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Hey, everybody, it's MaryL.
There's this Fiona Apple song that might be one of the saddest break up tunes I've ever heard.
Like, if you're going through a breakup and you really want to wallow, put this one on.
It's called Love Written.
In it, she describes the feeling of someone turning from partner to stranger.
She calls her former lover a term of endearment, baby, and then corrects herself.
No, I'm not brave anymore. If I need you, I'll just use your symbol.
Dang, you know, we saw each other every day.
We traveled together. I called you baby.
And now I have to just call you Bob or Barbara.
The next thing you know, we'll just be waving at each other from across the street.
This sad realization is one reason people try to stay friends with their exes.
I think sometimes it can just feel like such a loss to go from someone potentially being one of the closest people in your world
to you not talking to them at all.
That feels jarring, that feels devastating.
And I think people want to lighten the weight of that loss.
That's Washington DC based psychologist, Marissa Franco.
She's a researcher and the author of the book Platonic.
How the science of attachment can help you make and keep friends.
And she says people tell themselves, you know, if my ex and I can be friends,
then it's not all the ways. It's not all the loss.
There's still things that I can hold on to.
Now, as anyone who's tried to be friends with an ex could tell you,
things can get sticky real fast.
You know, you might not be ready yet.
You might not be friends for the right reasons.
You might not even be compatible as friends.
Maybe your relationship was largely romantic and sexual.
On today's episode of LifeKin, journalist Ruth Tam is going to give us some ground rules.
A guide basically that'll help you determine whether to stay friends with an ex
and what kind of friendship you both want.
And I'll just say here, if you're still listening to sad Fiona Apple songs and crying over them,
yeah, you're probably not ready.
All that sitting and swiping, your body is adapting to your technology.
Learn how and what you can do about it.
I really felt like the cloud in my brain kind of dissipated.
Once I started realizing what a difference these little breaks were making,
there's no turning back for me.
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I remember one time I broke up with someone and I mentioned it to my boss at the time,
and without knowing me very well, not to mention who I was dating, my boss simply said,
well, f*** him.
And that interaction said a lot to me about what people assume about breakups and how you should
treat your ex's afterwards. The thinking is that whoever you are dating is dead to you.
But sometimes that doesn't feel right. How can you go from feeling so close to someone to being
estranged from them? Look, I know I'm not alone here. Countless songs have been written about
this exact problem. So some people who break up try to stay friends. But that too doesn't always
feel easy or natural. I do think it's possible to be friends with an ex. I think that sometimes
it can be the exception to the rule. I think it's something you can't force, but it widely depends
on like a, your definition of an ex, b, how long you were together, and I think see like how
the relationship went and how it ended. This is Victoria Harding. She's a lesbian living in
Somerville, Massachusetts. When she first came out and was starting to navigate the dating world,
she didn't have a lot of queer friends. So she started to build friendships with people she
dated or hooked up with. When she realized she was ready for a serious partner, she turned to
these friends, her former flings, for advice. I worked in the nonprofit sector around this point.
I was like, you know, my nonprofit has a board of directors. Like, why don't I just have a dating
board of directors? So yeah, I just made a group chat with all of them and I would just kind of text
after dates or five scenes when being like, hey, is this kind of weird or like, is this good or like,
should I end it with this person if they did like x, y, and z or am I being crazy?
Dare I ask how many people are in the board of directors group chat? I think it's four, five,
one, two, three, four, five. Yep. I wanted information from people who knew what it was like to date me.
Like they were the first to be like, Victoria, that was weird and also you did that on our first date.
The idea of turning your exes into advisors, I love it. We may not want all our exes in the
same group chat, but I think it's refreshing to see how we can still have meaningful connections
with them once our romantic relationships end. Of course, there are times where it doesn't make sense
to stay in contact with an ex. If you are mistreated, take an advantage of or felt unsafe, you should
definitely try to maintain your distance. But when relationships end for other reasons,
figuring out a new dynamic with a former partner doesn't have to be all or nothing.
They don't have to be either friends or strangers. You can develop a platonic relationship that
works for you. So how do you actually navigate that? Here's our first takeaway. Ask yourself the
question, why do I want to maintain a connection with an ex? Here's friendship expert Marissa Franco.
One of the primary questions we have to ask ourselves is, would I be friends with this person
if I wasn't dating them? If I wasn't romantically involved, is this the kind of person I would
want to be friends with? Marissa suggests asking, were you actually good friends before your
relationship? What about during it? Or are you still hurting after a breakup and feel desperate
to keep them in your life? Are you used to them being your main source of support as opposed to
doing something solo, calling on friends or family or a professional? You may want to keep an
ex in your life because you're a people pleaser and you don't want to let them or your mutual
friends down. Or you may want to feel validated as a good partner, a good friend or a good person
and you think being friendly with an ex is a sign of that. Whatever it is, be honest with yourself
about your intentions. It's going to be easier to be friends if you were friends when you were
dating, which is just not true for all couples. If this was a connection that was built on the romantic
built on the sexual, you might realize that you don't actually want to be friends with them,
that you're, you know, again, doing it for those reasons of trying to soften the blow of the
breakup, but that they don't actually look like the people that you tend to want into your life
platonically. Staying in touch with an ex might be about more than preserving your friendship.
It might be about the shared life you used to have. Friendly acquaintances might be a good option
if you have kids together or if you have a shared friend group, people are more likely to maintain
friends with their ex when there's a shared friend group. So, you know, there might be reasons to
kind of be on a friendly level, even if emotionally you're not in a place where you can authentically
dive headfirst into a full blown friendship. Staying in touch might be normal for the community
that you're both a part of. Perhaps you're both queer and you expect to see your ex in the same
social circles post breakup. Here's Xavier Patchky, a therapist based in New York with the gender
and sexuality therapy center. Within kind of the polyamorous and queer communities, it's more of like
an ongoing kind of political effort to make it more like communal. I also would say like the
community is smaller. You're going to run into some exes. So, how to do that in a healthy way
and how to make sure that is a smooth transition because you're probably going to be in community
after the breakup. Part of figuring out why you want to be in touch with an ex is asking yourself
this crucial question. Am I actually in a healthy place to be in contact with them? That's our
second takeaway. You can't be authentic with a friend whether you've dated them or not if you
have a hidden agenda. So, you shouldn't be reaching out if you still desire them. Here again,
is psychologist and friendship expert Marissa Franco. There's research that finds it's just harder
to get over your ex. If you stay friends, you're more likely to desire your ex romantically and they're
more likely to desire you. And so, if you want kind of like an honest friendship, I would try to
wait until some of those feelings subside. If you're always tempted to bring up the past,
it's probably not a good idea to hang out. One way of knowing you're ready to treat them as a friend
is when you fully forgiven them for the past, you want the best for them and are happy for them,
whether or not their life includes you. Of course, all this is easier said than done because the
likelihood of being able to achieve all that depends on how you both handled the breakup.
So, if it was a more destructive breakup where you were ghosting or disengaging or withdrawing
or not really giving resolution or clarity, you're less likely to be able to maintain friendship
after. Whereas if you give like kind of like nice honest clear up front, transparent, not blaming
or attacking, you're more likely to be able to maintain that friendship. So, I would say the work
of being friends with your ex actually starts before they become an ex. If you've spent some time
thinking about why you want to stay in touch and if you're in a healthy place to do that,
it's time for a third takeaway. Ask yourself, what do I want our relationship to look like?
Do you want a close friendship that involves calling each other for advice? Or would you be more
comfortable with a friendly acquaintance's situation? It helps to know what you want first. That way
you aren't overly influenced by what they want. This might be something to watch out for if you tend
to have people pleasing tendencies or have difficulty vocalizing what your needs are. Here's a
Xavier again. Really being honest with yourself and checking in and being like, this is what I want.
If that doesn't match, then that's where a negotiation could happen, right? They really want to
be friends and you're like, I would like to be acquaintances, right? And then we can kind of find
something in between that. If there is a mismatch between what you both want, you'll have to figure
out how to respect the needs of the person who wants less intimacy in this moment. Because just
like a romantic relationship, you can't force a connection. Whether you've decided to be friends
or friendly acquaintances, it helps to remember that you haven't necessarily been downgraded in your
ex's life. Friendship might feel like a difficult pill to swallow because it feels like a
consolation prize, you know, something you settle for after breaking up. But transitioning smoothly
from being romantic to platonic means not placing either connection above or below the other.
I think it's viewing the relationship bottom up rather than top down. Like top down, we were
romantic. So now we should be something similarly platonically that's very close and intimate. But
rather, okay, this is how we're connecting now post-relationship given that information,
where do we want it to go? To figure out what level of connection feels good,
learn how to emotionally read the room. Try to survey the scene. What is the nature of your
relationship currently and how can you approach your ex in a way that reflects that? Just because
you used to be close when you were romantic partners doesn't mean that once you're platonic,
you have to have the same level of closeness. We don't necessarily want the most amount of intimacy
there is. We want a level of intimacy that matches, you know, the nature of the relationship,
right? Like in fact, friendship might work better for some people than a romantic connection does
because when they're, you know, spending all their time together, they end up getting tired of
each other, they get, end up getting annoyed with each other. You might actually find that giving
each other space makes you better friends. Sometimes distance creates more intimacy. I'm sure people
can relate to this with their families where they're like, I really love my family when I visit
them on the holidays rather than living with them. So similarly, that can be the case for romantic
relationships where you're like, okay, I'm actually happier and you're happier when we see each other
once a month and have check-ins rather than when we're living with each other. And look, if you find
yourself stuck on this question of what you actually want with an ex, it's okay to not know.
Here's our therapist, Xavier. When people have boundary conversations, they think they need to have
the exact answer and articulate it perfectly of exactly what they want and why and how they're
going to do that. But it's okay for the boundary to start at, I'm not sure. Like, I don't know if I
want to hear about your future dates, but we'll try it and then we'll check in again and be like,
okay, that was fine actually, I'm okay with that or not for me. And I don't know as a perfectly
okay boundary. If this is you and you don't know what you want, buy yourself some time to find out
where you are emotionally. Here again is Victoria who put five for casual axes in a group chat.
I do believe if you are going to be friends with like a serious act, you should probably try to go
no contact at first. I've never tried it myself, but I look back and wish that I had.
You're not going to regret taking time to figure it out, but you can wind up regretting rushing
the process. Are therapists Xavier suggest paying attention to how you react to an ex?
Not just emotionally, but physically. For example, how does your body feel when you get a text from them?
If you like see the text and it's just like anxiety instead of, oh, okay, my friend, right? Like,
that might be a sign of taking some space or taking time away from that relationship. Sometimes
with that time apart, you might realize you don't want to be friends actually. You might like have
more hurt as the processing is happening. And you might like realize like, oh, actually like we were
really bad together and I don't want to be around them. Right? You can work through all these issues
and find that the situation you're in is still dynamic, still changing. What if, for example, you
start to have romantic feelings towards your ex again? I would ask what changed? Like, what would
make it work right now? Just being clear on like, if you want to rekindle something, then there
should be a reason that you can state for why things might go better this time around. And sometimes
there's really legitimate reasons. Maybe you are long distance and now you're in the same city
or maybe sometimes you really have grown and realize how you were contributing to this
you and and you're ready to be more immature about it. I can't say that like people should never
get back with their exes, but I can say at least from a research perspective, when you go back to
someone that you dated prior, their relationship tends to have a lower likelihood of success than if
they're a new person. After taking time for you both to reflect, remember that you don't need to
be friends with an ex. Staying in touch may or may not feel optional, but the level of closeness
is up to you. The new relationship you two have should ideally add to your life, not drain from it.
Here's Victoria again. Like I think you can be in denial for a while and think like, oh my gosh,
like I need this person, like I'll keep them in my life in like any capacity, but you know,
if they're not meeting you halfway, then you shouldn't have to force it.
If you're going through a breakup, first off, I'm sorry. It could be so hard working your way
through that pain. And if you're now trying to figure out a platonic dynamic with someone you
used to date, here are three takeaways. Ask yourself, one, why do I want to stay in touch with my ex?
Two, am I in a healthy place to do so? And three, what do I want our new relationship to look like?
Just like a romantic relationship, you're not in complete control of the dynamic between you and
a partner after you break up. It takes at least two of you to want the same thing, to take care of
that dynamic and to communicate your boundaries, and maybe the boundaries of any new partners.
It'll require you to be considerate and communicative, but it can deliver some pretty delightful results.
Just ask Victoria, with the Board of Directors Group Chat of X's.
Did she ever find love? The last thing I wrote was like, hello board, I have a girlfriend,
thank you for following me on this journey. I think we should all get brunch and they were all like,
wow, congratulations, like I love to hear it. X's supporting X's, we truly love to hear it.
That was Journalist Ruth Tam. For more life kit, check out our other episodes. We have one on how
to break up and another on how to date in real life without dating apps. You can find those at
npr.org slash life kit. And if you love life kit and you want even more, subscribe to our newsletter
at npr.org slash life kit newsletter. Also, we love hearing from you, so if you have episode ideas
or feedback you want to share, email us at life kit at npr.org. This episode of Life Kit was produced
by Sylvie Douglas. Our visuals editor is back Harlan, and our digital editor is Malika Grete.
Megan Cain is our supervising editor and Beth Donovan is our executive producer.
Our production team also includes Andy Tagle, Claire Marish Nider and Margaret Serena.
Engineering support comes from James Willits, special thanks to Fiona Scarborough and Rachel Friedman.
I'm Mary Elcigara. Thanks for listening.
This is my voice. I can tell you a lot about me and I'm not changing it for anyone.
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