Staying friends with your ex: motivation for friendship after a relationship
For most people, contact with an ex-partner is limited to exchanging greetings or short conversations, and then lastly if there are no children or a common business. However, some people become friends with their ex-girlfriends or boyfriends after a breakup and ask, “Why?” if you please ask. Will these situations lead to trouble sooner or later?
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In an attempt to answer the question of what motivates cross-gender friendships between ex-partners after the end of a romantic relationship, Justin K. Mogilsky and Dr. Lisa L. M. Welling, PhD, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Auckland, USA, reviewed a new round of research. A detailed report and study results were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences in September 2017.
Experimental conditions
In the first round of the study, 348 participants listed reasons why they remained friends with their exes. The result was a long list of 2, 000 items. Subjects in the second stage (513 participants) rated the importance of each of the reasons indicated in the first stage. The analysis then revealed a ranking of seven main categories that summarized similar motives for wanting to remain friends after a breakup.
- Trust and sensitivity. This category includes answers such as: “I liked his (her) company,” etc.
- Pragmatism, i. e. the continuation of friendship is determined by practical considerations. “He bought me nice gifts (food).” “I missed her friend”;
- Romantic attraction follows: “I was still in love with her”; “I couldn’t imagine my life without him”;
- Children or shared resources: “we have a common child”; “we work together”; “we have a common business”;
- Decreased romantic attraction: “I have lost sexual interest, but communication continues to attract”; “I no longer have negative feelings after the breakup”;
- Maintaining social relationships: “to avoid awkwardness in groups of our mutual acquaintances”; “I wanted to be with friends, among whom was my ex-partner”;
- Sexual access: “the sex was good”; “The only thing that unites us is sex.”
Read also: The devil is in the details: what will prevent friendship with exes
Can I be friends with the first one? This is one of the most common questions asked to sexologists. Of course, this is rarely reality if after.
Participants were then asked to rate these seven categories on a scale measuring personality traits and varying degrees of deviation from psychological norms.
Reliability, pragmatism or sex?
Categories that included qualities of an ex-partner such as “emotional” or “trustworthy and reliable” received the highest ratings on the importance scale. Reasons indicating that the continuation of the friendship was practical, i. e. pragmatism scored the lowest number of points.
Should you be friends with your ex? Is it worth staying friends after a breakup?
Dark sides of personality
The study also found that people who were more likely to maintain friendships with previous sexual partners showed higher levels of manipulation and a tendency to cheat in personality tests. And this is not surprising. This is because previous research has shown that people who maintain close relationships with their “befores” are more likely to be sociopaths.
On the other hand, people who do not exhibit high levels of manipulative and misbehavior are likely to remain friends because their “do” is a reliable and worthy person, and because of their sentimental attachment to him.
Perhaps this is why it is recommended to remain friends with your ex-lover. Of course, it all depends on your motives. But if you really want to end the relationship, move forward and don”t dawdle — don”t dawdle because someone (you, your ex-partner, or your current partner) might get hurt emotionally.
