Hanging Out With An Ex While In A Relationship

Hanging out with an ex while you’re in a relationship is a bad idea. Friendship with an ex (especially a close one) is difficult and wrong because it makes your new partner uncomfortable and gives you or your ex hope and anxiety (depending on who left who).

If you left your ex, you feel guilty, obliged to help, and compelled to keep your ex around for selfish reasons. You don’t care about what your ex really needs from you (a relationship and to heal) and what your new boyfriend or girlfriend feels.

You just want to stay friends because friendship allows you to keep your ex in your life and stops you from pushing your ex away and feeling like a bad person.

If your ex left you, on the other than, then you also shouldn’t be hanging out with your ex while in a relationship. Hanging out with the dumper is unfair to your partner because you still have feelings for your ex and crave his or her validation.

You want your ex to notice your good points and eagerness to contribute to the relationship just so your ex can empower you. That means you have unmet expectations and cravings you need your ex to fulfill. You want your ex to make you feel good instead of your partner.

Even if you’ve healed and don’t want your ex back anymore, hanging out with an ex as a dumpee is still a bad idea because it confuses and scares your partner and makes him or her wonder why you’re spending so much time with someone you used to be intimate with.

Your partner sees things rationally and thinks you should be focusing on your new relationship rather than on the previous one. Every person knows this except for exes who think their connection is special and that they must preserve it.

Such beliefs sadly only complicate things between exes and romantic partners as these people don’t mix well together.

You can’t expect them to be friends and okay with each other. They may not express it, but they’ll be jealous of each other and wonder why you talk about them to each other and try to pretend they belong in the same world.

A dumper ex may not be jealous, but a dumpee and your partner certainly will. That is unless your partner is doing the same thing to you. But in that case, the relationship is probably doomed because there are no boundaries and mutual respect.

You both still feel the need to involve your exes, so expect to sooner than later encounter doubts, temptations, unprocessed feelings, problems, disagreements, or some kind of thought or emotion an ex shouldn’t make you feel anymore.

As long as the dumpee and the dumper have feelings for each other, they shouldn’t be anywhere near each other. They especially shouldn’t be hanging out as friends, acting like everything’s fine, and giving each other false hope.

Right after the breakup, someone usually still has feelings. That person is the one who was abandoned because abandonment triggers his or her separation anxiety, fears, and oftentimes even depression.

Because the dumpee is in immense pain, the dumpee quickly becomes nostalgic and puts the dumper on the pedestal.

By doing so, he or she becomes obsessed with the dumper and looks for hope in everything the dumper says and does. If the dumper wants friendship, the dumpee often sees this as a means of crawling back into the dumper’s heart and getting back together.

Initially, the dumper typically doesn’t know that the dumpee wants to get back together. At least not until the dumpee starts demanding too much time and attention and asking questions that intend to validate him or her.

When the dumpee starts to pressure the dumper, the dumper finally sees that friendship with an ex is difficult and that he or she needs to create some distance between them.

Not all dumpees reveal their intentions to their ex, of course. Some dumpees hide their feelings quite well and some dumpers don’t pick up on them at all. They think their ex is just being friendly and polite when in reality, their ex is trying to portray a detached and patient side of him or her.

Dumpees can be quite patient after the breakup. But sadly, many of them make mistakes that show they still want their ex back. Those dumpees shouldn’t be anywhere near their ex. They should be leaving their ex alone and letting their ex focus on his or her new partner.

If your partner doesn’t know that you’re hanging out with your ex, then that’s even worse. You’re keeping things from someone you love due to a fear of confrontation. You know that what you’re doing is wrong and risky (you could get caught) but you do it anyway because you’re afraid your partner won’t like it.

Because your partner won’t like it, you should stop hanging out with your ex immediately. Not only should you stop it, but you should also tell your partner that you’ve been in touch with your ex and that you kept hanging out with him or her.

Yes, the truth will hurt your ex, but it will also give you an opportunity to start being honest and fair. Relationships require honesty and trust. They have a significantly smaller chance of working out if you become okay with hiding things, lying, and perhaps even cheating.

Anyway, hanging out with an ex while you have a partner is detrimental to your feelings for your partner and the relationship in general. If you respect your partner and care about the future with him or her, you need to step on the brakes right away.

You need to end this post-breakup friendship with your ex and focus on your partner and other friends. If you don’t have any good friends, you should make some new ones and let your ex meet/focus on someone else too.

The more you hang out with your ex, the more you distract yourself and your ex from moving forward and creating meaningful friendships and/or romantic relationships.

In this article, we discuss why hanging out with an ex while in a relationship is wrong and how you can end that relationship maturely.

Hanging out with an ex while in a relationship

If you’re hanging out with an ex while you’re in a relationship, you need to put yourself in your partner’s shoes for a moment and ask yourself how you’d feel if your partner had a very close relationship with his/her ex.

Would you be okay with them chatting? What about meeting up for coffee and drinks? And what if they went to parties and then crashed at their place?

If for some reason you were okay with that, you’d want them to at least have boundaries and respect for their partners. This isn’t just an issue of trust but also respect. You’d probably want your partner to willingly show you that you are his or her top priority and that you have nothing to worry about.

It’s a bit hard to have nothing to worry about when your partner says one thing but does the opposite. Mismatching words and actions evoke negative feelings of jealousy and uncertainty and destroy trust. They also make people feel anxious and unheard and cause them to disconnect emotionally.

One thing you must remember is that in the past, you and your ex had no romantic boundaries. You were very close to each other and had a strong relationship. You may not have feelings today, but a certain feeling of familiarity remains.

You still connect and understand each other as people. And that can be scary for your partner and make it very easy for you and your ex to cross the friendship boundaries and do something you shouldn’t.

This is especially true if alcohol and feelings are present as hormones and drugs decrease people’s self-control and a sense of (moral) responsibility.

So if you, your partner, or both are hanging out with an ex while you’re in a relationship, know that exes belong in the past, not the present. They are people you couldn’t make the relationship work with and, therefore, shouldn’t be trying to settle for anything less than what was originally intended.

Downgrading to friendship when you or your ex still have feelings and need to get over the breakup is counterproductive. Friendships delay the dumpee’s healing and cause unnecessary arguments and problems in the new relationship.

You’ll be happier with your partner if you spend your spare time with your partner and leave your ex out of it. Your ex should understand why you don’t want to stay friends and shouldn’t throw any tantrums. If your ex does get upset, it’s probably because your ex has feelings for you and hoped that he or she would get another chance with you.

That would imply your ex didn’t care about your new partner and just wanted to reel you back in.

Don’t let your ex guilt-trip you and confuse you, though. Regardless of who dumped who, you are committed to someone new and should put everything you’ve got into your new relationship.

Your new partner should also know that you still hang out with your ex and that your ex is trying to get back with you.

There mustn’t be any secrets between you and your partner. Keeping secrets of this importance is a big deal as it gives you the green light to keep your partner in the dark just so you can get what you want. And what you want is the best of both worlds – a committed relationship that gives you love and security and a close friendship with your ex on the side.

This is something you can’t have.

As long as you or your ex have romantic expectations, you should be doing your best to break the connection you had as partners. What you’re doing now is the opposite of that as you’re growing your connection and getting so comfortable that you’re giving the dumpee the wrong idea.

You must realize that your friendliness isn’t helping anyone and that you’re not being nice and thoughtful. On the contrary, keeping your ex around is causing way more problems than it solves.

If your ex left you, it gives you false hope and if you left your ex, it gives false hope to your ex. Either way, the dumpee doesn’t want friendship without commitment. He or she wants a relationship or no relationship at all. It’s a black-or-white situation that the dumper must understand and handle appropriately.

Not every dumpee can handle it well because most dumpees are anxious and unhappy and feel tempted to grab onto the slightest bit of hope. Pot-breakup friendships, unfortunately, give quite a bit of hope as they make it difficult for exes to see the benefits of parting ways.

As for your partner, he or she doesn’t appreciate you fixating on your ex and planning things with your ex. Your partner wants you to direct your attention to the relationship and spend time with people who have no ulterior motives.

If you feel guilty or sad for leaving your ex, you probably rushed into a new relationship too quickly. You should have taken some time to process the relationship. Your guilt though doesn’t indicate you should have a close relationship with your ex but that you made some selfish decisions and that you now need to leave your ex alone.

To recap, here’s why hanging out with an ex while in a relationship is wrong.

You must remember that you have a new relationship to focus on and worry about. You needn’t (and shouldn’t) hate your ex and treat your ex poorly, but you shouldn’t have a close relationship with your ex either.

If your partner is okay with it, you can respond to your ex and wish your ex happy birthdays, but other than that, you should avoid talking to your ex and pretending like you never dated.

The two of you have a history together. And your partner doesn’t want history to mesh with the present. Your partner wants you to let bygones be bygones and focus on the present and the future.

Breakups require certain boundaries between exes. Don’t act like boundaries are for insecure people or only for those who are prone to cheating. All dumpees and dumpers need a break from each other so they can see the reasons they broke up from a rational standpoint and do something about them.

Distance helps exes see things clearer and allows growth to happen whereas a lack of space makes them focus on the past and stops them from reflecting and improving for the better.

You should understand this clearly so that you don’t hang out with your ex because of guilt, pity, or fear of being a bad person.

People come and go. Those who aren’t meant for each other need to break the bond completely (let each other go) and by doing so, give other people an opportunity to get to know their exes.

So should you stop hanging out with your ex if you’re in a new relationship?

You should definitely stop hanging out with your old flames. Friendships with them may seem meaningful at a glance, but on closer inspection, you’ll notice that they’re destructive to dumpees’ health, unhealthy distractions and means of relieving guilt for dumpers, and hindrances for dumpees’ and dumpers’ new relationships.

It’s okay to be on good terms with exes. If they treated you well or if they took responsibility for saying or doing hurtful things, they may have realized they acted impulsively and hurt you because they were hurting as well.

Such people may be worth having a closure conversation with. Talking about why the relationship ended and forgiving each other will allow you to get closure and find happiness and purpose in life.

What’s not okay, though, is continuing to stay in touch after getting or giving closure. Deep friendships with exes, regardless of whether they treated you well or not will cause more problems for all parties involved.

So instead of hanging out with your ex after the breakup, stop this friendship before it gets out of control. Tell your ex you’re not ready for friendship and that you think you could both use some distance. It won’t be easy to do this, but you need to be brave so you can get each other out of your systems and focus on things and people who are important to you.

It doesn’t matter how your ex will feel about your decision. You should be more concerned about whether your partner will forgive you for being selfish and if there will be any consequences to your prolonged friendship.

Some people find their partner’s friendship with an ex so disrespectful that they lower their relationship standards, decrease their investment in the relationship, and as a result, lose interest after a while.

In other words, they fall out of love because their partner showed them where his or her priorities were.

What do you think about hanging out with an ex while in a relationship? Do you think it’s acceptable? Let us know in the comments section below.

And if you want to discuss friendships with exes with us privately, sign up for breakup coaching with us.