Friendship with Your Ex – Does It Work?

When a romance crumbles, it sucks. But after the painful knock down, you stand up and come to your senses, realizing that you may be better off without the guy/gal. However, you have known each other so well and both of you may not be ready to relinquish that friendship. Or maybe, the man or woman or both is secretly wishing for a reawakening.

Well, there has to be some way to maintain wholesome friendship with someone who was once romantically linked with you. Those who were able patch things up as friends gave these pointers to consider:

Be honest with your feelings -- and make sure he/she is, too. Becoming just friends with an ex is a knotty situation, particularly when one of you is still carrying a torch for the lost love. If one person can't abandon the old feelings they have for the other, whether it's love, hatred, jealousy, resentment or lust, you run into a problem when trying to stay friends. Even if you're able to get along after you break up, the friendship itself is not true and genuine because of those leftover feelings.

Reflect on the reasons and manner of your breakup. Sometimes you can be friends -- in the long run. But when the gash of a hostile clash, double-cross or cold-hearted dumping is still fresh, the very last thing you could do with is to attempt to be pleasant to the perpetrator. And if you're the one who broke a heart, don't look forward to her/him to want to hang around with you as friends. If it didn't end up in a melodramatic fashion, the friendship can often rekindle somewhat soon.

Discern your motives for friendship. It's essential to ponder on the pros and cons of this friendship actually working. Sometimes the motivation for friendship isn't really healthy: You want some kind of justification for all the years you spent with the relationship, or you think lessen the guilt about moving on, or you're still fixated on him/her. Maybe it is better to let go of the memory altogether than work on a friendship that will hold you back later.

Sometimes, you can remain civil and friendly, but being friends in the long run just doesn't work. Somewhere down the road both of you will end up in a new connection. When you have had an intimate relationship with a person, the boundaries of the friend zone have been breached and you can't just go back to pretending like you were never lovers, which isn't fair to your new love, in case.

Share your experience: Do you think it's possible to maintain a friendship with an ex? Have you tried it? How did it work out? Does financial status play a role? Does shopping help you totally forget the idea? Shed some light and share your encounter…

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Getting Through a Broken Heart

Unless you belong to the lucky minority who met their soul mate in high school, married right after college, and spent the next 5 decades in marital bliss, you are going to bear what millions before you have gone through, and what millions after you will experience - a broken heart.

The hurt during a breakup is as individual as the millions of people who suffer it. While some simply shake the dust off and get right back into the dating game, others are left so distraught that they never date again, spending the rest of their life in bitter solitude. Why the difference? Could some of us just be stronger than others? Do some people love harder than others? Are some loves more connected than others?

For a good number of us who experience a break-up, a normal mournful stage will come about: Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and finally Acceptance. But for some, the grief and devastation are so severe that they end up hospitalized, and even suicidal. Others remain either bitter or so afraid of getting hurt that they never date again, closing off their hearts to just about everyone. Yet, some don't even grieve at all, subconsciously choosing to simply transfer their feelings for one person immediately onto that of another person in what is called a rebound relationship. Some people find that venting or journaling or blogging is the only thing that helps them release the pain and understand their broken heart.

Most of the variations have something to do with our loving style. There are many loving styles ranging from the very healthy, to the desperately needy. While one person may love another in a supportive and healthy way, another person may cling onto their mate simply as a way to fix what they imagine to be wrong with themselves. They use their partner as a method of dealing with their own imagined inadequacies or feelings of unworthiness - feeling good only as long as they are in the relationship. Others simply like the 'high' of being in love. This high becomes addictive to them and they hop from one relationship instantly into another - often times head-over-heels in love by the second date. They recklessly seek 'love' much as an addict will seek a 'fix', and are often so in need of being in love that they imagine their partners to have all the qualities they are looking for in a mate - whether their partners actually possess these qualities or not. Still others simply surrender themselves into their relationships quickly losing themselves and their own sense of individuality, becoming 'the relationship'. Should the relationship end, then shall they, too.

A hale and hearty view of oneself, one's partner, and one's relationship is crucial to surviving the ups and downs in our endless search for that special someone to share our lives with.

Read Also

• Debra Waibel ( Shattered Girlz ) added a discussion (fashionindustrynetwork.com)
• How NOT to help heal a broken heart (cnn.com)