Now there's a question many people ask after a relationship break-down - "Should I get back together with my ex?"

The thing is, not all couples are necessarily suited to each other. I know it's difficult to hear that when your emotions are running wild and you are feeling that deep ache in your heart. You feel that your world has fallen apart and sometimes the future can look truly bleak when you imagine it without that person that you loved. However, now really is the time to try to hold fire on those emotions and really try to establish, logically and reasonably, just why the relationship fell apart and whether, perhaps, it was always destined to do so.

Let's face it, you're not going to see things in the cold light of day while you are feeling like this and this could lead you down a path that you later regret. Of course, if you can manage to look at the relationship more objectively you might also find a way forward that will be viable for the both of you. Either way, as difficult as it may seem, you may want to embark on a cold, hard logical mission to see where things went wrong. How about sitting down with a notepad and writing out the things that were causing problems. Try to also look at the other side of the fence and be honest about what you might have done yourself to help the demise of the relationship.

Even if, after all the soul-searching and objective views of the break-down you're still wondering "should I get back together with my ex", then presumably you have seen a few positives that are shining through over the negatives. These are what you will need to concentrate on promoting between yourselves during any reconciliation meetings or conversations. Honestly, it will serve no purpose whatsoever to bring up any of the negatives except to perhaps air them once, admit your own faults and decide to move on. If you're hoping to get back together with an ex then you need a fresh start and all of that negative baggage needs to be acknowledged but then ditched. Otherwise you are going to go round and around in circles over the same old ground in the same kind of blaming game that got you to where you are today.

Sometimes breaking up can actually be a milestone in what turns out to be a longer life-term partnership. Again, this seems counter-intuitive, but the intensity of the relationship that you've been living through - and that seemed so passionate at the start, often reaches a natural crescendo before tailing off. It's precisely because the relationship was so exciting and wonderful in the beginning that the inevitable is going to happen - it's like things can only go downhill after a certain peak has been reached. This is part of the natural cycle of a relationship but the troughs, or flattening off periods, can often be mistaken by one or other of the partners as a sign that the relationship is failing, when, in reality, it is merely maturing into the next stage. When two people experience slightly offset periods of this natural cycle they can interpret the effects on the relationship in different ways. This is the time to explore the differences between your personalities. You are no longer joined at the hip

as it were - you're each starting to realize that you are, in fact, two separate people and you have different wants and needs. Again, this is perfectly natural but often coincides with a period of the relationship where there can be an appearance that it is failing. Of course, sometimes the relationship can fail and people move on.

Overcoming the natural trough, or dipping point in a relationship can be difficult but all successful longer term relationships will likely go through something similar. If you're still wondering in your mind "should I get Back together with my ex" you need to think about whether you are in such a trough and whether there is enough there to see the relationship through it. Of immediate concern might be that the partner ends up seeing somebody else quickly, so although you have time to collect yourself and decide on a rational plan of action to get back together with them (if that is your decision) you don't have forever!

You might want to think about something new that you might have to offer the partner. It's as true as ever that variety is the spice of life, and if you can attract them and get them interested in you again then you're much more likely to get them back. Just don't appear to be begging them or trying obvious cheap tricks to catch their attention and win them back. You're more likely to look desperate and this could just as well put them off. There are some psychological tricks that you can use - but you need to be more clever than the obvious ones. These are not so much 'tricks' as simply an understanding of what makes all of us tick. And hitting the right buttons at the right time. Sometimes the partner will simply want to move on, and that can be hard, but you'll learn to live with it eventually. However, there are definitely things that are tried, tested and trusted that you can do to help get your former lover back - but to get them wrong or to mis-judge the correct scenarios, times and places in which to use them could render all of your efforts in vain.