Good advice! I think i'm adding this in my memories for future reference if I get into a bind and sometimes I still get issues after dumping my ex back in 2005. I had to, otherwise he would have been controling or even abusive toward me in the future. i wasn't going to let that happen.

I just hope that my next boyfriend will become my husband...hopefully i wouldn't need your words. but maybe just in case.

good luck with your wife. may you both be happy.

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[ponder]

I think I'd have chosen "eventual" instead of "current", if you needed something to modify "wife".

:-)

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True. I did pause on the phrasing of that for a bit.

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Have you found it necessary, in the past when a breakup was inevitable, talked-about and agreed upon, to actually have sex one more time as a sort of goodbye? I thought from my early experiences that something like that always happened, because it always seemed to happen to me. But my last several breakups haven't included that. I guess I don't need to un-fuck someone in order to say goodbye.

(And I'm curious about my OKC profile too - how does it make me look? You know me a little, so I'm curious if there's much resemblance.)

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I've never had break-up sex myself. When it comes to the more painful breakups, I'm not sure I could enjoy sex when I'm feeling that sad, and if the breakup is just because we kinda got bored with each other, then we're probably bored with the sex by now too.

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This is also how I feel about my exes - something that Mr. E doesn't understand and has issues with. That's pretty sad, 'cause it tells me that he's never really dated/slept with someone he actually, y'know, liked.

Me, otoh, if you put on my exes in a room without them knowing they had me in common, they'd most likely become friends. Or kill each other. Shit happens.

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Put all my exes in a room and you'd see the body type I go for right away. Short, pudgy, animated.

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I so agree.

amusingly, the two exes I am not in contact with are my exhusband and the guy I was handfasted to. the ex-husband was a huge drug-induced mistake, but I would get back in contact with him if he were findable. the ex-hf'ed is in need of supervised medical care and scares me.

yay for making better choices over time!

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Ok, feel free to analyze my okc if you have time. You know where to find me. :)

I agree with this, in most cases, unless the relationship has petered out and you're already at the "just friends" stage already. Though break-ups can tend to rekindle romantic aspects of relationships for some reason. Why are humans so weird?

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Other than a few people I dated and, like you said, found out pretty quick that all we had in common was sex, I'm friends with nearly all of my exes.

The one glaring difference is my ex-husband. We were best friends since childhood, but the relationship deteriorated SO BAD towards the end that we couldn't salvage any of the friendship. I suspect the initial bumps and bruises of co-parenting from two different households cemented this, too.

We can be cordial, but I don't like him anymore.

(A great number of my exes attended my wedding and are still considered good friends. My most recent ex and I are friendly, but even after almost nine months, it still hurts like hell and we aren't -close-.)

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Spouses are often difficult; one of the things that saved my marriage was telling Gini that if we got divorced, she didn't get to have me as a friend. This was our one shot, and if she liked having me in her life, then she needed to work at it.

It was a good incentive.

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So weird reading stuff like this. (I started doing the maths, but the number of years freaked me out, and I quit.) But I think you're right about the remaining friends thing. I'm far more likely to have remained friends if there was the capacity in the "relationship" to BE friends, not just sex.

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Yeah, sorry. I always hesitate to discuss ex-girlfriends when some of 'em are reading, but you know the truth: I like you a lot, always have, and always will.

Well, unless you become Hitler. You know how it is. *g*

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At one point I told my current boyfriend that he had to stop trying to salvage a friendship with his ex, or I wouldn't be able to keep dating him. I feel bad about this. I don't like ultimatums, and generally I agree with you that, after a cooling off period, it's good to be friends again. But her interactions with him and us (months after the breakup) were malicious and abusive, and her harassment was giving me panic attacks all over the place. But I believe him when he says that she wasn't always like that (batshit crazy), and I feel bad for having to cut that off.

My exes... well, one of them was just sex and the other turned out to be a bad person. Like, really bad. Unmentionable bad.

So, despite the fact that it's never worked out for me, I agree.

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SOme of the exes don't want to be exes - they want to be in a relationship still. You can't keep those around. And it's a shame, but it's true.

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I can't do it... or maybe more accurately won't become friends afterward. To me the breakup usually is because of a betrayal of respect for me, or that the line gets crossed of whether or not proper concern over my choices has been crossed. For some reason it's all or nothing with me, either you love, care and want to see what's best for me/us or you don't. Break ups mean that you aren't given that opportunity to have an opinion anymore, and friendship means inviting that care or consideration back in to be violated again.

It's not to say that I won't be pleasant and cordial when we meet again, but it most definitely wouldn't be a friendship level.

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I can't be friends with my exes either.

But that's because so far, I haven't been able to fall out of love with them.

How do people do that, anyways?

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Yeah, sort of.

I'm on decently friendly terms with all but one of my ex-boyfriends, and that one I dated at thirteen-to-fifteen, when I admit I was a dumbass. I *have* lost touch with the ones I dated in high school, by and large, but I don't generally feel too bad about that: I've also lost touch with most of my friends from high school, because it was...high school, we were friends mostly because we were in the same place at the same time, and we're different people now.

There are people I had sex with that I now can't stand, but I haven't personally believed that all sex should involve like, respect, or connection: there are a few guys I fucked to get breakup catharsis, or to keep myself entertained during senior spring, or whatever, and some of them strike me as extra-lame now, but that's part of the package.

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I draw a distinct difference between "losing touch with" and "being friends." I'm friends with a lot of people I don't stay in touch with, but when I see them I'm intensely happy. I don't have to talk to them all the time to keep them on my good list.

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This sounds like a great idea that I'm psychologically/emotionally incapable of executing. It took me ten years to contact one of my exes and admit that I may have treated him unfairly during the breakup. And even after that, I didn't want to talk to him very much after that. Too many memories and too many stored emotions, all of them bad, of course.

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Yup. My most recent ex is one of my best friends right now, and she's pretty helpful. She's actually trying to teach me how to pick up girls at bars, though so far it hasn't been working out because I'm fiercely introverted.

But she also dyes my hair, which has been working out splendidly.

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I too remain friends with many ex's, except for the last one. He blaimes me for anything and everything that went wrong AND I am the one who left so he's pretty pissed about it.

Okcupid crossconnects

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I agree with you very much on that - but then, my wife & I just photographed the wedding of one of her exes, have done so for another one a couple of years ago, and one of my wife's bridesmaids at our wedding was an ex of mine. I've usually worked on the idea of being friends with someone before dating them, so for most of my exes, after some time for the hurt feelings to go away, we've gone back to that relationship.

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You been reading my LJ or something?

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I've never had sex with someone I didn't love.
I've never loved someone I couldn't first be friends with.

I am so like this that it confuses me that people can do either of these things without little warning flags going up in their minds. But, you know, that's just me. :-)


One of the many, many aspects of why relationships fail is the habit of blaming. Those who are trapped in this bad habit rarely exercise its counter-habit, giving credit. Humans are very bizarre, and too many grow up without any critical thinking abilities.

I am polyamorous. When these discussions of multiple breakups but remaining friends threads come up, I always wonder - why all this ending? Love isn't either/or. It is all-inclusive when allowed to be. But again, that's me. I was not raised poly, but apparently just am. It seems very logical to me, and much less full of drama, which I dislike immensely.

Just thoughts and another point of view. If you want to read & comment on my OKC profile, I'm MT2FL there.

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I've never had sex with someone I wasn't friends with, but often I was fooling myself about their positive qualities because I wanted to have sex with them. The flag would go up if I thought, "Hey, she isn't cool," but the technical hurdle is passed.

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Not being friends with my exes is not because we didn't connect, it's because basically all my exes used me.

I do keep a semi-good relationship with my ex Martha (as seen in my okcupid profile haha...also, fun fact, her tag in my LJ is the number 2 highest used tag)...because, no matter what, I run into her at school ALL THE FREAKIN TIME. The year after we broke up, I tried to join ONA (sorta the GSA @ GVSU)...she became the treasurer. The next year, I decided to join Voices for Healthy Choices (pro-choice, women's health, etc)...only to find out that SHE HAD JOINED TOO. O.O

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As I was about to comment -- the dynamic changes if your ex abused you -- be it verbally or physically or both. I've only had opportunities to deal with the mindfuck that is verbal/psychological abuse, and, after a year and a half of that shit I never want to see that man again in my life. Maybe I'll feel different a few years down the road, but... He was my friend -- one of my best friends -- and my mate -- and he used that against me to trap me in a relationship where he had someone to take out his pent up aggression on. Yeah.

I don't think I failed in that situation -- except maybe in living in denial for so long over how I was treated.

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It's funny, the one ex I have that I WANT to be friends with hates me. We wanted to be friends right off the bat, but I couldn't handle it, emotionally, so I distanced myself from her for over a year without telling her what was going on.

My own fault, sure, but I do regret it. She was one of the few people at that time who was brutally, unapologetically honest with me, and now she won't even talk to me online.

I've never had the chance to tell her my side of things, and I likely never will.

...unless she reads this comment, as she's the one who got me started reading your LJ.

ಠ_ಠ

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Well, here's to hoping. My mistakes usually don't talk to me again; maybe you'll have better luck.

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I've always thought the key was whether you were/could have been friends first, or if your only relationship was the relationship. Most of my exes that I'm still in contact with I was friends with, then dated, then went back to being friends with.

Of course, I was also part of a particularly incestous group in college; we were all friends, and many of us dated at one point or another, but we were all mellow enough about it that the group never broke apart. When my wife and I got married a few years after college, the attendees included two of her exes (with one more invited) and three of mine (with two more invited), one of whom was the maid of honor.

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*laughs* I refer to my former significant other farm as "the beloved ex collection". One of my personal inner games for my social gatherings is playing "count the exes". (:

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Yay, I'm not the only one who does that.

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I have to say, I'm afraid I complete disagree with you. Most of my girlfriends have been my friends first - in the most significant cases, they were the best, closest friends I could possibly imagine having, ever. In all those cases, the break-ups were such that we can't even think about speaking now, let alone be in the same room. Even e-mails are hard. These were relationships built on friendship, where we were both utterly in love with each other, the kind of love that makes you think no one else has ever felt this way. It was never, never just about sex. And the result of turning a friendship into such a relationship meant that there can't ever be a chance of friendship again.

In fact, the only ex-girlfriend I am still friends with is a girl I picked up in a bar without even knowing, and was never close with. We stopped dating years ago, and are still best friends.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, or invalidating your opinion in any way. My best male friend has the same thing with his ex-girlfriends, for the same reasons, I think. But I do think it's wrong of you to assume that the inability to remain friends after a break-up is the result of some kind of lack of connection. That's not true for everyone, and it certainly wasn't/isn't for me. Just because it's impossible to go back to the original friendship afterwards, doesn't mean the friendship wasn't worth anything or that the relation ship was based only on sex.

I'd be interested to know your thoughts on what I've said.

Calli

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Most of my girlfriends have been my friends first - in the most significant cases, they were the best, closest friends I could possibly imagine having, ever.

This is the case for me, yet I remain friends with them. Possibly because I just learn to bury/ignore the love over time or maybe it's just because I've never slept with any of them.

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My ratio of being friends with exes is about 50/50, which has usually been my choice and a result of it being healthier to walk away.

And yes, a cooling off period is (IMNSHO) necessary like whoa.

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Do my OKCupid :)

Username KimtheCanuck

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you can wind up falling madly in bed with each other,

Marvellous phrase!

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Not mine, but still an awesome phrase.

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I have always believed that I should only have sex with people I genuinely like.

I have always thought this too.

Either most people disagree or simply decide entirely too quickly than they "genuinely like" someone. Can you really "genuinely like" someone after only a date or two? I would think you would need to know the person for months at least to genuinely know them, much less genuienly like them.

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Then you've clearly never had one of those incredibly intense five-hour conversations with someone you just met.

Yes, sometimes it takes a lot longer than that to get to know people. But y'know, I don't always have to know someone super well before I know we're gonna be good friends.

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