A Field Guide to Staying Friends With Your Exes
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I always marvel at people who say they’re friends with all their exes. All of them? What on earth does that even mean? I understand it in a way, as I have a rich history of being friends with people who I’ve always been kind of into, or they’ve always been into me, or we almost dated but I wasn’t ready, so now we’re just friends who have maybe frenched several times. That I get.
How do you remain friends with exes? Which exes do you remain friends with? When do you transition from partners/hookups/people who have frenched to friends? And should it take months, years, or tons of therapy and a dramatic mutual blocking of each other on social media before it can happen? When is it worth it, and when is it not?
I ask myself these questions every time I try to be friends with someone I found myself in that murky territory with, even if it was just “we almost dated but didn’t.”
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I have one such friend named Elyse, who I met doing her podcast. Right after we recorded the episode, she emailed me, extremely sweetly, and asked if I’d ever want to go on a date some time. I definitely did…aaaaand then went through a bunch of trauma and the timing just wasn’t right.
We started going on friend dates and it was wonderful. Elyse would send a car to pick me up, no destination given to me personally, and I would be whisked away to a cute Color Me Mine–type place to make mugs. She’d always pick up my favorite latte and bring it by when she came over. She made me feel loved and taken care of, the way a best friend would. I knew there were romantic feelings tangled up in it, but it also gave me the security of knowing someone was already “in” whenever I was ready to also be in. The ball was fully in my court, so the threshold for rejection was nearly zero, exactly as people with anxiety like it.
Then, one day when we were in a coffee shop, all of my “maybe, I don’t know” feelings finally crystallized into “Uh-oh, I think I like you?” feelings…just as soon as she informed me she’d met someone. I laughed at first—of course this is when I got clarity. It also might've been that she looked extremely good in a cable knit sweater that day.
So, I let it go.
Elyse quickly fell in love with this woman who lived across the country, and they moved in together. Elyse was now not only in love, which changed the dynamic of our friendship (of course, it had to), but now she was also moving away. Two gut punches. I had my chance and I didn’t take it. I repeated that refrain in my mind for months after this, chastising myself for seemingly only wanting her as soon as I couldn’t have her. Surely, I’d messed up and Elyse was my soulmate and now she was definitely going to marry someone else, and I was going to die of yearning.
The kind of yearning I had wasn’t just for Elyse specifically but rather a cute form of self-flagellation in which I would tell myself that she was my soulmate and I blew it. She became my source of comparison for every romantic relationship I had: “Elyse never would’ve treated me this way.” She also became my source of comparison for every platonic friendship I had: “Elyse never would’ve treated me this way.”
Both were unfair because she was never really just my friend or just my girlfriend but a blurred definition of both. I clung to her, as evidence that what I wanted in either partnership definitely existed, but I’d messed it up. Because I felt so conflicted about this, remaining friends with Elyse was like remaining friends with an ex: There were unresolved feelings, unfulfilled promises, and things left unsaid (by me) for the greater good of us both.
In a more clear-cut “staying friends with an ex” sense, I’ve had quite a few. If it were up to me, I would stay friends with anyone I’ve ever meant something to, or who has meant something to me. So many of us want the “let’s stay friends” ending because we do not want to grieve any more than we already have. The door is still open, for better or worse. On one hand, you can get back together one day, but on the other, you can have a very murky friendship that is loaded with good and bad memories from the past, and untold possibilities in the future. Always in limbo, always kind of wondering.
The key to being friends with your exes is, without a single doubt in my mind: very clear boundaries and communication on both sides.
It’d be nice to wing it, yeah, but you can’t assume you both know how the other is grieving, what the other is expecting, or what the other needs during this sticky, complex process. And what will your new friendship look like? Is flirting allowed? Is bringing up other people allowed? And if so, when? Most of us don’t want to talk about any of this, especially when we’re still hurting, and in many cases, still hoping.
Assuming your ex-turned-friend is your soulmate and one day you’ll work it out and be back together can be harmful in so many ways that aren’t always easily seen. In my experience, that belief often kept me from truly giving anyone else a shot. I would often think things like, “This person is nice, but we’ll probably never have the connection I had with my ex,” or “They’ll probably never make me laugh the way my ex did,” or that we’d probably never feel as meant-to-be as my ex and I did. And that belief turned into a deep truth, mostly because I continued to reinforce it.
There is no way someone you just met can compete with years of groundwork laid. These things take time, and one thing you have in spades when you’ve dated someone, and are now Just Friends, is hours logged. You have history. And compared to most new connections, a connection with someone from your past—even if it’s imperfect and maybe even awful—feels far more comfortable.
The truth is, I don’t think I’m someone who is able to be close friends with their exes. Every time I’ve tried to be friends with an ex in a real day-to-day consistent way there was always something off. I’m still friendly with some people who I dated briefly, usually because we were able to take a break after we dated, and then they met someone else, and I was happy to see them in the street, but we didn’t talk with the same consistency, or the same level of intimacy that we used to.
If you’re still in love with someone, or your ex is still in love with you, you both need distance before you can be friends. So give each other the space to move on, even though you’ll miss them while they do.
While I can’t tell you there’s one right way to be friends with an ex, one way that always works, I highly recommend the following: Know what you need. Know what you want. Ask what they need. Ask what they want. Be as honest as you can. Because anything less is just another heartbreak waiting to happen. And we should strive to spare each other and, more importantly, ourselves, from heartbreak as often as we are able.
Excerpt adapted from the new book You Will Find Your People: How to Make Meaningful Friendships as an Adult, by Lane Moore, published by Abrams Image.
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