Why Staying Friends with Exes isn’t in Your Best Interest

I thought it was maturity; it was a galling amount of hubris

I once thought that staying friends with an ex meant I had reached a newfound level of maturity. I could lose the lover and keep the friendship. I was growing.

The truth is that staying friends with exes is nothing more than the worst kind of hubris.

I was so sure that I could maintain the boundaries, value the friendship, and process the rest of my feelings without making them his problem. I was confident that I could force an overwhelming amount of love into a neat and tidy box and resume the friendship as if nothing had ever happened — but love wasn’t the only thing I had to shove in that box. I also had to pack away broken dreams of a shared future. I had to squeeze in the feelings of rejection, loss, and grief. I had to make room for resurrected feelings of unworthiness.

I also had to grieve the loss of emotional intimacy because the second we went from lovers to friends I could no longer share at the same level I had before. I couldn’t process my devastation with the person who had caused it. It became necessary to compartmentalize the friendship to maintain it. I lost my ability to be truly vulnerable with him. Trust, already challenging for me, was damaged.

Still, I didn’t want to lose the relationship entirely, so I tried. God, I tried. I put myself through the rollercoaster of feelings every single time my phone lit up with a call or message. I got to experience the comfort of simply hearing his voice or connecting with a message, but that also meant I got to experience the jarring loss every time I remembered that he wouldn’t choose me, wouldn’t love me, and wouldn’t plan a future that included me as anything other than a friend. He would, in fact, go on to love someone who wasn’t me — and I would have no choice but to watch and add yet another layer to already heavy and complicated grief.

I thought that it would be easier if I could just move on — if I could connect with someone else. I thought it would ease the ache that came every time I realized that his not choosing me meant he would choose someone else. But it didn’t get easier. There was no way to dull the pain.

What’s worse is that I felt added distance with every call and message. The person who had been my favorite human being was slowly becoming a stranger. Still, I kept reaching out.

I even reached out during a family crisis when I found myself driving down the interstate sobbing so hard I could barely see the road in front of me. I needed someone, and I reached for the person I most wanted to connect with only to be sent to voicemail. Had we been in a relationship, he would have taken my call. Downgraded to mere friendship — and not a close one at that — my call was superfluous. I was alone at one of the most difficult moments of my life.

I began to realize that trying to stay friends with an ex might not be a sign of growth and maturity; it might just be another way I’m hurting myself by accepting less than I deserve.

While I don’t doubt that some exes are able to successfully maintain healthy friendships, I am skeptical that this can be done when one person is happy for the relationship to be over while the other person is devastated by the ending. I’ve been able to maintain distant friendships with casual lovers along the way, but I no longer think staying friends with someone we love is maturity. Here’s why.

We Cannot Heal If We Cannot Break the Attachment

Our attachments are more than the relationships themselves. We attach to the sound of our lover’s voice, to their names, and to messages coming in at particular times of the day. We feel that surge of elation when we get to see them or talk to them followed by utter heartbreak when they don’t respond to a message or answer our calls.

We cannot truly begin to heal and rebuild our lives when the person we feel an attachment to is still very much in the picture.

Perhaps it’s easier to have a friendship with an ex once time has passed, and broken hearts have healed. Yet, I tried to do it while still terribly in love. It was painful, and it made healing more challenging. I realized that I could only heal when I cut the cord — severing the connection to that feeling of safety and attachment I had associated with the relationship.

We Need to Recognize How Broken Hearts Equal Broken Trust

I can’t vilify my ex — although the process of grieving and moving on would be easier if I could. Still, it took a while for me to realize that a broken heart also meant broken trust. As I looked back at the breakdown of the relationship, the way one does when nursing a shattered heart, I could see all the little ways in which my trust had been damaged — moments where his pulling away to prepare for the end caused untold harm. I truly wanted to make a friendship work, but I began to realize just how hard it was to stay friends when the trust was broken.

Relationships often contain innumerable micro-betrayals. Every single time we reach for a partner to connect and instead encounter rejection, another crack is added to the foundation of the relationship. Our trust is betrayed with every single moment of misunderstanding or invalidation along the way. Soon, both people are hurt from the little betrayals that add up, and the relationship cannot withstand the damage.

Love is fragile, and if we aren’t working to take good care of our relationship, we are almost certainly destroying it with carelessness and neglect.

We Need to Abandon Hope — and Accept Reality

The problem with staying friends with someone we love is that it leaves the door open for just a little bit of hope. Hope that they’ll change their minds. Hope that they’ll suddenly realize we’re the ones they need. Hope they’ll love us the way they once did. Hope that the end is merely a bump in the road on the way to our Happily Ever After.

Every time he made me laugh or shared an inside joke with me, that little ember of hope was kept alive. The fantasy of “what if” was nurtured in secret. I could see all the ways we were right for each other. Couldn’t he? That kind of hope isn’t healthy. Instead of healing and moving forward, we get stuck hoping for something that will never be instead of accepting the new, difficult reality.

Staying friends with an ex can give us the illusion of hope when we’d be so much better off accepting the end of the relationship and learning to live without it.

There are moments I quite desperately wish I’d been able to keep the person I love in my life. I think about it sometimes, but I’m doing better accepting the reality and saving my wishes for things that are possible — like world peace or a magical rainbow unicorn. Wishing for the end not to be the end only kept me stuck inside that feeling of lost love and broken dreams. To heal, I needed to begin to imagine a life for myself that wouldn’t include a shared future as a couple. I needed to be able to believe that I could be happy without him.

We Need to Consider Future Relationships — Theirs and Ours

Let’s be honest: there was no way in hell I was going to be okay watching him move on with someone else. It would have been absolute torture to watch him fall in love with someone else the way he once seemed to fall in love with me. I’m a practical, reasonable person, but don’t think for a minute I would have been mature enough or healthy enough to support my “friend” through the relationship after me.

We need to consider the future of our own relationships. We’re not going to be emotionally available if we’re still pining for someone from our past who continues to be present in our lives. We may miss out on relationship opportunities because we can’t see them or don’t appear to be available to them. Besides, a new love isn’t exactly going to welcome the continued presence of an old one — particularly if we haven’t completely healed and moved on.

When we stay connected to an ex, even under the guise of friendship, we often create a roadblock to moving on and finding love with someone who will choose us.

Perhaps it would be more beneficial to have healing conversations at the end of relationships — where we have the opportunity to share our feelings and obtain a sense of closure — rather than trying to prolong the relationship by calling it by a new name. It could offer us a way to respectfully honor the end of the relationship and help transition to the next phase of our lives. But most of us won’t be offered the opportunity for a conscious uncoupling and instead must do our best to navigate the landscape of a broken heart.

I really admire my own foolish optimism — the way I was so sure I could compartmentalize love and keep the friendship I valued. I was so confident I could manage my feelings, navigate the uncertain waters of downgrading a relationship from lovers to friends, and still be able to heal, move on, and find love again. It’s almost beautiful the way I wanted to keep him in my life and love him in whatever way he would allow me to — until I realized that I was still accepting less than what I truly wanted and trying to force myself to be grateful for it.

The reality is that I want it all — I want love and shared interests and building a future with someone I admire, respect, desire, and adore. I want to share the joys of my good days and the weight of my bad ones. I want to trust that I can give my heart fully to someone who will always do their best to keep it safe.

What I don’t want is to feel my heart leap every time someone who doesn’t love me calls to give me the crumbs of his day. I want more, and instead of feeling bad about my inability to continue being a friend to him, I’m working on strengthening my compassion so that I can learn to be a better friend to myself.