Can Lovers Be Friends?

It always worked on TV. When Donna Martin and David Silver broke up on 90210, they stayed friends. When Ross and Rachel broke up on Friends, they were eventually fine hanging out with the group.

By Lauren

So is it any wonder that I always held out hope that the same things were possible for me?

Despite the fact that everyone told me differently, I always thought that my ex and I could defy all odds and stay friends long after our year long relationship came to an end. After all, it didn’t end badly. It just ended.

We still loved each other and neither one of us could imagine life without the other, so we convinced ourselves that we could do it. We could stay friends.

The only problem was that we were not acting like friends. We were still hanging out all the time and holding hands and doing things that I did not do with my other friends. We were still talking on the phone late at night and buying each other gifts just because.

The truth was, we had never really been friends, so we didn’t know how to do it now. When we met we immediately started dating leaving us nothing to return to. We were either together or we were not. And now we were trying to define a new category. We thought we were fine because we weren’t hooking up, but there was a lot more tying us together than a romp in the sack. Our relationship was more than just friends and neither one of us wanted to admit it.

We were holding onto one another because we were scared of what would happen next; how we would survive without each other. At the same time, we were sacrificing our own happiness and sitting in limbo while neither one of us took the opportunity to move on. We convinced ourselves that we were fine and happy but deep down – where neither one of us wanted to look – we both knew something was wrong. We couldn’t keep this up forever.

And we didn’t.

We both ended up getting hurt in the end, something we avoided while living our fake happy friendship for over a year. I could not imagine living my life without my ex, but I finally realized that I wasn’t living my life as it was. We were not friends. We were lovers in limbo with no way out. It was not healthy and it was not life.

We are not friends anymore – we aren’t even speaking – but I know we are both better off. Neither of us wanted to face the reality of life without the other person, but in the end it really isn’t possible to stay friends. At least not for us.