Why else can’t exes become friends?
You Can’t Confide In Each Other
As hard as two exes try to stay friends, they can never really confide in one another. How do you tell your ex that you have a hot date tonight, or that you and your new lover are going away on a steamy getaway? You can’t even tell your ex that the reason you’re smiling so much is because a wo/man has just pleasured you like never before.
You can tell him these things, but new lovers and mates are always going to be a sensitive issue. It’s even harder to tell him how hurt you were that your date stood you up the other night, thanks to your sense of pride.
Remaining friends seems to provide us with the security blanket that the person who has been in our life will still be there, and we can call on them every once in a while to find out how they are — but we’ll never actually know how they really are.
You’ve Seen Each Other Naked
Although it may be possible to have casual sex with a friend, even this can damage a relationship. As hard as it is to accept, it’s difficult to bring a relationship back to its normal state after having been most intimate with someone. You will always have an image of that person naked, and memories of the trysts will always be triggered by the smell of her skin or perfume, or even by hearing a song that you once made passionate love to.
Always One-Sided Bitterness
Since breakups are rarely one-sided, one party will always feel resentment or bitterness towards the other person. Even if your ex is feigning friendship, s/he’s not sincerely your friend; so if it seems like plans with your new potential woman/man are always being sabotaged, they just might be.
Jealousy Comes Into Play
And where there’s bitterness, there’s jealousy. And the truth of the matter is, it’s hard to be sincerely happy for your ex when they’ve just found the new love of their life.
You Don’t Want Them With Anyone Else
It’s human nature to be jealous or resentful when our ex finds a new person to cuddle up to, even if we don’t have feelings for them anymore. It almost becomes a race of who will find the new lover first, a challenge especially brought on by the person who was dumped. Even for the person who did the breaking up, the thought of someone else taking your place in the memories that you and your ex shared is hard, and sometimes extremely painful to fathom.
Passion Still Exists
Even if your relationship was completely problem-ridden, chances are that the passion and sexual chemistry between the two of you still exists (unless lack of attraction was the reason for your breakup). This is a recipe for disaster because it means that every time you get together under this new “friendship” premise, the lust and passion you have makes it more likely that you’ll end up in “one more” night of unbridled “goodbye” sex, for old times sake. This brings you right back to square one — how you felt right after your breakup, and just when you were doing so well.
moving on
Leaving the past behind is hard enough, and you don’t want part of your past still programmed in your cell phone. Although it’s easier for the dumper, recovering from a breakup is still a hard thing to do since it means being single again, getting back into the dating scene, and no longer making that daily goodnight call you and your ex used to share.
But having that person still lingering in your life as a constant reminder makes it even harder to move on with your life, meet new people and turn a fresh page. It’s almost like keeping one foot in the past, and another struggling to make it back into the pickup scene. It also might be a better idea to leave things with pleasant memories of the other person, rather than drag the potentially doomed relationship through the mud.
In a perfect world, the ideal would be for exes to succeed at being friends, but in one where bitterness, jealousy, passion, and human nature exceed reasoning and rational thought, it’s impossible. So unless the two of you were the best of friends before; both broke up on the same terms in a perfectly mutual breakup; both have no qualms about either of you seeing new people, and have both instilled a total honesty policy, better to leave the friendship behind… along with the memories.
