Being friends with an ex?

[ProseccoStormtrooper]

I usually take the traditional approach with exes of hating their guts until the day I die. However yesterday I met up with one I hadn’t spoken to for several years. We still have love for each other but neither of us wants to rekindle anything romantic and whilst in some ways we’d probably like to be, we agreed that we can’t go back to being each others person. We would like to stay in each others life in some capacity.

We had a good talk and both got a lot of stuff of our chests.

Have any of you successfully negotiated friendship with an ex? How did you do it? What boundaries did you put in place?

I have exes that I am delighted to see when I bump into them but absolutely would not seek them out or invest my time in them.

I am in the Men and Women Can Be Friends camp. However, I absolutely do not think you should pal up with exes (I mean unless you were school kids or something really young).

I'm friends with my ex (we were together for 7 years). Both happily married with kids. We keep in touch occasionally but not in person. He lives in another country so it's very much at arm's length. Not sure it would work actually meeting up though.

Keeping an ex you have love for in your life that you were at one time "each other's person" will likely interfere with you being able to see someone else as your person. There's still an emotional connection present that ties you to the past instead of being present to what lies ahead.

I am friends enough with my ex so that if we meet because of the now adult children we can chat, have a coffee etc and I get on well enough with his wife too.

It doesn’t go beyond that though and I wouldn’t meet with him if it wasn’t for the kids.

He’s in poor health so isn’t able for a relationship with anyone. I’m not looking at the moment but yes I hear what you’re saying and realise it could ultimately be a problem.

When I was an undergraduate, I had a two-year relationship with a beautiful woman. We were very well-suited and could easily have got married, but for the fact that we both had a lot of life to live. Decades have passed, and we've remained in touch, seeing each other occasionally over the years, and I'm looking forward to hopefully seeing her again fairly soon. She married a great guy maybe 25-30 years ago. I'm so glad we managed to navigate the tricky "post-relationship" period, probably made easier by the fact that, only a few months after splitting up, we ended up separated by about 100 miles. It would have been very sad if we'd not remained friends. Don't be influenced by what passes for "wisdom", either what people say to you, or you read in some godforsaken publication or SM platform. Trust your instincts and enjoy a friendship. "Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel."

I’ve no intention of nursing him through his poor heath BTW

Yes, I am friends with exs. My two longest relationships are what I see as being fraternal. One we don’t talk our past relationship in much detail he’s just someone I can rely on (or not 😆) like a brother, DS’s dad we are more open and happy to state we love each other, again in a brotherly sisterly way. Our partners don’t have an issue with this.

There’s a couple of other shorter term relationships where we are still in touch and are friendly. In none of the cases do we expect anything to be rekindled.

Yes, it’s unusual but it makes me feel I’ve done something right with my life to be in this situation.

Having him back in my life feels like a missing piece of the jigsaw has been slotted back in.

My ex husband is still a good friend. After we separated we agreed to stay amicable and friendly to make shared custody of our son as stress free as possible

9 years later DS is a young adult and me and ex are still very amicable and communicate easily.

Because that's what it is! Embrace it.