men: do y’all ever ACTUALLY want to stay friends with your ex? my ex (M26) broke up with me (F23) like 6 days ago because he claimed he wasn’t over his ex yet. they dated for three years, three years ago. so 2017-2020. he told me that he thought he had gotten over her before we started seeing each other but some feelings resurfaced recently that made him realize he wasn’t fully healed from her. he told me they had ended really badly, we ended on good terms and have never had a fight or argument.
he has told me many times that i was his sweetest and kindest girlfriend, when we broke up, he said it was just because of his feelings about his ex. he had been extremely off for about 4 weeks before the breakup and he told me he had family issues and was exhausted from work, which i’m sure was also true. but he talked to his friend about it bc his friends also noticed he was really off. him and his friend concluded that he rushed into a relationship with me and he hadn’t fully healed from his past one.
when we broke up, he claimed he still wanted to continue being friends with me and i wanted that too, we had been friends for a few months before we dated & i thought we could go back to that. but since our breakup, idk how to talk to him. i’m not sure what’s normal, he takes a lot longer to respond now (like three hours every message) and for the first time since we met, we went a whole day without talking. i can’t tell if this is a case of him saying he wants to be friends to let me down easy and not actually meaning it, or if he really did mean it and this is how he is with his other friends. i’m just so used to how we were when we dated, idk.
5 comments
I’m friends with my ex. We don’t talk often though.
I think that even though you stay friends, it’s normal to expect the communication to drop off a bit. Especially during this time when you’re both going to need more space. Maybe things will get back to where they were in time. They also might not, doesn’t mean you won’t be friends but you might not be as close.
I generally consider it a green flag when people are on good terms with their exes though. Much better than leaving a trail of destruction haha. Some people can’t handle it though and find it too difficult to get over people with constant reminders of them so they have to cut them out.
No, I don’t want to be friends with my ex. My situation is more complicated because we were besties that were into each other, but she didn’t want a relationship anymore so I felt super hurt. I still do, 2 years after. Actually, these feelings are usually there when I’m free. When I’m busy, I don’t care about her.
I lost a best friend, my first ever love interest, and a potential girlfriend who liked me back.
Now just imagine my hurt.
I was 16 at the time, she was 17.
Now we’re 18M and 19F. And no I don’t talk to her, I haven’t met her in almost 2 years, I don’t follow her on social media.
Probably not lying.
Friendships have different dynamics to relationships. Speed of reply to texts is affected by these dynamics so I am not surprised he is taking longer to respond. If you find yourself waiting for a text from him, I think you probably need to cut contact and do your own healing.
A friendship formed after a breakup is different to a friendship that never moved into a relationship. You’re both going to have to figure out what this new friendship is going to look like. It will never look like what it did before, although it can be similar.
Agreed with what most people have said, friendship will give a different dynamic but he probably was genuine about wanting to stay friends. Coming from someone who has quite a few female friends from working in a mostly female dominated area I definitely don’t communicate with them everyday because there really isn’t that much shared interest other than enjoying our talks about random stuff that’s going in our lives whereas with my boys we talk everyday because we all share the same interest, hobbies, sense of humor, etc.
If your needing that irl friendship maybe finding a group that has a shared hobby would be nice to start to make some new friends.
This happens to me from time to time. I do think most guys are genuine and want to be friends. However, I try to avoid falling into this territory with guys that I like besucase I wouldn’t be a good friend to them. In the back of my head I’d be expecting more which is not conducive to healing or moving on. That’s not fair to them or to me.
I was recently dating a guy who got transferred for work and was unwilling to do long distance. He’s exact words were “I don’t want you to go anywhere” and while I get the sentiment, that’s not beneficial to me, perhaps in the future we could be friends but the answer right now is a big NO.
I guess it all depends.