Why You Want to Be Friends with Your Ex
The ugliness behind a seemingly innocent wish.
There’s nothing fun about a breakup.
It’s not fun to see it coming — because even when you’re not the one breaking up with someone, you do see it coming — it’s not fun to experience it, and it’s not fun to deal with the aftermath.
The two moments where we’re prone to making our worse relationship mistakes are when we’re blinded by infatuation and in the aftermath of a breakup. In those phases of the relationship, your perception of who your partner is, and what the relationship means is twisted, and the misperception causes you to make dumb decisions.
If infatuation can get you to believe someone is essentially flawless, heartbreak can throw you in a state of denial over how healthy that relationship actually was. Heartbreak can make you put your rose-colored glasses back on, causing you to see your recently deceased relationship not as it was, but as it could have been — if only you could keep the good and ditch the bad.
But that’s not realistic. Relationships come with everything: the good and the bad; the stuff you and your partner can work on, and the stuff you have to simply accept; what you can compromise on, and what you have to let go of.
