Is There a Right Way to Be Friends With Your Ex?

Where there is affinity, there is fertility in all forms.

Two people who understand each other, who feel each other before words arrive, who recognize something in the other's way of moving through the world — that meeting always produces something. It cannot not produce something. The question is only what form the fertility takes.

With an ex, the form is complicated by one thing: the spark.

The spark is what makes friendship with an ex dangerous

Unresolved, the spark keeps us circling back. We meet for coffee and end up in bed. We tell ourselves it means nothing, and then we spend the next three days in a strange fog, our body still holding the memory, our mind rewriting a story that had already ended.

Or the return is quieter than that. We do not sleep with them. We simply feel the pull, and in feeling it we become energetically unfaithful to the person we are with. Nothing happened. Everything happened. There was that wish, that longing to be back there, and it lived in us all evening while our partner slept beside us.

This is unhealthy. And this is what most people mean when they say that friendship with your ex is always wrong. 

So the common advice is correct, as far as it goes. If you have a partner, do not be friends with your ex. Do not see them one on one. Do not test yourself.

But that advice is written for a specific situation: the breakup that was forced.

A forced breakup leaves the pull intact

Instead of really finding a closure, the relationship was just escaped.

The pain became too strong, so we left. We packed a bag, we blocked a number, we moved cities. The love we felt never found clarity, it was only interrupted. The challenges made us give up. We felt exhausted. We couldn’t do it anymore. But this is not true understanding. This is just reaction. Reaction is mechanical by nature, it is not conscious. If we avoid the conscious process of finding answers (both within ourselves and with our partner), we loose the ability to transform what was there into something healthier. It’s only through understanding that things can be transformed. We felt stuck by the problems, so the stuckness stays, but forgotten. It completely blocks the ability to express what we felt which was true and sincere. 

When we leave this way, the relationship stays alive inside us. The pull remains because nothing has answered it. Every meeting reopens the whole unfinished thing, and our body — which does not care about what our mind tells us — reaches toward what it never got to complete.

For someone in this position, contact is genuinely dangerous. Because there is real living energy still circulating between them and this other person, and energy that has nowhere to go will always try to go back where it came from.

A resolved relationship feels entirely different in the body

Something else is possible, and it doesn’t need discipline.

When a relationship has been fully lived, fully grieved and fully understood, a knowing settles into the body. This person is not for me. This is not a thought nor a decision we have to take everytime. It’s a simple fact that we feel and carry with us everywhere, without having to think about it. It’s an awareness that became who we are now. And we carry that awareness when the person is in front of us. The affinity is still there, all of it, sometimes more of it than before. But the sexual pull is gone.

It is gone because the body has understood something the mind can put words to. Our mind will put some words to it, but the body knows much deeper and with much more clarity. That going towards union, and even just having sex again, would not be fertile anymore for where we are now. It would not carry either person toward what they are here for. And when the body knows this, the pull dissolves. There is nothing to resist. Nothing to struggle with. The energy simply stops moving in that direction, the way water stops running uphill.

What remains is everything else.

The ex who becomes a brother, a sister

This is when the person begins to feel like family.

You know each other. You feel each other. Years of intimacy have taught you how the other's mind turns, where their sorrow lives, what they are pretending not to want. And now none of it is charged by a magnetic pull. You can sit across from them for four hours and feel only the particular warmth of being with someone who has seen you.

You don’t have to refrain yourself from crossing that line anymore. It has stopped existing as a line, because crossing it would require wanting something you don’t want anymore.

And so all that affinity, freed from the sexual circuit, becomes available for a different kind of exchange. These friendships become sanctuaries, even when we see each other once a year or less. They become spaces of insight. Places where an idea can be spoken half-formed and come back to us clarified, because the other person understands our thinking well enough to complete it. There is often more understanding than there was inside the relationship, because now there is no desire pressing on the conversation, no hope, no negotiation, no future to protect. Only two people, meeting.

This is extremely valuable in life, especially in our modern world where our families are broken and scattered, and we do not live in a strongly knit community anymore. Isolated in our cities, we have no true « brothers » / « sisters » who can really feel us. This exchange is fertile in its own way.

Sexual energy needs only one person

When sex enters, we are working with bonding, attachment, deep transformation, hope for the future, and so on. This is good. It is the engine. It gives us the strength and the reason to work on ourselves in ways we would never have found otherwise, because nothing else generates that much heat, that much longing, that much willingness to be undone.

But we only need one person for that. One person with whom the affinity is deep enough to support the process of the pushes and the pulls, the impossible hopes, the grieving, the letting go, and loving beyond it all.

Everyone else with whom we are deeply attuned is soul family. Then we feel like we are finally not alone in the world. Because sometimes, we feel alone within our own family. 

The love does not disappear; it changes form

Here is what surprises people who reach this place.

The love that lived between you and this person doesn’t have to be lost. In a way, Love is eternal, beyond space and time. It lives beyond the sexual pull. The pull was one shape it took, appropriate to a particular set of circumstances, and when they changed, the love just translates to another form. It is still here. Only now it fits Reality — here, now, as things actually are, for both of you. And to love is to be in a form of bliss, somehow. There is joy in that new non-sexual form of expression. 

So when one experiences that, there is so much gratitude. 

For having not lost the beauty of the relationship with this person. 

For it to only have transformed into a form that is adapted to Reality. 

For having these very close friends who can really understand. 

For having such a deep clarity that there is no need to put boundaries, and that energetic fidelity happens on its own. Completely naturally. 

For being able to express the deep love that still exist, in a way that is just as satisfying… just healthier for what there is now. 

It feels like freedom, like liberation from sexual slavery. Like deep deep loyalty to one’s partner, from the core of one’s being. 

Liberation from slavery to the endless push and pull of the sexual circuits, the way they organize our attention and decide, without asking, who we think about at night. 

Being able to feel intimate with someone of the opposite sex and feel absolutely no pull from either side is to discover that the heart can lead. That it was always capable of leading.

And it is loyalty. Not the loyalty of rules, but the kind that rises from the core of one's being, from recognition, which allows for nothing to pull us unconsciously to the opposite direction.

How we arrive there

This is not something we can just decide to do. Sexual energy runs way deeper than our conscious mind. 

We arrive through self-discovery. Through the work of understanding what we were actually seeking in that person, and what we were avoiding. Through contemplation, sitting with the relationship and staying in front until new meaning becomes visible. 

And through honest conversation with our exes, where the truth is finally spoken by both people, without agenda. Where there is no more pressure to speak out their truths.

Awareness, given enough time and enough honesty, puts things where they belong. It does not force anything. It illuminates what is true, and things reorganize themselves accordingly.

Until that happens, protect yourself and protect your partner. Keep your distance. 

But do not conclude that distance is the permanent solution for true freedom, or that the only way to be faithful is to amputate a love. There is another possibility. And this all comes from self discovery, contemplation, understanding, and honest conversation with our exes. Which, of course, must be approved by our actual partner if we are with someone else. Because speaking of the past can reactivate some things until they are fully resolved. 

So this process cannot be forced. When the circumstances are there, and the will to sincerely understand the past is there, then it can lead somewhere. 

Then once you have done the work of understanding what really happened and what is truly right for here, now, you will see how these new insights will change it all, bring peace to all of the people implied, and above all, will bring a new sense of purpose. Because we are all related. 

Need help to find a healthy closure?

I offer a free process to start digging up and clearing things that were not truly resolved between you two.

You don’t need your ex to do it. Just make yourself some time to truly listen to yourself, and let the process unfold.

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