Do you ever successfully remain friends with ex's?

Do you successfully remain friends with ex's?

  • Always

    Votes: 3 3.4%
  • Often

    Votes: 16 18.0%
  • Sometimes - around 50%

    Votes: 15 16.9%
  • Rarely

    Votes: 26 29.2%
  • Never

    Votes: 24 27.0%
  • Other

    Votes: 5 5.6%

I put "never."

None of my ex's are currently a part of my life. Breakups tend to be final for me--if she breaks up with me, I'm devestated, and we are unable to continue a relationship in any capacity as I push her away by pleading for her to come back. If I break up with her, it's sometimes because I have no interest in knowing her any longer, and sometimes because she's too hurt to continue.

This is not a pattern I like. I'm dealing with a breakup of a very special relationship right now, and once again she's washed her hands of me because of my behavior. I don't do breakups well, I guess.
 

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My parents divorced in the ‘80s. My Dad would eventually hook up with one of my Mom’s ski friends- Diane. They would get married and move to Idaho for her work.

Dad’s best friend sense the mid ‘60s was Dale. Dale’s second wife passed away. A year later he was encouraged to date my mom. A year after that, Mom and Dale are dating.

Okay now comes the weirdness. Diane use to baby sit Dale’s kids (kids from his first wife) back in the early ‘60s.

When my Mom goes to visit her parents- who live in Idaho, she will quite often stay at Dad and Diane’s for a day or two. Dale and Dad are better friends now then they have ever been. Diane and Mom no longer ski, but they quite often talk. Mom and Dad still hug when they greet, and when Dad is in town he makes a considered effort to meet with Mom to have dinner.

Few years back when my Grandfather passed away, we were all sitting about a breakfast table, Dad said something that was embarrassing and typical of him. Mom looks at Diane and says- “he’s your husband,” it was a great laugh. Granddad would have been very proud.

Weird? A little, I am glad they are grown up enough now to be able to communicate like adults (about time they grew up, I was getting tired of watching them).
 


I put "Never" because I've only been in one serious, long-term relationship and it ended badly.

My workaholic, very serious fiancee found out she would be graduating from college the morning of September 11th, 2001, right before the planes hit the towers. She was furious that all her friends (actually my friends, I introduced her to the group, she had few friends before meeting me) considered "some buildings falling down" more important than the fact that she was graduating. Then she got even more furious when she found out that I was seriously considering dropping out of college to enlist in the Army (which a lot of people were doing on Sept 12th). We didn't break up immediately, but our relationship went downhill, she kept finding excuses to not be with me, our conversations usually ended in arguments as she insisted that nobody cares about her because people disregarded her graduation announcement, and that I didn't care about her because I was willing to leave her "to fight over a pair of buildings". Things limped along for months, until one day I called her house (she still lived at home with her parents at age 23 and after graduating college) and got her father, who angrily shouted into the phone "[name] isn't here and never call here again!". Apparently she didn't have the nerve to break up with me in person, so she decided to have her dad break up with me for her.

Since then, the few times she ever came around our gaming club (where my friends I'd introduced her to were), she would always begin any conversation with anybody by attacking and insulting me (and we were rarely at the club office at the same time). Even though we broke up over 3 years ago, she still apparently takes the time to stop by occasionally largely to bash me to anybody present (and if I'm there, to just sit there quietly for a short while and leave). It got bad enough that once, one of my friends stood up for me when she was telling a blatantly wrong version of prior events (which he knew to be wrong because he was there to see the events in question) which portrayed me as an insensitive, uncaring lout. He called her on it and told what really happened, she responded by threatening his life, storming out, and IM'ing me with death threats against him. Wanting her to get help, but not in police troble, I turned over a printout of the IM's to the father of a mutual friend of ours (who is a psychiatrist), and apparently she got some form of intervention or warning about her tendencies to make idle death threats.

Amusingly, she wants to be a lawyer.
 


people who think that day was all about two buildings and nothing else really, fundamentally disturb me.
 

BOZ said:
people who think that day was all about two buildings and nothing else really, fundamentally disturb me.
Woah! Veering onto politics, people...

The answers so far have been interesting (thanks everyone) and I would like to see this thread continue without getting locked down.

Thanks,
Liam
 

I put sometimes, although in hindsight maybe "rarely" would have been better. Although Ihave lost track of both of them in recent years, I can think of two girlfriends whom I remained friends with for quite a while after breaking up. I went to the wedding of one of them, hung out with her husband a few times. My wife and I probably would have become great friends with the two of them if her husband wasn't career military and constantly moving to another post.
 

Only once. We're still friends now and she's friends with my fiancee. Considering all the fights we had over the six years of dating, it's a blessed miracle that we even talk at all.

The rest of the gals I've dated I don't see socially at all, and I don't care if I ever do again.

Kane
 

I can say that I've remained "friendly" with a lot of ex-boyfriends, but we are not friends... I can also say that I hate at least one of them with a passion so overwhelming that, if I ever saw him again, I may vomit.
 

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