7 Reasons Why Being Friends with Your Ex Usually Doesn’t Work

It often happens that a couple gets a divorce but decides to continue friendly relationships anyway. Staying civilized and tolerant in relation to each other is a good thing, regarding both of you, your children and surrounding. Yet, nurturing close friendship may not end well for anyone. Although your ex-husband may seem to be the best candidate to back you up in difficult situations and save you from loneliness, your ambiguous friendliness may ruin your present and future and bring a mass of troubles on top to your post-divorce issues. You are not forced to go to any extremes, but you’d better look at the reasons for not being friends with your ex before making any final decisions.

Need Time on Your Own

When all legal divorce issues are finally behind, most divorcees need some time on their own to settle the situation and adapt to new life conditions without difficulties. You need to realize your new status and accept that you are no longer married, maybe even grieve or let the anger out. If your ex will be sill by your side you will have neither time nor space to pass through all the post-divorce stages. It will be easier right after divorce, but sooner or later when you will finally draw apart to build up your lives in a new direction, you will have to relive the “divorce period” one more time. This can be too much for both of you and damage your lives significantly.

Relationship Rollercoasters

When you stay good friends after the divorce, there will be always “why not” situations, which will bring up a lot of complications consequently. You are doomed to come together and draw apart numerous times, have intimate relationships on the spot, feeling guilty afterward, and man more ambiguous cases, which will bring no good. This will bring the feeling of constant instability in your life, puzzle your children, and prevent you from building up a happy future and healthy relationships with other people. Are you sure that your indefinite relationship rollercoasters are worth of it?

Love and Broken Heart

Being finished with all possible divorce forms and documents, even counting superior court divorce forms, and still striving to keep a close friendship is the vivid sign that one spouse is still in love with another. This is one of the worst scenarios of post-divorce friendship. If you decide to get divorced than you have serious reasons to end your marriage and you need to end your relationships as well. Deciding to stay friends may be evoked by one partner still being in love and another partner feeling guilty for his spouse and ended marriage. Staying friends will give useless hopes to the first spouse and the burden of uncertainty to both of them. Anyway, it will all end sooner or later with the broken heart and may lead to serious problems and depression.

Confused Surrounding

When your older kids see you file for divorce online and younger have somehow put up with the fact that mommy and daddy are not together anymore, and, suddenly the next day they see you chatting joyfully in the kitchen, it may be puzzling and inconvenient for all of you. More to this, your close friends and relatives will choose the side of one of the partners after divorce so they will have hurdles dealing with another side after your reunion. This way your uncertainty in personal issues and decisions may harm and bring emotional disorder to your close people, not only to you personally.

Trying to Remake Your Ex

Friendship after divorce and the difference of relationship you will now have may give you a fresh look at your ex. So some vague hopes may arise. When you see your ex from a different perspective you may have wished and thought that you have a right to change your partner up to your failed expectations of marriage relationships. This will never end well and you are likely to obtain far worse relationships than you had straight after divorce.

Prevent Your Ex from Happiness

Imagine your ex-partner falling in love with the other woman or man after your divorce. So, you as a true friend has to support him/her and wish them to be happy together. Or you are still jobless, while your ex is moving up the career ladder successfully. Are you ready for that? Won’t you be a burden for your partner, or try to delay his/her evolving life just to be in the same conditions and the same level? Think about it.

No Qualitative Fresh Start

If you live in past and try to rebuild it, you will have no chances to succeed in the future. This is what friendship with an ex may bring to you. You will try to change something in yourself and your partner, analyze your failures, strive for reconciliation, instead of moving forward. You will drag each other back instead of working on changes and adapt to new life conditions. That is why and many more reasons because it is better to get separated amicably but keep the safe distance not to ruin each other’s lives and prevent happiness.

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