"We can still be friends." - Outdated or overrated?

We've all experienced the decent torture of a well heartbroken break up, and if you haven’t - then you surely will at least once in your life. See, what the movies don't tell you is that life isn’t just two hours long, and that long lasting relationships sometimes have their unfortunate expiration date. So what then? You can ponder the question, “Are we going to be friends after this?” Are happy birthday messages still allowed? Are we allowed to hangout with our friends in close proximity of each other? Can we still mention one other casually in conversation as if no hearts were shattered or ever mattered in the first place? I know how bad a name can hurt when it rolls off the tongue and you know you’ve said it a thousand times before. So, is it possible to still be friends? It always depends on how the relationship started. My friend Anouk stated that if you were friends before the relationship and know each other long enough to have a connection then maybe being friends afterwards could work, at least for some people. Maybe you realize that being friends, going back to the way things were, is better, easier. When you have that foundation of friendship it’s like a house that needs renovating. The windows may be broken and the ceiling might need a bit of plaster but the house doesn’t need to be torn down. It might take a while to repair everything that’s been damaged, but at the end of the day the house has sturdy framing and well built flooring to keep it raised. But a house cannot exist in the first place without a foundation. Just like a house, friendship is hard to form if it never existed at all. Me and my ex tried to be friends and that didn't work out that well, because we never were friends. Trying to be friends is always fine in the first 2 weeks when everything is sad and full of grief and you kind of need each other to get over that just like you needed each other through every step of your relationship, but it’s the second the first person is able to move on that the breakup just feels that much more official. Like you’ve been dreading coming to terms with it until now. When it comes to staying in contact you're not going to call each other at midnight in tears or talk about your day or do anything you used to do that felt normal. Having the idea that you might be able to still have a connection, is making it harder to process your hurt, sadness and guilt that you so desperately need to come to terms with. “Can we still be friends?” is softening the blow. It’s like putting a nice little ribbon over a plant that's already dead, but you continue watering it. It hardly ever works. For me, I knew that for a long time seeing him would be a reminder. And I didn’t want to remember, at least not yet.

Yours truly,

The relationship expert.