Can Ex-Lovers Remain Good Friends?

The intimacy shared in a relationship, the passion and depth and intensity of it, sometimes makes me think that there can be only one possible flipside: a total cooling off towards the person - even trying to forget about them, if possible. Where else can you go when you've already shared as much as two people can? Your choice is either to continue on or else sever the connection like a dead tendril; at least, that's how it often seems to me. Remaining friends, now that's some kind of middle ground that prohibits the closeness you once enjoyed and also denies you the cheap and easy avenue of escape.

I'm aware, though, that this kind of thinking is based on a lot of illusions. For one thing, I'm pulling the wool over my own eyes if I ever assume that I've "gone as far as I can" with a partner. It doesn't matter who you are or how strong your relationship; couples that've been together for fifty years can still find deeper depths to plunge to with each other. So, there are different levels of sharing. If a relationship was casual to begin with, what's wrong with holding onto the connection without the physical intimacy and all the expectations that inevitably go along with it?

Ahh, but then the real test will come when the girl or boy, woman or man, gets into a new relationship. It's one thing to say that you value the friendship of a former partner and quite another thing to see him or her sharing what you once had with someone new. It's not conjecture anymore; you know what this new person is experiencing. Possibly, something you never wanted to lose.

New involvements, then, can be the real test of the friendship. Maybe the only way around the pain of that is to define what exactly "being friends" means from the get go: because otherwise there's bound to be a lot of confusion. We had all sorts of freedoms before with this person (we could take a lot of liberties, you might say), and suddenly these are no longer there. How do we sift through all the emotional leftovers and try to discern what's now permissible and what isn't? Communicating it all upfront is probably the only solution.

It's difficult for men and women to be close friends without becoming lovers, and it's even more difficult for lovers to become mere friends. Neither scenario is impossible, but both take work and a measure of self-discipline. The popular modern compromise, the "friends with benefits" scenario, usually doesn't sidestep the problem very well either. Any real friendship requires a bond of respect; in the case of former lovers, this respect must be strong enough to overcome to persistent pull of attraction, the sweet and bittersweet memories, and the countless "what-ifs?"