9/11/08
Just watched the mighty Heels dismantle the Scarlet Knights of Rutgers (game played only a few blocks from the Budster!) and the long undulations of a football game allowed my mind to wander for a while... to today's CODE WORD question.
I used to have a theory that the measure of a man – and a woman – could occasionally be measured by their ability to stay friends with the people they once dated. Obviously, it's been eight years (almost to the day) since I stopped dating anyone except my superheroine better half, but there was a time when I was pretty good at morphing the romantic part into a long-term friendship.
It could be said I massively screwed that up a couple of times, one in particular (and you know who you are!) but even that tide has turned due to the tincture of time. My question is this: do you remain friends with old girlfriends or boyfriends? SHOULD you do so? And is there somebody out there, someone you dated, that nags your conscience? As always, you can be anonymous...
Posted by Ian Williams at September 11, 2008 11:52 PMThis one has always been easy for me - I could never stop caring for the people I have loved. But I have to admit complications ensue:
- Sleeping with my bride on the floor of a woman I formerly lived with on our honeymoon (hey it was in LA during the '84 Olympics and we had run out of honeymoon money) - now that I think of it we've crashed with three different ex SO's over the years.
- Requesting an opinion on a possible birthday present for a former girlfriend to my not-quite-wife-yet in a Cambridge store and getting back a string of profanity that narrowly missed exploding my head.
I suspect only the passage of time and thousands of miles has kept me from more of these potentially lethal episodes. :-)
No!
No!
My conscience is nagged by the fact that college boyfriend owes me money.
I would say yes. But my husband is not a fan of that stance, so out of respect for him, I don't.
It's funny you should mention this today. Thanks to the powers of FaceBook, I just reconnected with an old boyfriend two days ago. He was a pretty significant boyfriend and I broke up with him about three minutes after his parents checked him in to a hospital for "undiagnosed mental complications." I knew he wasn't "the one" and even the doctor on call told me if I wasn't in this for the long haul, I should let that be known. I always felt bad about bailing, but knew it was the right thing to do. I never heard anything about him after that. After looking him up a few days ago, I found him happy, sane and a father. I was truly relieved to see he came through everything and it did ease some of my guilt.
My high school boyfriend and I are friends when we see each other, but don't keep in touch. My husband has a good relationship with his high school girl friend and I like her too. They weren't very serious, so it doesn't feel weird to me.
I think it depends on the relationship you had with that person. The nice, sweet easy loves are easy to be friends with, but those tempestuous, tortuous loves . . . I don't think so.
I find it generally too awkward. There's always the residue of the attraction to deal with which gets in the way of being able to maintain a true, easy friendship. I agree that it depends on the nature of the nature of the failed relationship, as well. I can't even look at a photo of one of my exes without getting knots in my stomach because it was such an intense relationship that ended so badly, and that was 16 years ago.
I think this stuff should just work itself out naturally. I think there are people who say done is done every time, because they need to move on, and there are people (like an earlier version of myself) that try to stay friends every time out of sense of guilt or duty or because it doesn't make sense to care so much about someone and then just not see them.
These days, I generally take some space for a while to cool everything off and heal the wounds, and then just sort of figure out if it makes sense after that, and if I feel compelled. Obviously, proximity and mutual friends may mean that you forge a platonic relationship even if you didn't really feel the compulsion, but I just follow my gut.
I think you can, but you have to allow time to pass between the end of the relationship and the beginning of the friendship. Going mmediately from romantic relationship to platonic friendship usually is a recipe for disaster, but if you have some time apart and have let any wounds heal, you can try to be friends and it has a better chance of working out
I've been surprised to find that if the relationship with the ex was an emotionally healthy one (love + friendship, respect for each other, fair fights, etc. etc. etc.) then I have been able to stay friends. On, the other hand, if the relationship itself was a little (or a lot) dysfunctional, or, if the breakup was nasty and included some hurtful behavior or words, then, the friendship doesn't have a chance.
Completely off-topic, written by one of Ian's old friends....
I think it all depends on the person and the relationship. I still keep in touch with the girl I dated during and after college for 5+ years. She lives in SF, so I don't see her often, which probably is a good thing. I'm also set to see a girl I dated on and off from 1995 through 1998 for the 1st time in 10 years next Friday in Charleston - not sure if that's a good thing. I DON'T keep in touch with a girl I dated in Chapel Hill, a relationship with I believe has made me a persona non grata in the entire state of North Carolina.
Salem's mention of the Facebook phenomenon led me to run through my list of "friends" on Facebook to see how many ex's and/or hook-ups I've "friended" since joining Facebook. I was surprised to see that 22 of 243 friends (about 9%) were girls that I either dated or had a fling with. Of course, there were more than several friends that I WISH were in that group of 22, but sadly are not (caveman knows what I'm talking about - dammit, I'm still jealous of you).
I do regret, when completely blindsided one noon in 1984 by her statement "I don't want to be seen with you again", going out and buying enough booze for the entire campus of 200 and having a open party until dawn for all my fellow students as a mechanism to deal with my hurt feelings. In particular, I regret taking a certain evil glee when my dump-or's roommates showed up to join in and particularly join in our constant renditions of "T is for Texas, T is for Tennessee" with the person's name and characteristics exchanged for the name and characteristic of those particular states.
The person in question was as nice as pie and didn't deserve to have to date the jerk I was then. Otherwise, I think I get along with most ex-girlfriends though I see them rarely due to geography.
Ian - I'm still on the t-shirt topic. How about:
McCain/Palin
Thanks, but no thanks!
I don't feel obligated to stay "friends" with any ex-boyfriends, but I remain friendly with those whose paths I cross from time to time. I'm always happy to hear from any of them when they do touch base and am interested to see how and what they are doing. I keep up with my old h.s. boyfriend just because he is on FB, and I do admit I smile just a little bit that he has gained 50lbs over the years.
There are two old relationships that sometimes nag at my conscience because I ended things badly to the point that both guys wrote me nasty letters calling me out. One guy was super nice, but I met him at UNC the same time I met my husband, so that was the end of that. I almost reached out to the second ex just this year. A friend here was an alum of his college in TX, and I had her pull his email address off the alumni directly. In the end I thought it best not to make contact. He was a complete psycho and Marine (not that they go together necessarily) when we dated, and I have the silly thought that if his life is going badly he may show up on my doorstep Lifetime Movie Network style.
Maybe I'm lying to myself and Chris Rock is right...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxWWi8prOO4I do remain friends with old boyfriends. I hold on to close friends, in general, and have reasoned that I dated people whose company I enjoy far more than that of most people.
To me, it's not a should or shouldn't, unless it's upsetting to your partner. It's more of a personality type inclination.
In most realms, including this, I'm only haunted bad decisions I made when I was too young to know any better.
I'm in contact with the few men who were goodly enough to date me for any significant length of time, and as far as I know, none of them hate me. I've wondered, too, about people whose exes all hate them or won't talk to them. It's not a good sign.
But I've always proceeded into relationships slowly and never got into one that I wasn't careful about, so I usually had a pretty good idea of what I was going into.
However, I think friendships with exes are hard to maintain if one side still nurses deep feelings for the other. They may need to stay away from them in order to heal. Being around them just gets too confusing.
And then there are the situations in which something started off well and one of the parties became really hurtful or abusive, and of course you'd have to stay away. I haven't experienced either situation but I know that it happens.
Now, guys who stay TOO close to their exes, confiding in them instead of in their significant others, doing things alone with them, that's TOTALLY inappropriate. Same for girls.
Connected via e-mail with an old flame once; not a good idea. After a flurry of casual correspondence, something began to feel, well, rekindled. (Especially when he asked if he could travel to my city to get together.) I backed away quickly. My marriage is way too valuable for me to tempt fate.
Joanna: LOL!!! at Chris Rock. "A dick in a glass case" ha ha ha. I have long revered his "black vs. n-----" routine; it's an incisive (and squirm-making) exposition of intraracial dynamics.
Caroline, I can't let go of the tshirts either!!
I was also thinking of Hollywooding McCain/Palin to just "McPain"
I like the Thanks, but No Thanks!
This topic never fails to interest me--one might ask "Why?" and I have no satisfactory answer.
I have had a consistent pattern of always being able to transition into true friend-dom with my exes, no matter what heinous acts were committed in the name of breaking up (I have never had a relationship that I would call dysfunctional--but my breakups have all been HIGHLY dysfunctional--again, asked Why? all I can say is, I don't know). Even if the breakup process has lasted years, which it it often has, there always comes a point where that ex passes, as though through a veil, into another dimension where they are no longer seen through Boyfriend Eyes. I do not will or plan it to happen--I"m graced with it, every time.
My experience of transition may or may not influence how I am seen by said exes--I can't say for sure. My relations with all of them certainly seem wonderfully simple and easy TO ME--but I realize that doesn't might not read the same to someone's current partner and I strive to respect that.
I married my college boyfriend's roommate. We dated for 3 years. Now, we each have 3 kids and go skiing together every year! It's not weird, I actually like him a LOT more than my own brother, and sort of think of him as one.
Okay - so what does it say about me that I usually want to stay friends - or try to be friends after a healthy break - but they usually want to burn me in effigy. I think not good. Or maybe it just means that I have massive commitment issues and that the men I have dated have been driven nuts by my inability to pay any attention to them at all. I am better now - not fine but better. Just don't ask my husband about this problem of mine unless you have a year or so to listen.
It is impossible to be friends, real friends, with someone who snapped your heart in half. It is equally impossible to be friends with someone whose mere presence riddles you with guilt because you (rightly or wrongly) believe you crushed them. Even virtually mutual split-ups have been categorized by the great parser, time, into "they screwed me," or "I screwed them" sorters. The mind remembers what it wants to, often at the cost of being real at all. I think Paul Simon sang it best in Kodachrome, "If I took all the girls I knew when I was single, and we all got together for one night, I'd know they'd never match my sweet imagination, everything looks worse in black and white."
Yup! I am friends with nearly all of my exes with a few notable exceptions. I also find that I shy away from dating people who universally cast exes out of their lives.
Generally, I find that the ability to stay friends with one's exes shows that you have an ability to weather rejection or the loss of dreams and transform a relationship into something else. I think it likely speaks well of a person who has exes in their lives: clearly the exes think this person is still worth knowing and it may mean that they did not do something significantly damaging to the relationship.
I once discovered months into dating someone that she refused to be friends with her exes. This disturbed me immensely. I almost broke things off with her then because I couldn't believe I was dating someone who had this rule that didn't take into account what the circumstances of the breakup might be. We did not last as lovers. But, we are friends now, 14 years later. :)
Just this past Thursday had a mending discussion with the only ex that I wasn't on excellent terms with.