You’re My Ex, Not My Friend

There’s no limitation on where a relationship — and its participants — will end up, once all is said and done. Some exes remain friendly, some continually hook up, some check in every now and then, and some straight up ignore each other as though the whole present-exchanging, parent-meeting, love-making thing never happened. Then there’s all the shades of grey in between, and this is where you and I live — although I don’t have an explanation as to why that is. I don’t have an explanation for it because what seems evident to me has completely escaped you. So allow me to explain.

After our fairly painless breakup five years ago, you and I did what you, and I, and everyone on this planet does: we kept growing. And from my vantage point, we grew in completely different directions. You became more and more of the little quirks that eventually drove me away; I became something that I couldn’t have anticipated and won’t bother explaining to you, because that’s a waste of time for us both. Over the last five years, though, something became clear to me: If we met now, we would have nothing to say to each other.

We have nothing in common. I think back on our relationship and struggle to pin down what exactly kept us together for two years. I don’t struggle with what divided us, though, and the void only seems to have grown since we were together. And while the basis of our former relationship is perplexing, it doesn’t keep me up at night. I’m OK with having dated someone whom I have no interest in maintaining a relationship with now. It doesn’t feel like the worst thing that could happen.

But you. In the last year alone, you’ve gone from inviting me to large, clusterfuck events I’d have no interest in attending (which you’d know, if we were friends) to inviting me to your house parties, to texting me every single time you’re in my neighborhood, to drunkenly insisting that you’re coming to my apartment (you don’t know where I live, FYI) at 3 a.m. when I’ve made it clear — through my words and through my actions — that I have no interest in spending time with you, in my bedroom or anyplace else. There’s no harm in trying to be my friend, but when that ‘friendship’ begins to manifest in blatant booty calls, you need to back the fuck up.

We are not friends. I know you probably don’t remember this, because our life together was 90% of you and 10% of me, but I have friends. They’re the people you didn’t bother to get to know, the people who were not as deserving of our collective time as your friends were, the people I eventually realized I loved more than I loved you. We, my friends and I, have survived all of the little changes that took place over the last decade — something you and I could’ve never done. And that’s fine. I am OK with that.

I need you to be OK with it, too. I need you to accept that we are not friends. Because while the Facebook invites, and the messages, and the texts aren’t necessarily ruining my life, they do seem a little disrespectful in light of the relationships I currently have with other people. They do seem a little inappropriate in light of the relationship I don’t have with you.