Fuck Moving On: In Defense of Being Friends with Your Ex

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you do not stay in contact with your ex. Upon the breakup, you cry, mourn, grieve, you get angry, you scream, yell, shit-talk them to your friends, you try going out with other people a few times (and you cry after), you start to feel okay again, you have sex with someone else for the first time and it sucks, you have sex with someone else for the first time and it’s good, you notice you haven’t felt the hollow crater in your chest in days, weeks, months, and suddenly you realize somehow, somewhere, at some point, you moved on. But in that whole time the one standard rule is: you don’t talk to your ex.

To which I say: fuck that.

To be fair, I haven’t been in that many relationships in my life. My romantic history is made up of brief, intense summer flings, hookups with friends, and a single nine-month relationship that was mostly conducted long-distance. So I’ve wondered for a long time if I was simply lucky or naive to be friends with almost all of my exes (exes being defined here as all of the above-listed forms of romantic and sexual connections).

However, in March, I went through the sudden and painful breakup of my first truly long-term adult relationship. There was no falling out, either of good graces or of love. My ex-partner had wanted to move out of his hometown since before we met, and he decided to do so on short notice. Having moved twice since I turned 18, over 4,000 miles each time, I understood that desire. But he wanted to cut off communication for at least a couple months when he left -- if we kept talking, it would be harder, he said. It would hurt longer, he said. It would be easier to move on, for both of us, he said.

And I tried. I tried not to text him in the days after he left. I opened a Google Doc on my phone and typed all the texts I wanted to send him in it instead. But I couldn’t hold out, because honestly, I thought it was fucking stupid. I didn’t hate him, he didn’t hate me, we hadn’t fought, neither of us had hurt each other. We simply weren’t living in the same place anymore. He was still the person I had spent every day of the previous nine months talking to, one of the few people I had seen in person for months at a time, the person who had made living through a global pandemic (in a foreign country almost 8,000 miles from my family) bearable. Staring down hours alone in my apartment under a 6 p.m. curfew, it seemed absurd to sever contact with one of my closest relationships.

As I was debating with my ex about whether or not we should sever all contact, my other coping mechanism was probably familiar to many: posting mid-cry selfies on my Instagram “Close Friends” list. And not one, not two, but three of my exes reached out (and it was only then that I realized how many former hookups and flings were on that list). They offered comfort, advice, a phone call, a video chat, to listen if I wanted to talk about the breakup, or talk about something, anything else if I wanted a distraction — and before anyone brings up the word “rebound,” I’ll clarify that these exes all live across at least one ocean from me, are in other relationships, and have clearly defined our relationships as being now platonic. Overwhelmed with gratitude and love in the face of their support, I became even more certain of how valuable and profound friendships with people who have shared your heart and your bed can be.

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In April, a month post-breakup, I started reading the copy of Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, which I’d been carrying around on multiple friends’ recommendations for four years. While it is a fantastic book, I don’t recommend picking it up now, and I wouldn’t have myself if I had known that it was about a pandemic that wipes out human civilization. Once I realized, after only a few chapters, just how precisely it echoed the last year I had lived, I was already too far in to put it down — I desperately needed to know how these characters would find their way through their pandemic.

It sounds a bit dramatic, but as I read about all the loved ones these characters lost without having the chance, due to a pandemic so similar to our own, to say goodbye or to truly reckon with how much their previous relationships had meant to them, I only grew stronger in my conviction that cutting off contact wasn’t the cure for the hurt I was feeling. Why, in a world and a time when connection, communication, and love are so truncated, cut off at the knees by social distancing, quarantining, masking, and more public health policies (which are critical to save lives, but can decimate our social and emotional wellbeing) — why, in that world, would I purposefully amputate a vital organ, a joy-giving relationship with someone I care for in the long-term, simply because it hurt in the short-term that the nature of that relationship had to change?

Romantic and sexual relationships are often some of the deepest, most vulnerable connections that we cultivate in our lifetimes, and most of the time, we fully give up that connection when the romantic or sexual side of the relationship ends. We lose some of our closest friends, our staunchest supporters, our most trusted confidants. Relationships that took months or years of vulnerability and trust to build are violently, bloodily carved out of our hearts and lives because it’s not socially acceptable to stay friends with someone you had sex with.

While my love for my exes has changed, I love them still, and I don’t see the purpose or value in intentionally removing love from my life. Nor does that love diminish or taint my capacity to love future significant others. I treasure the kisses and conversations I shared with my previous partners, but I also treasure the transformation of our relationships, transformation that required commitment, respect, and compassion on both our parts. The time, attention, and effort that I put into maintaining and reshaping those relationships has made me more attentive, more communicative, and more confident in all my relationships, because it is not often straightforward or comfortable to move from a place of sexual and romantic intimacy to one of platonic intimacy. It is easy to hurt and be hurt, easy to blur boundaries, easy to lose your conviction to the fear of pain and loneliness, easy to choose distance to save yourself from hurt as my ex did.

Of course, I don’t think everyone should be friends with all their exes because being friends with an ex is not always the right choice. While I am grateful to feel that I have relationships of mutual respect and care with most of my exes, I have one or two where there just wasn’t much interest on either side in being friends. And there are many situations that do call for cutting off contact with an ex, including but not limited to partners who subject you to emotional and/or physical abuse. Which of your exes are good candidates for friendship is something only you can decide for yourself—perhaps with some advice from family, friends, and your therapist.

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Now, six months later, the post-breakup has been long, drawn-out, messy, full of tears, tension, bargains, and blowups, with both a briefly-reinitiated relationship and a social media block thrown in for good measure. As I try so hard to hold onto some kind of relationship with a person that I still care very deeply about, I’m honestly not sure that I’m doing the right thing in pursuing friendship this time. While the breakup itself was handled with grace and care, the past six months of trying to keep in touch have been a tumultuous rollercoaster of joy, rage, comfort, bitterness, laughter, grief. I’ve learned that it’s very hard to make the transformation from exes to friends with someone who doesn’t really believe that it’s possible, and sometimes the hurt of trying to convince them that it is overshadows the moments of happiness of keeping the relationship.

So I don’t know if I’ll stay friends with this ex, I don’t know if our relationship will smooth out or taper off over time, I don’t know if I’ll keep trying tomorrow, or if he’ll keep trying with me. But I’m glad that I tried at all. I’m glad that I’m taking the time to find out if this relationship works for us, rather than just assuming that I have to lose someone I love simply because we’re not dating anymore, because you “can’t” be friends with your ex. In trying and maybe failing at being friends with this ex, I’ve come to appreciate more than ever that being friends with your ex is possible, but it takes a lot of conviction and courage to try.

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Images submitted by Rosie Baird