Well, you know the Harvey Fierstein joke about how if God meant us to be friends with our exes, he wouldn’t have made them such shits in the first place. ;)

Sometimes a romantic relationship changes the friendship permanently. Sometimes you were friends before because of a romantic attraction. And sometimes being in a relationship shows you a side of a person that isn’t very nice, and you wouldn’t have seen if you’d remained friends.

That might work for some people, but not all. I personally broke ties with all my ex’s, except for my ex-husband, obviously, because we have a son together. While I don’t think I could pull off remaining friends with my ex’s, I know that there are plenty of people who can pull it off. I respect that.

But again, it is all up to the individual. I know many people who find my H’s ex writing at all to be inappropriate. I know couples who are divorced and spend every weekend with eachother and their new spouses.

If I can’t judge each relationship for what it is, has been, and might become, then I will feel trapped. My personal boundaries are about what works, for me, for my exes, for our new partners. I have more than one ex where we did the work (and it was work, believe me) to end and close our romantic partnerships and gave ourselves space to see what happened next. In one case, nothing. She’s in the past. In another case, a deep and abiding friendship emerged. In both cases, closure of one phase and giving ourselves time were both necessary to find out what would happen next.

As I think about the party you described, Hugo, with all the exes present, for me the red flag would be if I got a thrill from that fact. That frisson would tell me something was off (for me!) in how I was viewing the whole thing, and might get me to examine more closely what was really going on in those relationships, and in my current partnership. If someone has moved from “lover” to “dear friend”, then I would not expect to have a tiny thrill from the fact that she’s an ex. And if I found that I was having such a reaction, yeh, I’d worry about it. In the absence of such “off kilter” responses, though, I am unwilling to deny myself the possibilities of friendship, wherever I might find it.

For me, the past is not the past: the past is the source of everything in the present, and honoring it may well include cherishing the things that grew out of it into my present.

I was on the receiving end, as it were, of this approach. A serious relationship ended quite badly. From my point of view the nastiness of the breakup was largely attributable to my ex’s passive-aggressiveness — not that I was faultless by any means, but I do think much of the lingering bad feelings around the breakup had everything to do with her reluctance to discuss our problems directly. I tried to do so, repeatedly, only to be met with assurances that everything was fine — right up until it wasn’t fine at all. After we split, for various reasons, we continued to be thrown into one another’s company quite often. Not only was she determined that we should be friends; she simply decided that we were friends. At this point we had really exhausted the limits of our emotional connection, but I was young and clueless and felt somehow obligated to try to live up to her expectations of a continuing friendship for the longest time. It took a lot of effort for me to recognize that we had both fallen into the trap Kathleen refers to: not allowing ourselves to recognize that being friends (or not) with your ex is not a measure of how mature or evolved you are.

On the other hand, my next girlfriend became, after our breakup, my closest friend in the world. She’s part of my chosen family and my life would be much the poorer without her in it.

The thing is, this “transition from passion to non-sexual friendship,” for me, often occurs *during* the relationship–several of my relationships have ended because although the “passion” had gone, our genuinely friendly feelings toward each other had not. I do agree, though, that trying to *force* this transition often leads to some pretty awful things, some of which can hurt the people you later get involved with. My feeling isn’t so much that trying to be friends with an ex is a sign of immaturity as that *not* trying to be friends with an ex *isn’t* necessarily a sign of immaturity. I do see a lot of people trying really hard to be friends with exes they really shouldn’t, simply because they believe that if they can’t be friendly, then there’s something seriously wrong with them.

Largely, as I have pondered, what I am hearing is a call for finding and establishing healthy boundaries to create healthy relationships. Even in intimate relationships there are boundaries - persons are entitled to have privacy - to not share every thought, every experience - with their partner and yet, even that, can be troublesome.

In relating to exes, there is an element of emotional maturity in being able to relate civilly to one’s former lovers/spouses/partners, in being able to be happy for them when they are happy and being able to celebrate a success with them. But, a clear and bright boundary between the current and former relationships seems necessary for good health.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this exactly - I guess toward the notion that healthy boundaries, and a respect for appropriate boundaries, can support healthy relationships. That doesn’t mean the same thing for every person or every relationship.

In these cases, of course, there is no fantasy relationship involved; if that’s what’s going on, then I think Hugo is basically correct.

And jealously is indeed a normal and at times perfectly healthy part of being human, but inappropriate jealousy (both in object and/or intensity) is indeed immature. This would, to my mind, includes jealousy of close friends of the opposite sex. This absurd form of jealousy pretty much ruined my first attempt at a relationship (on both sides) but thankfully I grew out of it and past it rather quickly after that.