Dear Auntie MacKenzie,
My loved one and I broke up recently, and he wants to be friends. I said no. Then he told another friend that he really wants to be friends with me someday at least. I’m terribly hurt by hearing this, but it’s not really a surprise to me though. He broke up with me back in the Fall and I am not on good terms with him – even if he thinks I am – and I’m disgusted with him because I know he has been trying to go after my friend which I find disrespectful. We are still Facebook friends though. I have not initiated any contact or anything with him and have not spoken to him because of all this. Sometimes I think it’s possible but only if I fell in love with someone else. For him, it sounds like he already sees me in the non-romantic light since he is comfortable with the idea of being friends.
In relationships, the time to say goodbye usually arrives at a certain point, unless you intend to walk down the aisle – and even then, there are no guarantees. You two have shared memories that will either make you laugh or cry or be nostalgic, but it’s time to take your experiences, put them on a shelf and move on. But often when breaking up, somewhere on the road of parting ways couples feel the need to promise to stay friends, which ultimately leads to more broken promises.
So, can you ever be friends with your ex? Does it have to be all-or-nothing? I think it’s different for everyone. In your case, being friends doesn’t sound good for you. Since breakups are rarely unbiased, one party will always feel resentment or bitterness toward the other. Ideally exes could succeed at being friends. But in a world where animosity, jealousy, infatuation and plain old human nature cannot be reasoned with and we often lead with irrationality, it’s less than probable. Although it would make things much easier in the dating world, relationships rarely see mutual breakups.
Since you are not the heartbreaker, you’ve been mulling over the breakup for weeks, maybe even months. Your “loved one” did the breaking up and offering to be friends makes him feel like less of the bad guy: “It’s not you, it’s me, we can still be friends”. By remaining friends, it also allows your “loved one” to feel that you will still be in their life, and they won’t have to miss having you around. Now, they can move on with their life with no difficulty, and with the satisfaction of having a coffee date with you every so often. You, however, have the pleasure of being constantly reminded of how they ripped your heart out when you receive friendly messages and e-mail.
Remaining friends seems to provide us with the security blanket that the someone who has been in our life will still be there, and we can call them every once in a while to find out how they are. However, we’ll never actually know how they really are as long as we are using friendship merely as a way to dull the pain of breaking up. Friendship is its own valuable relationship, not a consolation prize for the broken-hearted. You know what real friendship feels like – if this isn’t it, don’t go for it. You’ll just be dragging out the pain of the break-up, and I guarantee you’ll wind up more disappointed in the end.