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It’s true; it does happen. Exes can<\/em> \u00a0stay 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 \u00a0one<\/em>, but \u00a0two \u00a0<\/em>of my three serious ex-boyfriends. I’m \u00a0only 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.<\/p>\n Ex-boyfriend one\u2014I’ll call him Evan\u2014was a high school flame. We had a Ross-Rachel<\/a> 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 \u00a0started dating SB2, and Evan and I would Skype regularly. “You look so happy,” he told me. And I was.<\/p>\n It was this\u2014my new relationship, my moving on\u2014that allowed my relationship with Evan to become pure, uncomplicated \u00a0friendship. We had always talked\u2014texted, called, Skyped, IM’ed\u2014nearly 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 \u00a0the air of a Young Werther.<\/a> 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 \u00a0me advice or encouragement when I needed it.<\/p>\n We went to different colleges, but over breaks, we’d hang out\u2014take 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\u2014his high school player self\u2014and 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\u2014many of my most embarrassing moments had been with him\u2014and he still wanted to be friends with me. \u00a0I trusted him. I trust him.<\/p>\n 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 \u00a0our 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”\u2014albeit friends with a crazy amount of sexual tension\u2014but still friends. Perhaps that \u00a0made it \u00a0easier for us to be friends again, once \u00a0the sexual tension had dissipated. We weren’t trying to build \u00a0a friendship from the base up; we already had the structure in place. We just needed to reconsider its use.<\/p>\n Are you friends with any exes? \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It’s true; it does happen. Exes can \u00a0stay 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 \u00a0one, continue reading<\/span>