Maybe We Can Just Be Friends..?

Breakups are like a descent into hell. It burns. It hurts. It catapults you into an abyss of anger, frustration, bitterness and cynicism, but it is not the most frightening part funnily enough. The most frightening part is the suffering that you’re going to have to endure in the aftermath. The most frightening part is the immediate knowledge that you are going to have to find a way to live without the person that you genuinely loved and at one point, couldn’t fathom a life without. I never really believed that there was any such thing as an amicable breakup. These things are messy and humiliating. But, you know what I find especially humiliating? Oh you know very well where I’m going with this.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever experienced a breakup and had heard this line before, “Maybe we can just be friends?” Nothing better to tie off a heart-wrenching experience than with an offer of friendship, right? And even more so appropriate if the relationship ended in a not so “amicable” way? Is it really a genuine offer? Or is it just a silly attempt at softening the blow?

Here’s the thing. I don’t really believe (and I don’t think you do either) that most offers of friendship after a breakup are truly genuine, but rather just a pointless attempt at being polite, in order to conceal how much of an assclown they really are. And when we say yes to this ludicrous proposal, you can almost hear their proverbial sigh of relief, indicating that by us accepting their hand in friendship, it must mean that we don’t really think that they’re that shitty of a person. So, now they can absolve themselves of the guilt of screwing us over royally.

I want you to level with me here. Do you really believe that you could transition from an intimate relationship into something platonic just like that? I mean, if that’s the case then there must not have been anything real there to begin with. If you were in a relationship where you were being taken advantage of or mistreated, it stands to reason that you would not want to be friends with someone who hurt and betrayed you. Nobody would. We know this on some level. We know that accepting the offer of friendship is a bad idea, although there are times in our lives where we’re all about the bad ideas. And while all of our alarm bells might be ringing, and the voices in our heads tell us that we would come to regret making that decision, we throw caution to the winds and we do it anyway. So, the question is:

Why is it that we fight so hard to remain friends with our exes, especially when they have not treated us with basic love, care, decency and trust?

Imagine for a second that you were drowning in your own blood. Yes, I know this is a very bleak example, but humor me. When you’re that close to death, your organs begin to shut down and every negative feedback mechanism in your body goes into overdrive in an effort to keep you alive. Your heart rate increases to multiple times the normal rate, your blood pressure rises, your chest heaves up and down. Your entire life flashes before your eyes as your body tries to cling to every second, to every moment, screaming “I’m not ready to let go!”

Accepting our exes hand in friendship I think is the equivalent of this innate survival mechanism, triggered by our immediate anguish at the breakup. We try desperately to hold on to the relationship through any means available to us, rationalizing that in this case, something is better than nothing. We become slaves to our own misguided beliefs and affections, hopelessly hanging on to every second and every moment because we can’t stand to see it end. Friendship is our last ditch effort to salvage what we can. Friendship is our final prayer in the face of looming despair. Friendship is our attempt to lessen the pain of the initial breakup.

Maybe in our own little passive aggressive way, we opt to remain friends because we want to show them what they’re missing out on. We hope and pray that by giving them unfettered access to our lives (i.e: a shoulder to cry on, sex, an ego stroke, etc.) they might realize their mistake and come begging us to take them back. Come on, don’t pretend as though you’ve never tried this at least once before.

The problem with allowing your ex to keep a foothold in your life is that it actually prevents you from truly moving on, thereby creating situations where you would most likely ruin your chances at a healthy and mutually fulfilling relationship with someone else. Why take that chance?

Here’s the thing. We have been socially engineered to try to remain friends with our exes after a break up because we’ve been told that it’s the “mature” thing to do. It was like a rule. Be the bigger person. Turn the other cheek. Make a clean break. I mean…seriously? For the life of me, I could not quite understand why we constantly dwelled under this delusion that people who either mistreated, or at worst, abused us in a relationship would somehow become more loving, caring and sensitive to our needs if we were to transition into a friendship. It begs the question:

If they did not treat you with basic love, care, trust and decency while you were in a relationship, what makes you think that they would be any better as a friend?

We need to understand that whenever someone has mistreated us in a relationship, there MUST be consequences to their actions. There MUST be consequences to betraying our trust. And of course it goes both ways. Consequences are the only way that we could truly understand the gravity of what we have done and take accountability. Consequences are the only conduit to the realization that we need to change and do better. When you have been betrayed by your partner, sometimes, the consequence has to be that they don’t get to be with you anymore. I think accepting your ex’s hand in friendship is like saying, “Hey, I don’t really love or respect myself enough, and I am starving for some validation, so I am going to crawl around emotionally broken and snuffling for your breadcrumbs.”

When we accept our ex’s hand in friendship, we are in fact incentivizing more assclown behavior because we are communicating to them that they can screw with us and there would be no major consequences to their actions. If you truly think that little of yourself and that much of them, then it’s safe to say you need to do some serious reevaluation of your moral values.

At this point you’re probably thinking, “okay Ryszard, well are you saying that it is not possible to be friends with your ex?”. To be fair, most of what I said probably points to that conclusion, but the truth is, I absolutely believe that you can be friends with your ex. There is a catch though. You cannot be friends with your ex if you are still emotionally invested. The only way it can happen is if you no longer have romantic feelings for each other, and the only way that can happen is if you spend time away from each other. Go no contact. Yes, even if they have treated you well. You cannot truly move on from an ex if they are still hanging over your shoulder. You cannot truly foster a healthy and mutually fulfilling relationship with someone else if your ex is still in the picture.

Breakups are hard, and in order to heal and move on, you must give yourself time to grieve. Yes. Grieve. Let the pain wash over you. As your mind travels to where your heart cannot, you would pine for what once was, and probably what most likely will never be again. It’s quite okay. It is necessary for your growth. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you could manage a friendship with an ex while pretending that you’re not still emotionally attached to them. When you let them get too close hoping that you would be able to win them back, then they remind you that you are only just friends, trust me, it’s going to hurt a whole lot more than it did when you first broke up. Respect yourself.

Use the distance and take the time to work on yourself so that you can foster more healthy boundaries and relationships. Now, if you’re looking for exactly how much time it takes for this to happen, I am not quite sure because everyone is different. But, the consensus is at least six months to a year.

If you have done the work and truly moved on, and you still want to pursue a friendship with your ex after, by all means, have at it. However, if I am being honest, after you have taken the time to process and then move on, I think the attraction, as well as the desire for a future friendship would have long since died.

Your thoughts?