Last weekend I was enjoying an aimless mooch with my boyfriend. Sipping beer on a bench, a swing band playing in the distance, plotting our next move. Pub? “I went there with my ex,” he says, glancing at Google Maps. “Let’s not go there.” Suddenly, my calm is overwritten with feverish curiosity. What was she like? Did you love her? Why did it end?
I’m far from a freak here. Our collective investment in, and endless questioning of, the ex-factor is internet catnip these days. I’m thinking of ‘frexes’: friendly exes. It’s Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson laughing together at the Met Gala. Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux having a low-key dinner last month (five years after their divorce). Scarlett Johansson calling ex-husband Ryan Reynolds a “good guy” on a podcast.
Yet I can’t help but sense a sickly-sweet, congratulatory, undertone to all of this. As though being mates with someone you used to share a bed, your secrets and Netflix password with is somehow a marker of emotional maturity.
I call bullsh*t. It’s not that I’m down on people who maintain connections once de-coupled (plenty of people do and it can work). Nor do I buy into the idea that this is a litmus test for true enlightenment. The ‘bigger’ and ‘better’ course of action. In other words, if you’ve not managed to at least try the friend-zone, well, you’re in a bitter, smaller league, harbouring unresolved resentment. Rather than just accepting you had something once, you both moved on, no bad feelings, the end.
I’m not actively friends with any exes. Some people have wondered why over the years and my response is simple. Romantic and platonic partnerships do share some qualities, but they’re not to be confused. The expectations and desires are just different. It irks me even when people profess their beloved is “their BEST friend!” As the psychotherapist Esther Perel said, “what we have created in a romantic ambition is one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide.”
It’s, frankly, exhausting. Perhaps it explains why, when relationships sometimes don’t work out, people still cling to this impossible ambition. But I didn’t come here to make friends — those roles have already, happily, been filled.
