How long until exes can be friends

Write to Jamie Ducharme at jamie. Here's What Experts Say. By Jamie Ducharme. Each product we feature has been independently selected and reviewed by our editorial team. If you make a purchase using the links included, we may earn commission. Related Stories.

Already a print subscriber? Like existing romantic relationships, ex-romantic relationships are complicated and don't have to end after a break up especially in the era of social media. According to researchers, whether you're able to make the delicate transition from partners to friends comes down to four primary motivators. These include: civility; unresolved romantic desires; practicality eg working together, going to school together or sharing mutual friends and security.

As you'd probably expect, friendships based on unresolved romantic desires led to the most negative outcomes, while a lack of support from family and friends, being in a new romantic relationship and behaving badly during a break up were also major inhibitors. Comparatively, those relationships based on security produced the highest-quality friendships. If you're confused, you're probably not alone — in fact, it's only relatively recently that men and women have been able to form relationships that aren't strictly based on romance.

Rebecca Adams, a US sociology professor who has been researching male-female platonic relationships for more than 40 years, told The Atlantic that for much of the 20th century men and women existed in separate spheres. The only reason to form relationships, she added, was to get married and have children.

It wasn't until mid-century, when women and men began to mingle at work, that a change started to occur. For the first time in history, women and men were working and spending time together en masse, which led to the development of shared experiences.

Studies show that establishing a friendship before dating is a strong predictor of whether or not you'll continue to thrive as friends after a break up. Dr Gary Lewandowski, a professor of psychology at Monmouth University US , says friendship-based romantic relationships are also usually more satisfying.

However, that doesn't mean it's always an easy dynamic to put into practice. When Mr Liddington-Cox first broke up with his ex-partner, he found it difficult to be around her. While it took years to feel comfortable with her, they are now at the stage where they can truly be friends.

She watches out for my sisters," he says. However, a friendship with an ex is fundamentally different to one where the romance line has never been crossed. You need to give yourself ample time and space to mourn the end of the relationship. That means letting yourself feel your emotions — sadness, frustration, rejection, resentment or some combination thereof — rather than bottling them up. A good test, deVos said, is to imagine sitting with your ex at a coffee shop and seeing a notification pop up on their phone that says they have a new match on a dating app.

Think about how that would make you feel: Would you be indifferent? Maybe irate? Honestly ask yourself why you want to be friends with your ex. In the back of your mind, are you holding out hope that you two might reconcile?

We set up our ex to disappoint us, and we set ourselves up to be angry, hurt or disappointed should our expectations not pan out. One surprising finding was that extroverted people were less likely to remain friends with an ex—romantic partner. But the researchers and historians I spoke with for this story generally agreed that in the history of relationships, staying friends or attempting to is a distinctly modern phenomenon, especially among mixed-gender pairs.

The experts also agreed that two of the concerns that most often lead to an offer of post-breakup friendship—the worry that a social group or workplace will become hostile, and the worry that the loss of a romantic partner will also mean the loss of a potential friend—are relatively modern developments themselves, made possible by the integration of women into public society and the subsequent rise of mixed-gender friendships.

For much of the 20th century, she says, the assumption was that the things men and women did together were date, get married, and have families. Adams says that began to change as more women joined the workforce and pursued higher education; while some 30 percent of American workers were female in , by women accounted for nearly half the workforce.

And when a platonic friendship between a man and woman became a more realistic proposition in its own right, Adams says, so did a platonic friendship between a man and woman who used to date. Read: Why men are the new college minority.