Don’t Be Friends with Your Ex Unless You’re Okay Being Replaced

My friends’ romantic choices have been a mixed bag, but I have always felt excited and optimistic when I first hear they’re dating someone new. Then one of those newly coupled friends was my ex.

Our relationship had “not meant to be” written all over it from the start, but it still took me months and months to acknowledge the inevitable: this wasn’t going anywhere good. Acknowledgement doesn’t always mean acceptance, though, and in my case that took many MORE months. In the meantime, we had agreed to be “friends” and remained in frequent phone contact and also part of the same small social community.

I thought “friends” was working for us at first. Did I still have more-than-friends feelings? Yes. Did I frequently feel frustrated when I bumped up against these new platonic relationship boundaries that I wasn’t used to? I did. Was I doing most of the work in the friendship, putting in energy I should have been using to heal my broken heart? I was.

But yeah, sure, let’s be friends, this will be great.

All my delusions fell away when my ex started dating someone else. My mind received the news like I was hearing about a death. And I guess in a way it was one — the death of the hidden hope I still had that we would get back together (or at the very least that he would stay single until I’d properly moved on).

Because we were “friends,” I heard about this new romantic interest in a casual way and was supposed to react just as casually. Instead, the very idea of them out to lunch made me feel as though I was about to lose mine. Once I was alone in my room, I ugly-cried like I had the day we ended things.

What was wrong with me? Was I really still that into him? Even if I was, why did the news shock me so much when I myself had been trying to meet and date new people? This was always going to happen eventually.

None of that mattered, of course, because the point was I wasn’t ready for friendship with this person if I couldn’t tolerate the existence of my replacement. That’s not to say exes can’t be genuine friends; they just need to form that friendship on solid ground rather than layering it on top of unhealed wounds. Mine were still too fresh to support a true friendship, and I realized I needed to pull back from our interactions for a while and refocus on my own needs. If that meant that for now I couldn’t play the role of the chill, supportive ex, then so be it. I’ve never convincingly pulled off “chill” anyway.

If a former-partner-now-friend starts dating again and you feel like you’ve been punched in the stomach, you are experiencing a perfectly valid, human reaction. And you aren’t alone, I have been there. But you’re not reacting like a friend would, and it’s important to be honest with yourself about the kind of connection you’re capable of maintaining with your ex — at least for the time being. Your mind and body are telling you in no uncertain terms that you aren’t ready to have a front-row seat to this new chapter in your ex’s life.

We may never particularly enjoy seeing or imagining our exes with anyone else. It’s preferable to think we’re irreplaceable. But for most people, the end of one relationship is followed eventually by the beginning of another. Your ex may reach that stage before you do, but you’ll be there yourself before too long if you take the time and space you need in order to fully heal. Then maybe someday you’ll all hang out and banter in a coffee shop like the characters on Friends. Or maybe (and more realistically) you and your ex will just wish each other well from afar — and actually mean it.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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