh out of high school, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Lichtenwalner was already divorced by his mid-30s. That was when he met the woman of his dreams. “She’s the polar opposite from my wife. She’s the fun tattoo girl, while my wife was rigid,” said Lichtenwalner. “And then she just crushes me. She breaks up with me out of nowhere. Cheats on me. The whole thing.”
The heartbreak brought Lichtenwalner to his knees, and he resolved to try anything to win the “fun tattoo girl” back. So he turned to the internet and sought the advice of so-called get-your-ex-back coaches—YouTubers, authors, and podcasters who have made their careers in the large and mostly uncertified world of breakup rehabilitation. These coaches offer their clients a proprietary set of psychological and rhetorical strategies that, they claim, will cause a former lover to return to the grasp of their dumped partner, restoring the relationship.
Lichtenwalner was particularly fond of Coach Corey Wayne, one of the original innovators in the field, whose marquee self-help video, viewed more than 1.6 million times, is titled “7 Principles to Get an Ex Back.” Lichtenwalner followed Wayne’s advice to the letter, and sure enough, “fun tattoo girl” orbited back into his life. Naturally, two months later, the pair had broken up all over again, but Lichtenwalner became obsessed with the process of romance restoration. In 2018, he decided to get into the business himself.
“I walked the path of a lot of this stuff, and I realized I could help other people,” said Lichtenwalner, who is now 43, and is remarried. “I got on TikTok, and started putting out all these videos, and I realized that the ones about getting your ex back tend to do well. So I switched up my whole brand to be focused on that.”
Today, Lichtenwalner, who goes by “Coachbennydating” on TikTok, has over 280,000 followers. He offers free advice on his page, where he distills general-use relationship axioms into bite-size, social media–friendly clips. In one recent video, Lichtenwalner—recording shirtless from a white-sand beach—outlines the “No. 1 one skill” needed to reattract an ex: The “emotional discipline” to refrain from overindulgences like double texting. But for a more curated experience, Lichtenwalner offers one-on-one coaching sessions, via a 45-minute Zoom call, at $350 a pop, where he promises to craft a more personalized recovery plan for a client’s romantic disaster. If those clients desire even more access to Coach Benny, patrons can shell out $499 for his personal phone number, allowing them to send two “500-character inquiries” about the current status of their breakup per day. This approach has been lucrative. Lichtenwalner claims to be making “multiple six figures” from his coaching.
“No more feeling lost,” reads Coach Benny’s website, outlining the texting plan. “Take control of your relationship and navigate any challenges that come your way.”
Breakups are a foundational part of life. They happen all the time. A couple might be unable to find equitable ground on a variety of existential questions—parenthood, faith, lifestyle—and call it quits. Or two people can slowly grow distant from each other, without either party being the sole author of the discontent, until they mercifully concede that the love has flickered out. Sometimes, a relationship can detonate in spectacles of pure id—ravenous infidelity, screaming arguments, sobbing in bar bathrooms, 200 texts per hour—eventually leaving both ends of the partnership feeling raw, extreme, and ideally, free. The point here is that relationships often come to an end for a good reason, but coaches like Lichtenwalner believe that with the correct approach, anyone who’s been recently dumped can devise a way to mend even the grisliest wounds.
But can anyone truly optimize their way back into the good graces of an ex? Breakups are an amalgam of soft, emotional truths. Can they really be cracked like a math problem with the help of good coaching? Lichtenwalner’s clients, who are all invariably stinging from the hallucinatory pain of a life-defining heartache, would certainly like to believe so.
“It’s at that price because that’s what people pay,” said Lichtenwalner, when asked if he possessed any hesitation about charging such a hefty cost for his services. “My schedule is packed back-to-back all week. Think of the worst breakup you’ve had. Would you try to solve it for the price of a PlayStation? I think if their ex said, ‘Hey, give me a PlayStation and we’ll be back together,’ they’d do it. I can sleep at night just fine. Because I love that I’m helping people.”
It is difficult to know how many get-your-ex-back coaches are working on the internet. There are a handful of big names in the sector, all of whom command sizable followings on social media and loom over the smaller players. Brad Browning, who advertises himself as the “Ex Back Geek,” has over 600,000 subscribers on YouTube, while Dan Bacon, with 431,000 subscribers, promotes a $297 Get Your Ex Back Super System, which includes a video detailing how to achieve “Ultimate Makeup Sex.” The majority of get-your-ex-back mentors tend to be men, though there are some women in the field, and the coaches themselves claim to work with clients of all genders. (Lichtenwalner said that his demographics skew slightly toward women. “Most women want a man’s perspective on things because they’re talking mostly to their friends about their relationship,” he said.)
In general, life coaching—in which dubiously certified experts offer for-profit consultations on the touchy-feely facets of ill-defined “self-improvement”—is in the midst of a legitimate boom period. The New York Times reported that there has been a 54 percent increase in the number of professional coaches between 2019 and 2022. It’s a fair assumption that other, more specific avenues of mentorship might have seen similar growth.
The prices for get-your-ex-back coaching are notoriously expensive across the board. Lichtenwalner’s premiums are actually a tick cheaper compared with some of the other relationship coaches on social media. Lee Wilson, a 44-year-old from Tennessee, runs MyExBackCoach.com. A session with him comes in at $579 for a 70-minute call. “Coach Lee,” as he’s better known on the internet, tells me he got his start in this field at a Christian marriage counseling nonprofit, where he was tasked with the rehabilitation of couples who were considering a divorce. Around that time he also developed, and then sold, a dating site in the early 2000s, and he figured a leap toward a more secular brand of relationship advice was within his expertise. So, Wilson made his way to YouTube. He uploaded a video called “What Your Ex Is Thinking During No Contact” in 2018, where he imagines the satisfying second guesses that might be running through the head of a former partner in the aftermath of a dumping. It racked up more than 2 million views, and shortly afterward, Wilson started offering his own courses.
“[An ex] will reach out with something casual like, ‘Just wanted to see how you were doing,’ ” he said, in that video, outlining how someone can slyly direct a separation toward reconstitution. “Tell them that you’re having a great week. … That’s how they can feel the same loss that you felt when they broke up with you.”
Wilson believes that every breakup is unique, and each is buoyed by a distinct flavor of conjugal strife. But he’s also confident that there are a few objective maxims that, when learned and deployed, can help a wide swath of people get their exes back. Chief among these is the principle of “no contact,” which is also endorsed by Lichtenwalner, and practically every other relationship coach on the internet. Essentially, in cases where an ex claims that their feelings have faded, Wilson encourages his clients to systematically shut off all streams of communication with them, while simultaneously directing their time in singlehood toward personal enrichment—trusting that a boost in their own self-esteem will eventually remind a former partner of the goodness they’ve abandoned.
“They see that you’re not going to chase them down, which prevents them from running further away,” explained Wilson. “And when they do start doubting their decision to break up with you, it’s easier for them to reach out, because they haven’t attempted to escape you.”
Versions of this basic doctrine are plastered all over Wilson’s YouTube channel, essentially repeating the same idea in slightly different ways. There are videos titled, “Stages of No Contact for Your Ex,” “Mistakes You Must Not Make During No Contact,” and “Psychology of No Contact on the Dumper.” Occasionally he delves into stranger and more conspiratorial territory, while still hitting the basic notes. Earlier this month, Lee published his take on how to win back a “brainwashed ex,” a condition he blames, in part, on peer pressure put on a former partner by their single friends who “make an effort to destroy a relationship.” Taken together, the catalog reads like an attempt to squeeze down the vast cerebral mysteries of a breakup into a parsable formula—to simplify kaleidoscopic pain with black-and-white sensibility.
The problem with this is that “no contact” is not exactly exclusive information. The method has its own Reddit community, its own Quora threads, and its own Forbes explainers, and I think I speak for pretty much everyone who’s ever been dumped when I say that a label-free variation of “go no contact” is the standard advice meted out by friends and family whenever we must recover from heartbreak. It raises the question: What exactly are people paying for, when they shell out nearly $600 to Coach Lee?
“I put so much energy into the calls. I usually go over the allotted time,” said Wilson. “I bring a lot to the table as far as helping someone to really see clearly when they’re in a situation where it’s very difficult to see anything but the pain. And that’s a vulnerable place to be. They think $570 is a cheap price to pay to alleviate the pain and win a person back. They want to win. They don’t want to lose. I’ve had people say things about the price, and my opinion is, ‘Well, I’m not making you do it.’ “
Both Wilson and Lichtenwalner are adamant that the time they spend with their clients over the phone is thoughtful, well-considered, and empathetic. They’re also steadfast that the best coaching they do is when they can speak directly to a client, one-on-one, and analyze their predicament from all angles. (“Sometimes I’ll tell them that getting their ex back isn’t worth the effort,” said Wilson. “That I think they’re better off trying to move on because of the situation.”) But Kelli Harding, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, questions whether a single-minded devotion to the rejuvenation of a lapsed relationship is the most effective way to heal from heartache. And she has concerns about the mental state a prospective client might be in when they charge their credit card a large sum for some coaching.
“A breakup can feel like your survival is at risk,” she told me. “It really is on that biological, physiological level. And if you suddenly have someone promising you a way out, it can be tempting to lay down the cash. Being in a situation where you feel under threat, there’s definitely some risk of … I’m cautious to use the word exploitation. But you’re definitely in a vulnerable period.”
Harding’s fear lines up with the experience of Jay Pimentel, a 27-year-old from Maui, who hired the services of Coach Lee last year to heal from what he describes as a torrid, three-month-long “situationship.”
“I ended up following every breakup coach imaginable on TikTok and watching every single video that could help me in my situation,” said Pimentel, recalling the fallout of his breakup. “I felt so desperate.”
Pimentel organized a free 15-minute consultation with Wilson, who recommended that he purchase his “emergency breakup kit.” It’s a service on his website that promises to contain an “ex-return formula,” brimming with videos and self-help guides, to “reignite the spark again” in their former lover. The large red button, leading to the payment portal, is marked with the words, “WIN HER BACK!” Pimentel said it cost him $60. He made the purchase, dove into the material, and pretty soon afterward, began to feel like he’d just been scammed.
“The general thrust is just, ‘Go no contact and work on yourself,’ which is already posted on all of their videos for free, and is just a mature response in general. But it’s not worth a $60 price tag,” said Pimentel.
Pimentel ended up using the no contact method to no avail. “It ended up being just an old tall tale,” he said, of its ineffectiveness. Pimentel has since moved on. He’s healed from the breakup and is enjoying a renewed sense of growth and self-knowledge—which is the silver lining of all heartache. But he continues to harbor ill will for all the dating coaches who inculcated a false sense of hope in him.
“These coaches prey on people desperately wanting to get their partner back, say that you ‘need’ to pay for their services, and that they will ‘make a plan’ for you,” said Pimentel. “But in reality we can’t control others. We can only control ourselves.”
Honestly, Pimentel was lucky to only spend $60. Another former get-your-ex-back client, who is 28 and asked to be kept anonymous, spent a total of $1,400 on a dating coach when he was 20 and languishing in the psychic destruction of his first major breakup.
“I didn’t get her back. No amount of coaching would have helped anyways, in hindsight,” he said. “I was pretty much willing to pay anything to invest in my happiness. Which, again, was pretty impulsive and felt kind of predatory, since relationship coaches know people are not thinking straight and rationally.”
For what it’s worth, Wilson reiterated to me that he never promises his clients that the advice he offers will be effective. “The other person is their own person, they have free will, and I’m not a mind reader,” he said. Lichtenwalner, meanwhile, argued that while he is confident that the coaching is sound, practical, and battle-tested, he has little faith that his clients will wield it correctly.
“The advice that I have to give is so emotionally disciplined that I do know that a lot of people aren’t going to be able to implement it,” he said. “I have to disconnect from the results in many cases.”
This all gets us back to the central question in the get-your-ex-back industry: Can a breakup be truly mended with the designs of a carefully orchestrated psyops campaign? It makes you consider how profiteers have sold the reassurance of calculable logic within the mercurial chaos of romance for ages. Lichtenwalner and Wilson both bring to mind the pickup artists of the mid-2000s, who advertised a similar set of pseudo-anthropological nightclub theories (negging, approach anxiety, and so on) that, the pickup artists said, would increase the number of women a man could seduce during a night out. Naturally, Lichtenwalner tells me he is familiar with pickup artist dictums and regards his get-your-ex-back turn to be a nicer, more wholesome interpretation of those same dating schemes.
“The pickup artists were operating from a manipulative perspective. Everyone got a bad taste in their mouth from the cheesy pickup artists. But a good pickup artist is just somebody that learned charisma,” said Lichtenwalner. “There’s a tasteful way to have a charismatic effect on people, and that’s important for the guy who’s lost his wife, and his kids, and the empire they have together.”
It is nice to believe that human behavior could be so predictable, in the same way it is nice to believe that, one day, your ex will miraculously shed all of the points of tension that tore them away from you in the first place, leaving the two of you fully renewed. Unfortunately, just like a breakup itself, sometimes you need to live through the pain in order to accept the truth.