Over time, it’s become popular to befriend your ex after the relationship is over, to show a sense of empowerment and “closure” regardless of what happened between you two and how you are truly feeling. DISCLAIMER: if the two parties are friends voluntarily, that is absolutely amazing. I am not shaming this type of relationship by any means; I’m just expressing my mixture of experience and observation.
Since this phenomenon has been occurring, especially at the young adult level, many people force said relationships simply to not seem vindictive and dwell on the breakup.
With shows like Gossip Girl, where everyone in the friend group has dated and broken up and still remain great friends, seems a tad unrealistic, but has become the norm. People automatically assume that if you are not friends with your ex, you hate them or she/he broke your heart, and this is not always the case. I dated someone for a good portion of high school and when we broke up I felt like we needed to be friends, because it would help me cope and was the mature thing to do. If people saw we were friends, then I would have a definite handle on life, right? Wrong. Regarding him and I, our personalities didn’t allow friendship, and I just didn’t want to believe it. It ended up causing more confusion and awkwardness, causing me to keep the negative vibes in my life that I did not need. If you ended on bad terms, or are trying to completely get over your ex, being so-called friends can be poisonous.
Trying to adhere to this standard of cool and nonchalance people are forcing themselves to have is insane and in the long run you end up hurting yourself more than anything. If you know for a fact that this friendship will end in disaster, abort mission. If you have intense anger or abhorrence for your ex, it is okay to hate them for whatever they did to you, you do NOT have to pretend you like them or can even stand them. If you just don’t feel like talking to your ex anymore, for any reason at all, please do not feel obliged.
Other people are going to say what they want, but they weren’t in the relationship with you two, so therefore their opinion on the matter is as insignificant as Michelle William’s career post Destiny’s Child. Maybe in the future you two can be friends once the maturation level equalizes, but if the time is not now that’s just how it is. Things have a funny way of occurring chronologically and fate has a weird way of opening and closing doors whether we are ready or not, but we just have to be ready to accept what’s handed to us. To refrain from finishing my thoughts to the tune of a Disney movie, I won’t tell you to follow your heart and trust your gut in these situations, they’re normally both right. I also won’t tell you that life is too short to deal with negativity and demise; you’re flawless.
