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Making a friendship work after a long relationship
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
hi guys.
ive recently split up with my partner, but on good terms. we're now looking at ways which we can keep, and hopefully strengthen, our friendship. We text once every few days+ive arranged to meet up with him and his mate a few times, for a laugh. But i spose im worried about this making it harder for him to get over us.
any advice please? or past experiences where it all went well.
thanx
ive recently split up with my partner, but on good terms. we're now looking at ways which we can keep, and hopefully strengthen, our friendship. We text once every few days+ive arranged to meet up with him and his mate a few times, for a laugh. But i spose im worried about this making it harder for him to get over us.
any advice please? or past experiences where it all went well.
thanx
0
Comments
If either of you has any feelings for the other it might hurt..I think it's better to just not see them, you can't get over someone if you see them all the time.
It's one of the shitty things in life cos you don't want to lose someone who is so important to you but you can't get on with your life otherwise.
Who split up with who? It sounds like you split with him...in which case I would be very careful to not mess with his feelings. My ex kept saying he still loved me and sent messed up messages which really hurt me more as it gave me false hope. It can be kinder to just stay away.
Try it, see how it goes, you'll be able to tell if it's too soon very quickly.
In time it is possible if you split on very very good terms, but I think most people need a long time to clear their head before it becomes possible. Most people don't go back to someone they've taken a timeout from because apart from being lovers there isn't that much in common anymore- most people split because they don't get along, after all.
If you dump someone you dump all of them, try and remember that. You reject them as relationship material; in most cases I don't see how you can go from that to liking them as friends.
read that, and turn it's essence a 180° around.
im in the same position now really ( you may have seen my most recent thread), my ex came back and we'd agreed before to 'still be friends', but i saw him last week and it fucked my head up completely cos i like him even more now.
soo the sensible thing to do would be to not see your ex anymore so hes not getting confused feelings..
however if i could never ever see my ex again and he cut me out then id be absolutely devastated- it would be the worst thing ever and would completely destroy me.
so sorry mixed advice there!:(
This doesn't really make sense David... I mean, say a friend asks you out and you don't want to, you're rejecting them as relationship material but that doesn't mean you don't like them as a friend. Sometimes people split up because they've drifted apart from one another on a relationship level, doesn't mean they can't still like each other on a friendship level. Obviously sometimes (maybe more often than not) it doesn't work like that, but it's not always the case.
[now just commenting generally, not aiming this at David in particular]
People always say it's not possible to stay friends with an ex, and in many cases it doesn't work out, BUT sometimes it does and I wish people wouldn't always answer these threads in such a one-sided manner: "it's impossible", "you should cut all contact", etc. Mention that as an option, recommend it even, but don't make out like that's the only way forward. Particulary since the original poster specifically asked for experiences "where it all went well" rather than just experiences in general.
There are good experiences out there. When my ex and I split up we'd been together since the beginning of uni and as a result all our friends were mutual. Not staying friends would have been quite awkward, cutting all contact from each other impossible, and we wanted to stay friends, so we did, and it worked.
It was hard in the beginning because I wanted us to get back together, but I preferred having something of a relationship with him (as in, a friends-type relationship) to nothing, and besides it would have been a hard time whether or not he'd been around - I actually think him not being around would have made it harder. After all, when you're going out with someone they're your best friend (or one of your best friends), and to lose my best friend as well as my boyfriend would have been just too much to cope with.
The way we handled it was to to treat the other person just the same as you'd treat any of your friends. We still did things just the two of us, just not stepping outside the 'friends box' (ie. no holding hands, kissing, etc), but we also made a concerted effort to do things with friends whereas before we might just have spent the time together. And we sent those random "Guess what I just saw?" texts to friends rather than always to each other, that kind of thing. It is a bit tricky to get your head round at first but once you get into the habit of thinking of them as no more special than any other friend, it works well (or did for us anyway).
As the months passed it all got easier as I stopped wanting that reconciliation and stopped relying on him so much as a best friend - when you're single you have more time to spend with other friends, so it helps bring you closer to them. I wouldn't say I strengthened my friendship with my ex because the reason we broke up is that we had become very different people, but it's been 2 years now and we're still friends in more than just being on speaking terms.
Being friends isn't going to work out if one of you is doing it with the aim of you getting back together. If one of you harbours a hope that that will happen then it's hard to be friends but it can work, if that person accepts that the aim of the friendship is simply friendship and that anything else is a bonus.
Good luck, hope things work out the way you want them to.