We have a 54-day snap-streak, and we’ve been each other’s #1 best friend on Snapchat for the past two weeks. We FaceTime every night, and there’s hardly a minute that we aren’t talking or sending each other memes during the day. We don’t hide anything from each other. From the outside, this seems like a very close friendship. The thing is: he’s actually my ex.
There is a certain kind of closeness that comes from being friends with someone you dated. This person was your best friend, who you told everything to, so why should that end just because you break up? There is a reason you dated in the first place, and it’s likely because you vibed well together and had important things in common. All of these things are ideal traits in a friend. I pride myself on the fact that I am on positive terms with all of my exes. Of course, none of my relationships made it past the one month marker, so perhaps we never had a deep romantic connection, to begin with, but I think that if any point in the relationship you envision your wedding (which, confession, I have done with every single one of my romantic interests), then there had to have been some spark. People always say to marry your best friend, so I believe that if you can’t maintain a friendship, they probably weren’t the best person for you to begin with.
Perhaps my tendency to stay friend with my exes all stems from my obsessive desire to be liked by everyone even after unceremoniously dumping them over text message (to be fair it was never my plan, all four times, it just happened that way). And, maybe it’s because I have always been the dumper and not the dumped that I find it so easy to stay friends with my exes.I am not saying that everyone should always be besties with their exes. In fact, if it was a toxic relationship, I encourage you to never ever speak with that person again. Or, if you truly had your heart broken, it wouldn’t be healthy to immediately attempt to forge another relationship with this person. Or, maybe you just didn’t get along with this person as well as you thought you did initially, in which case a friendship wouldn’t make sense.
I consider myself pretty lucky that I managed to date and maintain friendships with people who actually care about how I’m doing regardless of whether there is a romantic aspect to our relationship. Whether it’s swapping Game of Thrones theories, sending links to things that we think the other would like, going on friend dates when I’m in town, or even just shooting an occasional text to see how I’m doing, my exes and I are safely in the “friendzone”. But, this is because we value each other as people, and view each other as people with feelings and not a fleeting high school fling.
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