Maintaining friendships with ex's

[firecat]

I'm afraid I'm not very good at maintaining relationships with former sweeties. In a number of cases I am theoretically willing to, but neither of us puts effort into it. In other cases when the relationship ends I just don't see anything left that is worth maintaining. I feel cold about it, but there it is.

Comments

[jenett]

Oh, I have that problem.

I'm on good terms with two of the three other people in my first quad (those being, obviously, Darkhawk and husband) but I haven't talked to my ex-fiance in years, and I've deliberately cut off all contact with both my local ex and his wife.

Me, I think it depends on why the breakup happened. If the breakup is a "Oh, we're going in different directions" then that's one thing, but if (as in the two relationships where I'm no longer in any communication), on one hand there was a lot of emotionally abusive stuff going on, and on the other, there were communications problems that no matter how I tried to fix them, my trying to fix them made them *worse*. Ditto for things like basic betrayal of trust, manipulation, etc.

Anyway, if it's the latter set of things, then I think the best thing may well be to walk away. People who do those kinds of things *aren't* people I want to have in my life, even as friends. That's just the way it is. I don't have enough free time to want to spend it with people I don't trust and can't rely on to be reasonably trauma free relationships.