Is it normal to stay friends with your ex

While it's obviously fine for your partner to have one-on-one time with friends — including friends who are exes — if they refuse to include you, it may be time to ask questions. Is it possible for you to go out as a group next time? Ask and see what they say. You have a right to speak up if you feel uncomfortable, left out, or worried that something might happen behind your back. And you shouldn't have to live with that kind of stress. Friends reach out to each other when they're upset in order to get support.

Instead of calling their ex, your partner should be addressing negative feelings with you. Constant contact is a way to keep themselves top of mind and to keep your partner loyal to them in some way.

All of that said, the last thing you want to do is allow negativity, paranoia, or bad feelings to seep into your relationship just because an ex is hanging around the periphery. Jonathan Bennett , certified counselor and dating expert. Anecdotal evidence feeds arguments on both sides — but what do the experts say?

Under no circumstances should a relationship that was abusive, manipulative or toxic transition into a friendship, Sussman says. One study , for example, found that friendships between exes were more likely to have negative qualities, and less likely to have positive ones, than cross-sex platonic friendships. That may be especially true if you were never friends before you dated, Sussman says.

Sussman also says there are potential downsides to staying friendly with an ex. Are you giving the new relationship a [fair] chance to really flourish or blossom? Ashley Brett, a psychology researcher in her late 20s who asked to use a pseudonym to protect her identity , knows that struggle well. I speak from personal experience when I say that no matter how amicable the breakup, the pressures and hurts that split you up in the first place will follow you into your friendship, and you might even part ways on even worse terms than before.

This is because there is always at least one party who holds on to ideas and feelings from the relationship, no matter what boundaries are set, in the hope, or misguided assumption, that you will get back together again. The problem with being friends with your ex is that even if neither of you has an ulterior motive for wanting them to stay in your life, their presence is a constant reminder of what you had together, which can do more harm than good.

Experts recommend that you should take between six months to a year on average to get over a person before reintroducing them into your life as a friend, but this is no exact science.

Even if you do take that long, there is always the possibility that their behaviours may trigger unwanted memories, feelings and even traumas. This can only be detrimental to your mental and emotional wellbeing. In my personal experience, attempting to be friends with my ex because I still cared for him and liked him as a person only served to make me see him in a different light. He continued patterns of ignoring boundaries that I set for myself, and it exacerbated my healing process in a way I could have avoided simply by removing him from my life.

It most likely had the same effect for him, and so made the breakup harder for both of us. The mention of boundaries is especially important. For example, if you think it would be best only to see each other with mutual friends, then it is imperative that you consider and talk about this before diving into the deep end.

An attempt to stay friends may be a kindness if it suggests an attachment or a respect that transcends the circumstances of the romantic relationship, for instance. It can be a cruelty, however, when it serves to pressure the jilted party into burying feelings of anger and hurt. As a result, how to interpret or act on the suggestion of a post-breakup friendship is one of the great everyday mysteries of our time. There are four main reasons, Rebecca Griffith and her colleagues found, why exes feel compelled to maintain a friendship or to suggest doing so: for civility i.

For instance, Griffith and her team found that friendships resulting from unresolved romantic desires tended to lead to the most negative outcomes, like feelings of sadness, challenges moving on romantically, and disapproval from other friends. One surprising finding was that extroverted people were less likely to remain friends with an ex—romantic partner. But the researchers and historians I spoke with for this story generally agreed that in the history of relationships, staying friends or attempting to is a distinctly modern phenomenon, especially among mixed-gender pairs.