My Ex Was My Best Friend And I Miss Him

If your ex was your best friend and you miss your ex like crazy, you probably feel like you didn’t just lose your ex, but also your best friend.

You feel that a big portion of your life is now missing and that you want your ex to remain in your life at least to some extent.

You want this so that you don’t lose “everything,” but only the romantic aspect of your life.

It’s your stop loss order.

But the undeniable truth is that losing everything after the breakup is way better than staying friends with an ex and holding on to hope.

It’s better because as long as you possess romantic feelings for your ex, your ex can’t, nor want to be your friend. He gave up on you and first needs to process the breakup before your ex can change the label of the romantic relationship back to friendship.

As for you, you also have work to do. You have to properly grieve over the loss of your relationship before you can see your ex as just a friend. This is something that takes time.

How much time, I can’t say because each person is different. Generally speaking, it takes around 8 months to get over the breakup. If your ex was your world, it could take twice that long.

Maybe even thrice if you relied on your ex for happiness and have poor self-esteem.

The point is that you mustn’t try to become your ex’s friend even if your ex was your best friend prior to the romantic relationship.

You mustn’t do it for the sake of your healing as well as your ex’s need for space.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “My ex was my best friend and I don’t want to lose a friend,” read on. This article will encourage you to see the bigger picture.

My ex was my best friend

I get it. It hurts like hell to lose your ex who was also your best friend. It hurts twice as much because it feels as if you’ve lost two good people. Your romantic partner as well as your best friend.

But unfortunately, that’s what breakups do to us when we don’t prepare ourselves in advance and self-invest. They separate us from the people we love and completely confuse us.

They punish us for not taking care of ourselves and leave us stranded with nothing but broken self-esteem.

This is why it’s so important that our partner isn’t our best friend. Or even worse, that he isn’t the one and only person who matters to us.

If he is, the separation anxiety after the breakup is going to be much more severe than if we had many good friends and lots of people to rely on. The breakup is going to torture us with demolished self-esteem, no ambitions, and a lack of available help.

So make sure to expand your social circle and by doing so, guarantee sufficient support for yourself in times of need.

The point of having lots of supportive people (friends) around you isn’t so that you can party with them and drown your grief and misery in tequila.

It’s to surround yourself with people who care and create a happy, self-sufficient life for yourself. One that your boyfriend or girlfriend can’t destroy simply by leaving you and withdrawing his love from you.

Ideally, you want to have your own groups of friends and activities that are not connected to your partner. You want to be with your partner but also live for yourself.

This is what life is all about. You have to live with purpose and have a plan for yourself. A personal happiness plan that your partner is not a part of and can’t control, manipulate, or destroy.

You don’t want your partner’s departure to scar you and torment you for many years. At least not to my awareness.

I believe you unknowingly want a plateau of security in your life that will guarantee the fastest possible recovery when something bad like a breakup occurs.

You want this feeling of security in all aspects of your life and not just in your romantic relationships. So make sure you create a life for yourself that’s built on internal happiness, confidence, and high self-esteem.

When you create it, you’ll realize that no one can take your happiness away from you. Not even by force.

My ex was my best friend for many years. I Miss our friendship

It’s okay to miss the person who’d been in your life for many years. But try to understand that you wouldn’t miss your best friend this much if he was “just” your best friend.

He was also your boyfriend which means that you don’t ponder about the friendship part of the relationship with this person very much. At least not as much as you may think.

What you nostalgically reminisce about are the emotions your ex-boyfriend engraved into your subconscious when you were still together.

We’re talking about simple emotions of familiarity, tranquility, comfort, appreciation, and acceptance.

These are the basic human needs and emotions that your ex enabled for you when you engaged in simple tasks with him such as grocery shopping, walking the dog, and going out for dinner.

They may not have meant a lot to you at the time because you experienced them on a daily basis, but because you repeated the same tasks many times, you shoved even the most trivial memories into the nostalgic region of your brain.

In simpler terms, you unknowingly gave them importance, and as a result, now miss their absence.

So don’t underestimate the power of nostalgia as it can play with your mind a lot after the breakup.

With the power of repetition, it can make even the most ordinary memories stand out from the more emotional ones and make you think that you’re missing out on simple things.

Things that you previously took for granted.

Will my ex who was my best friend come back?

Friendships prior to romantic relationships unfortunately have nothing to do with reconciliations. They are completely separate entities because dumpers don’t hold grudges toward the relationship.

They hold grudges or bad associations toward the person they left. This is the reason why breakups are often so black or white.

Couples either stay together and love each other or they break up and can’t stand each other.

I know it’s cruel, but not liking someone romantically makes friendship very difficult. Ex-couples just can’t seem to separate romantic persona from the friendship one, so they experience a lot of difficulties.

They perceive their ex (friend) as their partner and continue to behave around him or her with all the accumulated negative thoughts and feelings. This causes imbalances after the breakup and makes the ex-couple wonder how they can even be friends.

Such imbalances often occur when the breakup is one-sided and the dumpee still loves the dumper. In this case, the dumper would usually rather lose a friend and make new friends than to watch the dumpee drool over him or her.

Keep in mind that friendship is possible only when the dumpee and the dumper no longer possess romantic feelings for each other and keep it strictly about friendship.

Such ex-couples are able to stay friends or best friends and even become bridesmen or groomsmen.

But for most of you reading this article, becoming your ex’s best friend right now is probably not going to happen. Most of you don’t even want to be your ex’s friend because you respect yourselves too much to settle for friendship.

You love who you’ve become and can’t risk getting hurt.

As for those of you who think you want to become your ex’s best friend, you’re probably jumping the gun. As long as you’re not prepared to see your ex marry someone else, you’re not even remotely close to having a balanced friendship with your ex’s friend.

Not even if your ex used to be your best friend for 40 years.

Is it worth becoming friends with an ex?

This is just my opinion, but I really think that most exes shouldn’t be friends. It doesn’t matter if they were best friends before the relationship or if they got along just so so.

I think that the second a long-term romantic relationship ends, the dumper and the dumpee should go separate ways. The dumper shouldn’t send any breadcrumbs and confuse the dumpee—and the dumpee shouldn’t try to stay in contact.

Dumpers are the ones who set the pace after the breakup, so if they decide that it’s over, it’s over. There shouldn’t be any more contact on either side.

If there is, dumpees immediately feel incredibly hopeful for reconciliation and prolong their suffering. As for dumpers receiving messages, they usually feel smothered, empowered, and in complete control.

This is the reason why I stayed out of contact with all my dumpers and dumpees. I don’t want to confuse them or hurt them, so I continue to let them process the breakup and mind my own business.

Don’t get me wrong, I respect my exes and think I could be great friends with those who treated me well during and after the relationship.

But because it hasn’t been that long since we broke up, I know I need to wait a while longer before we’re ready to be friends.

I’m sure they understand why I’m giving them space.

Is it possible to become my ex’s friend?

If it’s been many months or years and you truly want to be your ex’s friend, simply contact your ex and tell him you have the best interests at heart.

Tell your ex you wanted to see how he’s doing and ask him if he wants to meet up. Reassure him that you only want to catch up and that you thought it’d be sad to throw away many years of friendship.

If your ex likes you as a friend, your ex will agree on friendship and you’ll have your best friend back. It will probably feel a bit strange at first, but you’ll soon get used to your ex being your friend again.

However, if your ex says he needs to think about your offer or says that he’s not interested at the moment (for whatever reason), tell your ex that you understand.

Give him all the time he needs to himself and make some new friends who hold no hard feelings toward you.

There’s no time to waste on someone who’s unsure about being your friend. So find someone who’s willing to be your friend without even being asked.

As you know, throughout life, we make and lose many friends. It’s natural for people to evolve, regress, and move on with life. So don’t be sad if you’ve lost your best friend who is also your ex.

I’ve lost my best friends too. But I know that I did my very best to keep them for as long as I could.

I have no regrets. What about you?

Was your ex your best friend or a good friend? Do you miss the friendship or the feelings of familiarity your boyfriend provided for you on a daily basis? Share your thoughts below.

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. Buy me a coffee, learn more about me, or get in touch today.