Real Talk: I’m Best Friends With My Ex, and It’s Not Weird At All
It’s true; it does happen. Exes can stay friends without secretly wanting to make out every time they’re left alone together, and I offer myself as proof: I am close friends with not only one, but two of my three serious ex-boyfriends. I’m only going to focus on the first one, because we’ve been friends longer, which means our relationship is more stable. The other one still feels like a rickety chair: it’s okay to rest clothes on, but I fear if I sit in it, it will break.
Ex-boyfriend one—I’ll call him Evan—was a high school flame. We had a Ross-Rachel sort of relationship. We first dated freshman year of high school, then broke up, then made up, then broke up, then made up, etc. through my freshman year of college. It was a bad cycle. And then I started dating the man who would become serious boyfriend #2. I was studying abroad when I started dating SB2, and Evan and I would Skype regularly. “You look so happy,” he told me. And I was.
It was this—my new relationship, my moving on—that allowed my relationship with Evan to become pure, uncomplicated friendship. We had always talked—texted, called, Skyped, IM’ed—nearly every day even when we hadn’t been exactly “together,” and nothing changed now. We talked as frequently as we always had, only now I did so without the air of a Young Werther. What helped us along is the fact that Evan wasn’t jealous: he was happy for me, he liked hearing about my new boyfriend, and gave me advice or encouragement when I needed it.
We went to different colleges, but over breaks, we’d hang out—take long walks, go to movies, out to dinner. The fact that we had dated, that we had, so to speak, “been there and done that,” made it easier for me to relax around him. I didn’t analyze his speech or the way he did or didn’t touch my arm as I might with another guy friend, one I hadn’t already dated. I also felt more comfortable being physically intimate with him than with other guy friends. We shared a bed at our five-year high school reunion. He frequently told me I was his best friend, because I had endured his worst self—his high school player self—and had remained; because I knew him as he had been, not just how he was; because I was loyal. I felt similarly about him. He’d seen me at my worst—many of my most embarrassing moments had been with him—and he still wanted to be friends with me. I trusted him. I trust him.
We live in different parts of the country now, and don’t manage to talk as much as we used to. We’ve grown somewhat apart; our lives have taken us in the opposite direction. But he’s still a saved “favorite” on my phone; he still gave a toast at my wedding; he’s still the one I call when I need relationship advice. I guess, in retrospect, what made our friendship work is the fact that, although we were always close, we weren’t always dating. That is, for large part of relationship, we had been “just friends”—albeit friends with a crazy amount of sexual tension—but still friends. Perhaps that made it easier for us to be friends again, once the sexual tension had dissipated. We weren’t trying to build a friendship from the base up; we already had the structure in place. We just needed to reconsider its use.
Are you friends with any exes?
