Just curious how often people manage to maintain good friendships with people they have previously dated.
I guess I got thinking about the subject because today I broke up with my gf of several months. It was a very amicable break up for the most part - we were both up front about what we thought and how we felt. However I guess I feel kinda bad about it overall. In truth she has become a very good friend over the last several months and she is a wonderful person, it’s just that my feelings for her were diminishing as her feelings for me were growing.
After getting everything on the table we decided it would be best to discontinue the relationship. I suggested that we stay friends, but she wanted to hold off on seeing me entirely for the time being. I am left to wonder whether this will effectively end the relationship entirely. I understand her postion and I don’t want to cause her anymore discomfort (lord knows that it’s hard enough to get over someone without seeing them everyday). But I really do think she’s great and would love to maintain the freindship. I guess only time will tell if this is possible.
So anyone care to share thier experiences in this regard? How often have you managed to maintain a freindship with someone you used to date?
I haven’t really dated in quite a while (was married from 1980 or so - 86, and have dated the same guy steadily since then), but, among my circle of friends are:
The first boy I ever dated (and saw at times after that as well)
The second boy I ever dated
Several others.
IN most cases if I liked them well enough to date, unless there was really something ugly about the break up (a guy who cheated on me for example), why not remain pals?
There’s really only a short list of those I wouldn’t be happy to hang around these days.
It happens. My high school/early college girlfriend and I had a hard breakup, but it was a long while back and we’re best friends now (even after two marriages and two children on her part).
My next girlfriend after that, we had a bad breakup and aren’t friends at all, noway nohow. I want to be nice to her, so I stay the hell away from her. Havent seen her in 6-7 years.
My next girlfriend after that, we had a really bad breakup that drug out for like a year. We were at odds for a long time, but we’re friendly to each other when we see one another now, which we occasionally do as we still have the same friends.
I’m definately an odd case. The only x-bf who I’m not friends with is a lying cheating SOB who cheated on me… then without my knowing he had been dating another girl for NINE MONTHS cheated on her with me! He wants to be friends, but I told him to F*** himself…
However, when I first got to college I met a really nice guy, and by the end of my second semester we were dating. We had a break-up a lot like yours (except he was the one losing interest and I was the one getting dumped).
IMHO, it’s good to have some time apart. We did. Now he’s my best friend in the whole world, and when it’s NOT summer vacation (cause I’m outta town), we hang out usually 2-3 times a week.
My advice is to just give it a few months. Then gradually talk. It’ll be quite a bit uncomfortable for a while, but once one of you is dating someone else, it’ll get easier (believe it or not). It’s best if you’re both dating someone else, though!
In college, I went with a guy for about two years. We broke up with a fizzle rather than a bang (We didn’t speak for about two weeks and then he gave me a call and said something to the effect of "Uh, we broke up, didn’t we?), and while it took a little while for us to be comfortable again, we were good friends until he moved away for grad school. I think a big part of the evolution of our friendship was forced proximity–he shared an apartment with my two best girlfriends (Hi, Emily!) and, unless I wanted to just sit around by myself for months at a time, I had to go over to their place to socialize.
I think we realized that our problems weren’t demonstrably either of our faults (though I mentally assign myself most of the blame) and while we had pretty good chemestry, our differences were too great for us to maintain real closeness. But when we broke up and removed the physical and heavily emotional elements from our relationship, we worked out just fine as friends.
From my limited experience, friendship doesn’t work if one - and only one - has feelings for the other. It’s way too painful. Break it off! That’s the kindest thing you can do to her.
Well, from my experience, I’ve maintained friendships with pretty much all of my semi-serious exes. Some relationships took longer than others to heal, but in the end, everything wound out okay. I never made an overt effort to “patch things up” so we could be friends; it just happened after a period of time. None of them resulted in any romantic flare-ups or any serious crises. I suppose the key factor in these cases was that both parties had moved on. My current SO sometimes doesn’t like the fact that I keep touch with some of my exes, but, I’m unwilling to break off contact with any of my friends for any reason. I have no romantic interest in them anymore; it seems the feeling’s mutual so what’s the problem?
It doesn’t work in all cases. Some people just drift away. But I’ve never been the victim nor given the cold shoulder to anyone I’d previously been with.
Nope… Tried two times though, didn’t work out at all. Two times a year I get a cup of coffe with the girl I was with 4 years ago but that hardly counts.
Nothing wrong with maintaining a friendship after a breakup, if it can be done. Friends are a precious commodity.
There was a wonderful man that I dated for about three years, shortly after I moved here to Flint. We were even engaged. The romantic relationship failed, but to this day, he is still one of my very best friends. He was one of about four people that knew in advance that my current husband and I were going to elope, and my husband and I danced happily at his wedding just a few months later. He and his wife attended my first baby shower, and I attended theirs.
Some people might think that maintining a friendship with a former lover is weird. But I say hey. Sometimes two people just aren’t cut out to have a romance together. Doesn’t mean that they suck as humans, it just means that they weren’t meant to be romantically involved.
I tried. Lord knows I tried. The last time I saw my ex was over Easter. I had previously seen him at Christimas, and he talked about how he was having problems with his girlfriend, but he never mentioned her at Easter. He really didn’t mention anything about his life. We went out, had a couple drinks, and it was akward as all hell. Christmas wasn’t bad, in fact, it was great. It was like when we were friends pre-relationship. But as I was leaving during this Easter visit, he said something that made it abundantly clear that he had expected me to sleep with him that night. I can only assume he had broken up with his girlfriend, and just assumed that I was a sure bet. Haven’t spoken to him since. (FWIW, I was the breaker-upper, he was the one who was more into me than vice versa…)
One vote for yes, frequently… of the nine women I dated before I met my wife, I remain friends with five. One of them, who I dated for almost two years, is my best friend to this day, and was maid of honor at my wedding.
It can happen. I think that if you like someone enough to spend tons of time with them, there’s really no reason that has to change just because you’re no longer getting horizontal.
Another vote for it being possible. I’ve remained friends with almost all my ex-bfs, and also with an ex-fiance. Running joke with me is that most of my serious ex-bfs were attendants at my wedding! And epeepunk and I played a serious role in the subsequent marriage of my ex-fiance to his now-wife. So, yeah, definitely.
The tricky thing is deciding the course of the recovery - do you stay in the field while the more wounded one recovers (more likely to cause pain in the process, also more likely to retain the friendship IME) or do you disappear for now and reappear later hoping to re-start the friendship when the more wounded party has healed? If you have a lot of mutual friends, staying in the field is easy, and important, too. The guys I’ve stayed closest to have kept up with my life, checked in on me to make sure I’m okay now and then, talked to me when something important changed in their lives, gone out on a limb to be honest with me about something or other… well, friend stuff. GOOD friend stuff.
But, in all my cases, both parties wanted to remain friends. Even the nasty breakups in either direction were cases where we valued the friendship more than the relationship. In the one that sounds the most like your description of the situation, it took me 6 months to recover emotionally, and he had to stay fairly background, not close friend but always there on the edges, and kept making sure I knew what was going on in his life (in a ‘just felt it was important for you to hear about my life from me instead of from some other party’ kind of way). We aren’t super close now, but we are definitely still on each-other’s lists of friends, invite each other to our parties, etc. And if he needed to talk to me, I’d be there in a minute. Same if I needed to talk to him.
Good luck. If she doesn’t want to be friends, or doesn’t think it is possible, you might be out of luck - for now. But there’s always ‘down the road’ (my highschool sweetheart has recently gotten in touch with me again, and is trying his best to re-establish our friendship… no other motives that we can tell, either, just coming back around full circle).
I’m still pretty good friends with my ex-husband. In fact, I stayed at his place during the divorce hearing. We just shouldn’t have gotten married, that’s all.
Thanks everyone. This has been quite informative and somewhat theraputic. There is always a set of unusual (and uncomfortable) feelings surrounding a breakup - no matter which end of the breakup you happen to be on. I know it may sound strange, but reasing your responses has helped me “process” a bit. It’s also interesting to hear how other people deal with “friendships after breakups”.
With a couple of my exes, when we broke up, there wasn’t much in the wreckage left to preserve. But those were the exceptions. Most of them, I was still in regular contact with, and on good terms with, for years after we broke up.
A word about your particular situation, guitarmax: I have to second what scr4 said. If one person in the breakup still yearns for the one who was ready to call it quits, the best thing to do is break it off firmly and avoid all unnecessary contact for awhile. The two of you may be able to be friends later, once she gets over you. But it’ll be difficult for her to do that if you see each other often, even strictly platonically.