Relationships1w ago · 54 comments
Should you stay friends with your ex?
Mature and healthy, or a door left open you both keep tripping over? Where does friendship end and unfinished business begin?
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Add your comment- Leo1w ago
My ex and I have been 'just friends' for three years. We text every day. We meet for coffee. His girlfriend hates me. My boyfriend tolerates it. Neither of us has the guts to admit what's actually happening. So. Yeah. Read the room.
- Maya R.1w ago
That's incredibly unfair to your current partners. Like, I'm sorry but you're describing a situation where two people are getting their emotional needs met by each other while their actual partners get the leftovers.
- Riley1w ago
'We're just friends' is what people say while keeping a backup warm and emotionally cheating in slow motion. Sometimes. Not always. But sometimes.
- Quinn2d ago
The comment about 'never grieved, just reclassified' destroyed me because that is my entire twenties in one sentence.
- Hana1w ago
My ex is my emergency contact. Has been for six years since we split. We both remarried other people. She called me when her dad died at 3am and I didn't think twice. Some bonds just aren't romantic and never were, even inside the relationship. Not every story is a drama.
- Marco4d ago
My ex and I are 'friends' on social media, which means I watch his highlight reel and he watches mine and we both pretend the other one is doing fine. That's not a friendship. That's surveillance with good manners.
- Zara3d ago
I stayed friends with mine and watched him fall in love with someone new from the front row with a smile on my face for two years. I was proud of myself the whole time. Then I had a complete breakdown at 34 and my therapist said 'you never grieved the relationship, you just reclassified it.' Don't do that. Grieve first. Everything else second.
- Taylor M.5d ago
I've noticed that when women say they want to stay friends with their ex, people assume she's not over him. When men say it, people assume he's a great guy. The double standard in how we judge this is wild and nobody's talking about it.
- Jordan1w ago
I'm a therapist and I want to push back on the idea that staying friends is automatically unhealthy. Attachment doesn't always equal romantic unfinished business. Two adults can genuinely reorganize a relationship into something platonic. It requires honest self-assessment and usually some real time apart first — but it's absolutely possible and sometimes deeply valuable.
- Nina1w ago
With all due respect that's therapist speak for 'theoretically possible but almost never actually happens that way in the wild'
- Hana3d ago
Hot take that will age well: the people who are most loudly insisting they're 'totally fine being friends' with their ex are almost always the ones who ended things and feel guilty about it. It's not friendship. It's absolution-seeking with a group chat.
- Reese 924d ago
I think the real question is whether you can celebrate their happiness with someone else. Genuinely. Without a pit in your stomach. If you can, the friendship is probably real. If you can't, it's just hope wearing a friendship costume.
- Hana M.4d ago
disagree. you can be a genuinely good friend to someone and still feel a little sting when they move on. that's not hope, that's just being human. requiring zero emotional residue as the test for 'real' friendship sets an impossible bar.
- Quinn1w ago
Burned my bridges and I regret every single one. My ex is now married to someone else and we don't speak. We had ten good years and three bad ones and I threw all thirteen away because I couldn't handle the transition. Don't do what I did.
- Noah1d ago
The friendship test I actually use: would I introduce them to someone new I was dating, within the first three dates, and feel completely unbothered? Not performatively unbothered. Actually unbothered. I have one ex who passes that test and four who absolutely do not, and I stopped lying to myself about which category they were in about two years ago. The ones who don't pass the test aren't bad people and I'm not a bad person — we just didn't finish the thing we started, emotionally, and calling it friendship doesn't fix that.
- Jamie6d ago
I asked my ex to be my best man. He said yes. My wife was NOT amused and she was right not to be. I was using the friendship to avoid fully committing emotionally to my marriage. I only understood this about four years in when my therapist basically drew me a diagram.
- Omar B.5d ago
The diagram comment made me laugh but also this is genuinely brave to admit publicly
- Noah3d ago
The fact that this is framed as a binary — friends or enemies — tells you everything about how badly we handle breakups as a society. There's a huge middle territory called 'warmly wishes you well but doesn't need you in their daily life' and it barely has a name because we don't practice it.
- Quinn1w ago
The people who say 'we're better as friends' are usually the ones who dumped the other person and feel guilty about it. It's a consolation prize disguised as maturity.
- Iris2d ago
okay but nobody ever talks about the FRIENDS who get caught in the middle when two people break up and then 'stay friends.' suddenly every hangout is a diplomatic negotiation. some of us are exhausted being Switzerland for your unresolved feelings
- Elena5d ago
People act like staying friends is always the progressive enlightened choice and cutting contact is petty or immature. Sometimes cutting contact IS the mature choice because you know yourself well enough to know you can't handle it. Self-knowledge is underrated.
- Marco _x5d ago
THANK YOU. I'm so tired of being made to feel like a failure because I chose no contact. It was the healthiest thing I ever did and people act like I'm the one who hasn't 'done the work'
- Theo R.5d ago
Nobody is saying you're a failure for choosing no contact. But let's not pretend it's always about self-knowledge. Sometimes it's about avoidance, which isn't growth either.
- Liam4d ago
Four months out of a seven-year relationship. People keep telling me we should stay friends because we were so good together. What they mean is that THEY don't want to deal with the awkwardness of taking sides. The 'stay friends' pressure often comes from mutual friends protecting their own comfort, not yours.
- Leo4d ago
Oh this is so sharp and so true and I wish someone had said this to me eight years ago
- Casey1d ago
I'm a therapist (not giving professional advice here, just a person) and the question I actually find useful is: does this friendship have its own reason to exist NOW, or is it only surviving on the fumes of who you were to each other? That's not a judgment either way. It's just a more honest question than 'can we be friends?'
- Liam 926d ago
The people who make this work long-term almost always had a clean, honest breakup. That's the actual prerequisite nobody talks about. A messy ending very rarely turns into a healthy friendship. The foundation matters.
- Maya6d ago
Counterpoint: some of the healthiest post-breakup friendships I've witnessed came out of very messy endings. Sometimes working through the mess together is what creates genuine respect. A clean breakup can also mean neither person ever said the hard truths.
- Feli2d ago
I have three ex-partners. One is dead to me (mutual, fine), one is a casual acquaintance I'd help if he called, one is genuinely one of my closest friends fifteen years later. The idea that there's one right answer here is just... no. Every relationship leaves a completely different kind of scar or gift. Treat them differently.
- Elena3d ago
Can we stop treating this like a universal rule either way? My culture expects you to hate your ex forever or people think the relationship didn't matter. My partner's culture expects you to stay friendly or people think you're immature. Both pressures are nonsense. Do what actually works for you and stop performing either position for an audience.
- Ravi1w ago
Hot take: the ones who insist they absolutely cannot be friends with an ex are sometimes the ones who never actually processed the relationship. The anger is the unfinished business too, not just the lingering warmth.
- Yuki 921w ago
This is genuinely a good point and nobody in this thread is going to give it the credit it deserves because it's uncomfortable.
- Liam L.4d ago
Stayed friends with my ex for two years 'doing the right thing'. She was in a new relationship the whole time and I was slowly going insane. One day I just stopped answering. Best decision I ever made. Sometimes loving someone means letting the whole thing go completely.
- Jamie1w ago
I think there's a massive difference between exes who dated for 8 months at 22 and exes who built a life together for a decade. Treating these as the same conversation is why we never reach a useful conclusion. Context is everything.
- Taylor R.1d ago
My husband knows I'm still friends with my college ex. They've met, they like each other, we all had dinner once. I understand this sounds unhinged to about 60% of people reading this and completely normal to the other 40% and both groups are right about their own lives.
- Hana5d ago
The question nobody asks: what does the friendship actually look like? Are you supporting each other through life? Or are you just... available? Two very different things wearing the same label.
- Kofi1d ago
The timeline matters more than anyone here is saying. Friends six months after a two-year relationship? Probably one of you is fooling themselves. Friends six years later after you've both built separate lives? Completely different emotional landscape. We keep arguing about a static answer to a question that changes entirely depending on when you're asking it.
- Elena2d ago
nah the real answer is kids. if you have kids together you HAVE to figure out how to be something resembling friendly and everyone acting like you get a clean break is giving terrible advice to actual parents
- Zara1w ago
Honestly? It depends almost entirely on why you broke up. Cheating: no. Grew apart: maybe. Wrong timing: high risk. Mutual respect and just incompatible: actually yes, sometimes the friendship is the truer version of the relationship all along.
- Sam6d ago
Every situationship I've ever been in ended with 'let's stay friends' and then six weeks of torture followed by silence. At a certain point you have to recognize the pattern and just... not do it.
- Zara2d ago
I think the distinction people are dancing around is: friendship you'd have chosen anyway vs. friendship that only exists because you used to sleep together. The first can be real. The second is mostly just... inertia dressed up as maturity.
- Feli1d ago
what gets me is we treat romantic love like it retroactively poisons everything. like the years of knowing someone, the inside jokes, the way they knew which thing to say when your dad was sick — all of that just becomes contraband the second you break up? i don't buy it. some of that is worth salvaging even if the romance wasn't
- Reese1d ago
lmao 'be honest about who you're really protecting' okay but sometimes you're protecting yourself and that is allowed. not every choice post-breakup has to be a selfless act of nobility. sometimes you stay in contact because you're lonely and scared and you're not ready. that's human. that's okay too.
- Maya2d ago
Confidently wrong opinion incoming from me: if your ex actively doesn't want to be your friend after the breakup, that's a red flag about their character. Mature adults should be able to put aside hurt feelings. I am prepared to be argued with.
- Elena2d ago
That is genuinely one of the most entitled things I've read today and I've been on the internet since 7am. Nobody owes you friendship. Someone declining to maintain contact after you've hurt them — or they've hurt you — is not a character flaw. It is a boundary. Calling it immature is how people justify not respecting it.
- Theo R.1w ago
Best friend now is my ex of nine years. We were terrible lovers and excellent humans. People can't imagine it because they've never done the work.
- Zara 211w ago
If you can be friends right after, either you never loved them or you're lying about being over it. Real grief needs distance first.
- Diego1w ago
The test isn't whether YOU can handle it. It's whether your next partner should have to. Be honest about who you're really protecting.
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