My Ex Is My Best Friend But I Still Love Her

If your ex has always been your best friend or became your best friend after the breakup, the connection you have with your ex is likely very good. You probably feel that your ex is your soul mate and that in this lifetime, you and she are meant to be together.

Before you start checking your astrological compatibility and requesting fortune tellers to reveal if the two of you will ever reunite, sit down for a minute and assess something first.

Assess why the relationship has ended and what the two of you should have done differently to make it last. If you do that, I guarantee that you’ll learn more about your relationship than you would by reading horoscopes and asking mystics about it.

You’ll understand whether your ex gave up on the relationship due to her lackings and needs time to grow or if there’s something you should have done better at and it’s now time to better yourself, improve your ex’s perceptions of you, and win her trust back.

What you’re supposed to do after the breakup strongly depends on who broke up with who. If you left your ex for someone else because you had another woman lined up, for example, that would make you the dumper – the person responsible for taking the initiative, fixing things, and reconciling with your ex.

You would need to come clean about your reasons for leaving, apologize, say that you’ve been thinking a lot and that no matter what angle you look at your relationship from, you still feel connected with your ex and are wondering if she feels the same.

A confession like this will, of course, expose your heart and leave you vulnerable to rejections. But if you don’t take a risk with your ex quickly (before she moves on), you won’t know what she’s thinking and feeling and let her detach. You’ll miss out on an opportunity to be with her because she may still have some feelings for you and wants to get back with you. Just make sure you really love her and want to make it work before you impulsively run back to her. You don’t want to return just because other men are giving her attention and doing what you previously wouldn’t or couldn’t.

If you’re the dumpee, however, then you don’t have any initiation and confessing to do. Your ex probably friend-zoned you out of self-protection and won’t know what to do with your feelings if you suddenly open up to her about them. She’ll just see and feel that you have romantic expectations of her and that she can’t reach those expectations no matter how important you are to her as a friend.

This could, in turn, make her feel guilty for stringing you along and rejecting you again, which could then cause her to distance herself from you to prevent you from hurting her and her from hurting you.

Remember that just because your ex is your best friend, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to make your ex love you again. She may be really close to you, but if your ex decided to be just friends, you won’t change her mind very easily. You won’t be able to do it because she’ll remember why she dumped you, feel repulsed by the idea of getting back with you, and push you away to avoid feeling uncomfortable and/or hurting your feelings.

The title of this post is my ex is my best friend but I still love her. We’ll discuss what to do when you’re stuck in a friend zone with an ex and whether your ex-girlfriend will ever want to be with you again.

My ex is my best friend but I still love her

There’s nothing wrong with being in love with your best friend who happens to be your ex.

Romantic feelings are created mostly by factors such as physical/sexual attraction, similarities in beliefs, traits, and ways of thinking, mutual understandings, low self-esteem and/or desires to be loved, emotional, physical, financial codependence (relying on someone for happiness or survival), a high opinion of a person (idealizing), and feeling comfortable around a person due to familiarity, nostalgia, and various past experiences.

Some say you can’t choose who you fall in love with, but I think we make it perfectly clear who we want in our lives. We want the person who matches our description of our ideal partner. That person is the man or woman we’d spent our entire lives (or recent years if something shifted our focus) forming in our minds. And more often than not, that person is a reflection of our characteristics in many ways as we want someone who understands us and wants the same things in life (marriage, children, lifestyle…)

Of course, we never find a complete match because there is no such thing as 100% compatibility, but if we’re open to love, we eventually find someone with similar traits, values, and beliefs we can work with.

For example, if we’re intelligent (have a high IQ and graduated from a prestigious university) we tend to gravitate toward people who at least on the surface seem to share similar qualities, skills, and goals with us. Such people seem similar to us in ways that are important to us, so we start to romanticize them. That’s why we also begin to desire them (emotionally) and want them closer to us and exclusively to ourselves.

With exes and exes who are our best friends, the story is very similar. We know who they are as people and like them, so there’s familiarity. But the thing that pulls us toward them the most is attachment and unprocessed feelings. Sometimes (or almost always) there’s also anxiety, fear, and a loss of self-esteem that compels us to seek love from our exes, which means that the breakup affects our romantic needs.

It heightens our senses and makes us think that the person we were with in the past is the person we should be with and have the most successful relationship with.

We think this way only because our ex has dumped us and triggered the emotional response in us we didn’t know we had. In similar words, our ex made us hunger for love and connection even though the love and connection may not have been that great in the relationship. Especially toward the end.

That’s why the saying, “You don’t know the value of something until you lose it” is half deceptive. You definitely realize you need someone who dumped you, but that’s only because you were attached or emotionally dependent on that person without realizing it. You couldn’t feel the bond because love emotions waned and forced you to take love for granted.

Now that you and your ex are no longer together, many factors are telling you that your ex is the best person in the world. But the factors you should be aware of the most are separation anxiety, loss of happy hormones, decreased self-esteem, fears, uncertainties, and regrets.

So if your ex is your best friend and you still love her, think about why you love her. Is it because she’s a great match for you or is it because she doesn’t want you (hurt your self-esteem) and triggered your needs for love and self-love.

If you give it some thought, you should realize that love is a big word and that it becomes very complicated when you stop receiving it from the person you perceive as worthy. It especially gets tricky when you perceive yourself as unworthy because that’s when your self-esteem plummets, forcing you to put your ex on a pedestal and making your well-being dependent on your ex.

If you want your ex-girlfriend back when you’re extremely hurt, this isn’t a great time for you to attempt to reconcile. Every fiber in your body is telling you that it is because “time is running out,” but if you’re a dumpee who recently got dumped by his ex, there’s a big risk that you’ll come on too strong and overwhelm your ex with your desire to bond.

It’s much safer for you not to get rejected when you’re at your weakest point in life so that you can focus on healing and becoming emotionally stronger. The stronger you become and the more you invest in yourself, the higher the chances that you’ll exude confidence around your ex and that your ex will eventually drop her guard and see your potential.

So don’t waste your time trying to directly reattract your ex. She’s your best friend, but that won’t make it any easier for you to trigger her “hidden” feelings for you and help you reconnect with her on a deeper level. Exes seldom go from friendship to romantic partners. Sure, it happens now and then because dumpers date other people and get themselves into trouble, but usually, they come back when the dumpee does no contact because that’s when they see what it means to lose relationship benefits.

What do I do?

Most dumpees I speak with want to do something. They want to show their ex they’re worth another chance, so they get ready to do anything to impress their ex and reconcile. But as I’ve said a million times on the blog before, the breakup isn’t the time for dumpees to act. It’s time for them to let the broken relationship rest, self-prioritize, and improve as much as possible.

Their dumper will act on her own when she has focused on herself and possibly dated other guys. This is because it’s through comparisons and failure that she will realize what she’s lost and regret dumping her ex,

Your ex as a dumper already knows what she’s lost. But she doesn’t care about it right now because she doesn’t think of it as a loss. She considers it a win as she’d been meaning to be single or with someone else for a long time before she dazzled you with the breakup. The girl or woman wanted the breakup to happen very badly, which means that something unexpected and difficult must change her opinion of you and cause her to crave your affection again.

What does this mean for you?

It means you must not interfere with your exes perception process. Your ex has a certain thinking style or mentality and will not appreciate it if you tried to meddle with it. If you try to make her see your point of view through force, your ex will see your desperation and feel that you aren’t respecting her boundaries. That’s when she’ll get upset or just silently increase the distance between you and her.

If you’re still in love with her when she pushes you away, know that you’re going to get hurt badly. She may not hurt you on purpose, but she’ll nonetheless do what’s best for her and prove that she’s not interested. And that’s something you don’t need. One rejection was more than enough.

So don’t consider yourself lucky just because your ex is your best friend and you still love her. Just because you love her, doesn’t mean that she loves you back. All it means is that you’re infatuated with her and that you haven’t taken the best path to disconnect from her and find your peace.

Although your ex is your best friend, you must know what the breakup demands of you, so you can respect your ex’s decision and boundaries. And while you’re doing what’s necessary, you must also set your own boundaries. You can do that simply by going no contact and doing your best to emotionally understand your ex most likely won’t come back the nice way – by being her friend. She’ll come back if she gets hurt and sees that you weren’t perfect but still made a decent partner.

It’s hard for you to respect yourself right now and let your ex go, but it’s very important that you start no contact right away. The sooner you put yourself first, the sooner you’ll heal and make your ex realize that you won’t give her relationship perks without getting what you want in return.

Here are some simple tips on how to go from friendship to a relationship.

You can also take the long and painful route

I usually talk about indefinite no contact because no contact is the safest regimen for dumpees to get their health back and for dumpers to stop feeling pressured into acting the way dumpees want them to act. It’s also the most successful method for reattracting an ex back as it leaves the dumper alone to his or her own devices.

But once in a while, some (not many) dumpees still manage to go from friendship to relationship without relying on no contact. Such dumpees sacrifice their healing, stay in their ex’s lives as friends or best friends and eventually get lucky with their ex.

By getting close to their ex, they initially lose all the romantic attraction their ex feels for them. They make their ex see they are willing to accept anything their ex proposes and lose power. But as time goes on, their ex starts encountering problems and confiding in them again. This is how dumpees slowly become useful to them again and appear to be reliable dating options. At that point, dumpers don’t come back just yet. They still need an emotional incentive strong enough to desire the person they left.

Dumpees come back only when they fail badly. That’s when they reflect on their mistakes and realize that the person they dumped is still available and willing to help them in whichever way they need him or her to help.

If you go down this painful route, know that there’s no guarantee your ex will eventually see your romantic worth and return to you. It’s much more likely that your ex will knowingly or unknowingly string you along until your ex pushes you away for good or you get tired of chasing.

How your story ends depends on your patience and the things happening in your ex’s life. So remember that if you keep asking for attention, your ex will soon feel pressured and crave space. Your best chance of reuniting with your ex by going down this dangerous path is by developing your own strength and waiting for something bad to happen to your ex. When it does, your ex might come back or just use you for emotional support.

It’s up to you if you want to take that risk. But if you ask me, the chances of success are too low to even think about it.

Is your ex your best friend but you still love her? What course of action have you decided on? Share your plans with us below the post.

And if you’re looking for 1-on-1 personal guidance and want our help, check out our coaching options.

Zan

My name is Zan and I’m the founder of Magnet of Success. I enjoy writing realistic relationship and breakup articles and helping readers heal and grow. With more than 5 years of experience in the self-improvement, relationship, and breakup sphere, my goal is to provide advice that fosters positivity and success and avoids preventable mistakes and pain. Learn more about me or get in touch today.