[Friendships with Exes]

The thing about ex's, is why continue engaging with them. What is the real benefit? You say that it's because you share an intellectual and emotional bond, but to what end? But you can share these bonds with other people that you weren't so intimately involved with once.

To what end are bonds shared with people, if not for self-fulfillment for each person? Like I said, good people are in short supply, and of course I can share these bonds with other people as well. They are not mutually exclusive.

 

You said one of the reasons you couldn't deal with her as a girlfriend was because of her draw to superstition and vanity. This is important because what has changed in that regard? Certainly your opinion of these issues as you stated has not changed. So has she now changed and no longer drawn to these issues?

My opinion of those issues has not changed (that is, they are counter-rational), but my understanding of them has changed indeed, as I now recognize these mental habits as adaptations to traumatic experiences. For me, these qualities are too repellent for an intimate long-term relationship, but are tolerable in an otherwise rewarding friendship.

For example, vanity as an expression of the need for validation is much stronger in an intimate relationship than a friendship.

 

To take the mailroom to CEO to mailroom analogy: What if after working up to CEO level, you find that the board members are too difficult to deal with? What if you step down from CEO to midlevel employee, or part-time contractor? This way you don't need to deal with the board members, but can stick around if you appreciate the other employees and the work you do.

(I like my analogies stretchy.)

 

More often than not having ex's as friends even if you can deal with it platonically, doesn't mean the ex necessarily can, even if he or she says they can.

This is definitely worth exploring. I'll get back to you on this.

 

By the way, something that crops up a lot when Stefan says something, is people often feel that he is laying down the law. This isn't a moral issue at all just an important observation to make in a partner you are dating.

Yeah, I get that. It still sounded to me like Stefan was making an unconditional (i.e. universal) argument. It was not hedged with "in this situation", or "in your case" or "if this were happening to me". The argument clearly applied in the caller's case. I'm checking if it is universalizable and if it applies in my case as well.

 

I can definitely say that it would be a red flag for me, if a women I was dating was hanging out with her ex. Not necessarily a deal breaker if she then processed her real reasons for it and then decided to give up the friendship. But I personally wouldn't go near her romantically until she had.

I'm with you until the "and then decided to give up the friendship" part. Thanks for your perspective. I think I'm going to challenge my ex to consider whether she's supplementing her intimate relationship with our friendship, and see how she responds.

[Friendships with Exes]

While my other respone is in moderator limbo, let me reference the call-in-show so you can check it yourself.

Here's what prompted my question:
 

@40:25 : You don't get to downgrade lovers to just 'oh they're friends now'. I mean that's all Seinfeld and Friends nonsense. It's corrosive.

@41:55 : When you're lovers, you're united, and you're one, and you're intimate, and you share everything, right? And you can't then downgrade that kind of relationship to friendship. The reason being -- because you've been lovers you can't talk about any of your current romantic relationships with your ex-lovers. Which means there's a huge chunk of non-intimacy in what was formerly the most intimate relationship you have. So trying to be friends with your ex-lovers is like starting in the mail room, working your way all the way up to CEO, and then applying for a job in the mail room again. Nope! Can't downgrade it. You can't go from "We talk about everything" to "Now we can't talk about most of the things going on in my life because you're an ex."

The context of that conversation is that the caller's boyfriend was fooling around with an ex, and lying about it, but I think the statement at 41:55 was stated as true regardless of circumstances.

[Friendships with Exes]

I don't want to turn this into a discussion about Tom Leykis, just that his suggestion that it's ridiculous to have a girlfriend at 19 sounded, well, ridiculous to me. I don't know what you mean about 'my answer being "we have unprocessed childhood trauma"'. It was a comment on his attitude towards relationships, so I don't think you understood me correctly -- or perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.

 

 

What does your current girlfriend think and feel about you spending time with your ex now and are they friends with one another?

My gf was uncomfortable with it when we first got together, but not anymore. They're friendly, but not friends. These days my gf interested in how she's doing and such, the way one would be intested in a significant other's friends one does not see often. ("Hey, have you spoken to Bob lately? How's he doing?")

 

 

Does your current girlfriend know you made this post and are engaged in this thread?

 No, but I just sent her a link. We're apart for a week due to a work/vacation incongruity, and she fell asleep early last night, so I hadn't yet shared this post with her.

 

 

(As an aside, the moderation delay makes it tough for me to engage in this conversation -- my response had preempred PatrickC's questions, but he was unable to see it at the time.)

[Friendships with Exes]

I got the impression that Stefan was saying that "it is not possible" to have a mutually healthy friendship with an ex. I interpreted this as an unconditional statement, So I was wondering if someone had an unconditional case to make about it. It's like abusive relationships are unconditionally bad -- you don't have to know the specifics to know it's bad (though the details help in determining how bad). And, as an aside, Stefan was saying this in the context of a relationship with an ex which was clearly unhealthy.

 

So - definitions: a "friend" is someone with whom I share an intellectual and emotional connection, and an "ex" is -- well, this seems a bit redundant, but -- someone with whom I used to have a friend connection plus a sexual connection.

 

But there might be a wider-ranging conversation to be had here, so here are the details of my situation:

I'm late 20s, we had this relationship back in my college days, and it laster for 2 (3?) years. We ended it mutually -- in the abstract, our childhood trauma experiences did not mesh. She wanted validation and tended towards the superstitious, and I had little to no tolerance for vanity (this is still the case), and was dismissive of her issues with superstition. I also was quite against tokens of affection -- flowers, valentine's day cards, etc. I much prefer to say 'i love you' with actions, rather than words or things. She had a pretty fucked up family dynamic, which I recognized and called out at the time, but I did not connect it to her hangups until much later (thanks, FDR!).

 

That's the short of it. I listened to some of this Tom Leykis thing -- you could say I'm a bit conservative for this player lifestyle perspective ("you're 19 -- why do you have a girlfriend?" is an attutude it'd probably stay the hell away from) he's coming from, but we don't talk avery day or borrow cars. We meet up once every month or two, talk about interesting stuff, I don't think either one of us is supplanting our romantic relationships with this friendship. My girlfriend (of 4 years) was suspicous at first, but not anymore.

 

To sum things up, our histories made a long-term relationship too grating for both of us, but we can maintain a pretty solid friendship, and good friends are hard to come by.

[Friendships with Exes]

Hey folks. On a recent call-in show, Stefan said that honest friendships with exes are 'not possible'. And no, I'm not talking about executables. Well, I'm friends with an ex of mine. We're both in long-term relationships, and I don't see how it is unhealthy or deceptive.

 

But I have some history of my own with people staying friends after break-ups... My parents, after divorcing (+1 ACE points), remained on very good terms. My attitude is that they fucked up in not working out their issues, but I did not mind them remaining friendly. But clearly I might have a bias here, so I'd like some input on this matter.

 

what do you guys think? Why can't one remain friends with an ex?

[NYPD protest backfires]

"Crime" is a terribly muddled word, especially coming from the mouths of police statisticians.

The key question should be, "Is the number of victims increasing?" I think it's too early to tell, but at least this way we don't have to do the whole 'victimless crime' dance.

[MaidSafe]

If you're discussing open-source distributed storage projects, you ought to look at Tahoe-LAFS, a distributed file storage and sharing platform. Its scope is quote a bit smaller than Maidsafe, but it's all ready to go and has already been used in production for a few years.