BEST EXES FOREVER
Do you have to be besties with your ex?
I am a 27-year-old queer woman and I know a lot of queer people are able to be friends with their exes and are neutral about them dating other people. I’m finding it extremely difficult to do this with my exes — do you think that some people just aren’t able to be friends with their exes? Even if they are queer? Or do I need to work on my attachments and self esteem?
My ex-girlfriend and I used to say If we broke up, we would still live together. We’d be tight friends and maaaaybe have sex occasionally. We were certain that we could remain in each other’s lives in the extremely unlikely event of a breakup. Staying in each other’s worlds would be easy, because, as we heard from friends and saw from media, lesbians are always good at being friends with their exes, able to rise above the pettiness of a breakup to preserve the love that remains, or if not, then to die trying.
Among lesbians, being friends with an ex is almost a cliché. Clichés exist for a reason—they’re mostly true. But if you fall outside the cliché it can leave you feeling like an outlier.
Having an ex as a friend can be invaluable. A former partner has access to your flaws, idiosyncrasies, an intimate and complicated knowledge of you that no one else has. In the best cases: they’re less like a friend and closer to a family member. This transition isn’t always complicated; some relationships naturally transition into friendship as the romantic and sexual element fades away, but in many cases, the move from partners to friends isn’t easy. For every queer woman that is officiating her ex’s wedding there are also restraining orders, torched cars, and exes trapped in lease agreements together. Because humans are human and we do crazy shit.
I assumed that being friends with my ex would be easier because as a gay person it’s supposed to be in my DNA, but there is real danger in assuming that just because you no longer want to be in the relationship that you’ll be able to be good friends without doing some work first.
I made all the classic mistakes: showing her a story that I happened to have based on her, hanging out on a fairly regular basis, talking about people that we were dating, all after a month of breaking up. These things that would have been fine with a regular friend but not a friend who I recently ended a long-term relationship with and whose entire sock collection I still have and accidentally never returned. Had we processed the end of the relationship more, had a real period of no contact, or eased more slowly into friendship, things likely would have worked out differently. Friendship might have been possible had we handled things another way. This experience is one of my only real regrets.
The short answer to your question is yes, it’s possible to be friends with an ex, but it depends both on the person and the relationship.
You need to lay a foundation for the post-breakup friendship to thrive, the same way you would lay a foundation for any relationship. If possible, communicate what you need to communicate in order to have closure. If you haven’t already, I’d suggest breaking up fully and cleanly. Have a period of no contact. People process breakups at wildly different speeds. Being friends is possible, but you both need to have sufficiently moved on from the relationship in order to re-enter into each other’s lives as friends.
It doesn’t just boil down to fixing your attachment style or having higher self-esteem: being friends with an ex, and not just friends as in friendly but friends as in close friends is difficult. The problems in the relationship don’t just go away if you address them by segueing into friendship.
Be honest about your motivations for wanting to stay friends with your ex. Do you want a friendship in order to sustain any kind of connection with this person? Are you hoping that you and/or your partner will eventually change and that will lead to being in a romantic relationship again? Do you still like and respect this person? Just because you are struggling to be friends with your ex now doesn’t mean that you always will. Not everyone is meant to be in the center of The L Word relationship web, nebulously connected to a network of friends, lovers, and those existing precariously in between. Let yourself be human, but also be open to the different kinds of relationship paths that being queer allows for.
I think this is great advice for all. Interesting that what you are suggesting as helpful and not helpful totally for with what I experienced in the heterosexual world when my marriage ended. We are able to be friends but I get it wouldn’t work for all. We have a geographical distance factor that helps frankly but I love the questions you suggest asking yourself. Why do you want to remain friends? I find that my idiosyncrasies - and his - are something we can own about ourselves and laugh about now that the pressure of getting through everyday together isn’t there. Sad perhaps, but true. I wouldn’t want to fully give up someone who I spent a significant portion of my life with unless I found I couldn’t move on successfully without doing that. So, your advice to take a total break for awhile and get your independent footing is solid in my experience. I’m not saying we did that - I’m saying I realized that would have been wise because I found the need to pull away to get a better understanding of what I wanted to maintain and why after awhile. We’ve both managed through - not everyone will want something that is agreeable to both in the relationship, but then it’s easier to let go if you realize this. Good advice Hannah and even for a very broad audience I think!