Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Ex*

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LESSON ONE

Can Exes Ever Be Friends?

There’s always more to Ex relationships than meets the eye.

Just Friends. Don’t be so sure. Enemies? Don’t be so sure either. Lesson One will explore the twenty-first century world of Exes, including the new lines between lovers and friends. It will show how the end matters in determining the kind of Ex relationship you can create. Finally, it will reveal that your Ex actions speak louder than words.

CHAPTER 1

Understanding Today’s Ex World

Socrates said, The unexamined life is not worth living. However, an unexamined Ex life can make living hellishly confusing. This became crystal clear when we asked a woman next to us on the treadmill if she was in a relationship. She answered, No, but I do have a very serious Ex. It reinforced that for many of us, more time seems to be spent on our past than on the present or future. If you’re reading these words, there’s probably still a shadow of yesterday clouding your thinking. If so, you’re not alone.

EXcapades

Meet Melanie, the star of her own one-woman Ex show. She’s single, and no one can figure out why. Like a Cornell girl with a Ford Modeling contract, she’s the perfect almost 10. She has a great job as a producer of a cooking show. She’s willing to babysit for her friends’ children. Her life is fun and almost full. But at thirty-two, she stands out as the single girl in a sea of happily ever after. Always a bridesmaid, never a freakin’ bride.

BUZZ. Melanie’s BlackBerry wakes her up. There’s a message from Stan, the Ex-boyfriend she dated for five years and lived with for three. He’s a computer junkie who lives in London and sends her links to the hottest European food trends and restaurants. He also sends political messages to his other Ex, but Melanie doesn’t know that. The next message is her university’s alumni e-newsletter, and she sees a note about her college boyfriend, Doug, having his second kid. It’s a boy—yippee! They broke up because he said he didn’t want children.

When Melanie arrives at work, the first person she sees is the cameraman she had a sizzling six-month affair with. Drink tonight? he whispers.

Looking to see if anyone is around, she answers in the most aloof way, We’ll see. But she’s already wondering if her lacy Cosabella boy shorts are clean.

She gets to her desk. They’re making spaghetti carbonara today, and the eggs didn’t arrive. In between calls to various purveyors, she gets texts from the three guys she dated from an Internet dating site. She texts back, trying to be nice. In Melanie’s world, it’s raining men. So why isn’t she saying hallelujah?

Well, she gets great sex from the cameraman, who isn’t marriage material; she gets her emotional needs met from the computer junkie, who could never commit; and her constantly vibrating phone is a thrill, albeit a brief one.

The continued attention from these Exes feels awesome, but Melanie forgets that none of them was man enough on his own. By snacking on all these men, she never gets hungry enough to look for a real meal!

Melanie is an Ex symbol, a prime example of how dating has changed. By now you’ve read The Kinsey Report, you know that Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, you’ve committed The Rules to memory, and even (despite lots of resistance) recognized when He’s Just Not That into You. You’ve absorbed all the tips and tricks. But have you considered that your relationship with your Exes may be what’s sabotaging your future?

Mr. EXcuses

Meet Amanda, a thirty-five-year-old divorced mother of two children, ages seven and eleven. Her marriage ended when she realized the boy she met in college was Mowgli from The Jungle Book: a man-cub. She chose to have two children; she didn’t want a third. She’s a successful anesthesiologist and despite being a total MILF coveted by every single surgeon she works with, she’s still single four years after her divorce. She’s met a lot of people and claims she wants to get remarried, but every man is a short-term stint. No one understands—not even she herself—why she’s a serial monogamist.

One morning, as she’s racing into the OR, her phone rings. It’s Alan, her Ex. He forgot that their son needs his baseball uniform for an away game. The man-cub is at it again. Even though Amanda resents having to do it, she agrees to save the day. When she gets off the phone, her morning is shot. She’s stressed out. Once again she’s caught in a conflict with her desire to be friends with him and her disappointment with his childish unreliability.

That night, while Amanda is snacking on popcorn in bed and chatting on the phone with a new guy she’s dating, Alan sends her an instant message about how funny their son was at the game. Like any good multitasker, Amanda keeps talking on the phone as she IMs. Finally, she says good night to the phone and a more concentrated hello to the computer. One message leads to forty, in which she and Alan cover everything from inside jokes to old pet names, with plenty of LOLs thrown in. The exchange is almost as good as a good-night kiss.

Amanda had been in enough pain to split up her family and leave Alan. But now that she doesn’t live with him—and despite the morning’s incident—she’s numb to how it once was. She is still emotionally married to him and unconsciously holding out hope that he can grow up and be a part of the man village. This is precisely why she doesn’t give anyone new a sporting chance. But it didn’t happen in their years together, so why does she believe it’s going to happen now?

Melanie and Amanda are caught in Ex games. They are perfect examples of how Ex interactions are more insidious than ever. What they—and so many of us out there—need is schooling in how dating has changed in the twenty-first century and how these changes impact us.

Why Ex Issues Are Different Today

People have more Exes than before.

These days everyone has an Ex (or four). In the United States, there are at least twenty-five million divorced people and one million more each year. And that’s not mentioning the even greater number of breakups. Melanie had at least three Exes she was in daily contact with. With later-in-life marriages and higher divorce rates, people have more Exes in their lives. Furthermore, the inevitable end of relationships is a given: one woman even met someone in a bar who introduced himself as her future Ex-boyfriend. Given the overwhelming numbers, no matter what the duration of the relationship, the odds are that someone in your past, or in your partner’s past, may be affecting you. Until you take a good, hard look, who knows whether the Ex effect is positive or negative? Who are the Exes in your life?

It’s now politically correct to stay friends with your Exes.

In the past, no one expected Exes to be friends. Most people made a clean break. Today it’s vastly different. For example, Melanie never even considered cutting off contact with Stan when he moved to London. Everyone has become so PC that saying good-bye just doesn’t happen. If you take a look at other people’s Facebook friends, you’ll find many of their Exes. It would be considered rude to ignore a friend request from an Ex. Nowadays the person who says she can’t be friends with an Ex is seen as unsophisticated and insecure. And you’re really lame if you can’t handle your boyfriend’s Exes. However, a pseudofriendship with an Ex can be like mold or high blood pressure—a deadly, silent killer. Are you friends with your Exes?

Strides in technology have given a whole new meaning to reach out and touch someone.

Private sources of communication like cell phones, email accounts, and Facebook have made the new etiquette of staying in touch with Exes supereasy. It’s so simple and casual, most people don’t even consider what they’re doing. Amanda didn’t realize that her constant communication with Alan was keeping her lines tied up for any new callers.

It can all seem flirty and fun when Exes text you while they’re out drinking. Or when you email them a link you know they’d like. Or when they say a quick hey on IM. Since it’s just verbal communication, it’s not really cheating. Or is it? Well, emotional infidelity is as much a threat to your relationships as physical infidelity, and it can be equally addictive. By staying connected to certain Exes, you could be acting in an emotionally unfaithful way.

The downside of technology is that all these points of contact can keep toxic patterns going. Melanie never realized that on any given day, she had as many as ten contacts with Exes through text, email, and phone. These forms of communication mean you can be reached at any time. Your workday can be invaded by a hostile email from an Ex-husband. While on a great date, you can get a text from an Ex that leaves you confused and, more importantly, throws you off your game. The benefits of technology are unquantifiable, but the downside in the Ex world can be huge. How does technology keep you in contact with your Exes?

What these cultural changes amount to is a lot of time spent on Exes. The sad truth is that the more time you spend on Exes, the less likely it is that you’ll look for the right person. Both Melanie and Amanda are good examples of women who are doing just that. So just when did we start spending so much time on Exes?

CHAPTER 2

Who Said Exes Could Be Friends?

Spending so much time on Exes came from people taking great pride in saying, I’m friends with all of my Exes, as if this were a testament to their maturity, sophistication, and evolution. This Girls Gone Wild culture has made not being friends with an Ex completely uncool. It’s made us afraid to be honest about the best way for our relationships to work after a breakup or divorce.

Wendy Shalit, in her book A Return to Modesty, observes what all of us have experienced in recent years: It’s the new etiquette: One may dump shamelessly, but one must always be friends and check-up! You know, just so that they should find out how you’ve been doing ever since they decided that they didn’t like you.

That’s not how it always was. You only have to watch one episode of The Brady Bunch to understand how Exes were dealt with in the past. You kill them off and then never mention them again. Turn the clock forward to Seinfeld and Friends, two shows from the early nineties that reflected how things started to change. Exes went from being excommunicated to being neighbors and best friends. These two shows proved that if you keep your Exes around, life can be an Emmy Award–winning comedy. They alone displayed and propelled the cultural shift—and therefore the current PC pressure—to be in regular, casual contact with your Exes.

CoEX Dorm

Anna is twenty-one and a junior in college. She lives in a coed dorm. Anna breaks up with Brian, the cute guy next door (literally). Their relationship started after they did beer bongs at a frat party. No courting. No dating. No time to build trust. He’s an adorable, nice enough guy. One night after the breakup, Brian flops down next to Anna in the cafeteria and says, Hey, Babe. Her stomach turns. She still digs him, but she’s stuck. She believes she’s not cool if she can’t eat meals with him and hang out like they did before. She’s embarrassed to admit that she’s still hurt and not interested in friendship without benefits. Brian’s cavalier approach is a mask for his own confusion about how to behave. Even though Anna feels out of sync, what she’s feeling is actually normal. Sex changes things. Her discomfort with Brian’s casual approach should inform her that she’s a more traditional girl. It may not be PC, but that’s okay. In fact, it’s better than okay. It’s perfect. If she keeps this in mind, she’ll choose her next Ex better.

It’s a time of instimacy: instant intimacy. What does that mean? It means that you have sex on the first date. You share your innermost thoughts on the World Wide Web. Your photo collection and home movies (which at one point only your closest family had to suffer through) are now up for public suffering. Privacy is an outdated paradigm. It’s expected that you can become intimate with someone you’ve just met and then reverse back to a neutral state when the intimacy is over.

Yes, technology has changed, but our psychology and souls haven’t. Transitions are still the most difficult part of human development. Anna denied herself the chance to slowly determine if she wanted to have an intimate relationship with Brian. Just as love, communication, and trust take time to grow, feelings of separation, disappointment, hurt, and grief take time to overcome. Where are everybody’s real feelings in a world of instant connection and disconnection? No matter how quickly things move these days, hearts still take their sweet time to heal.

The media promotes this PC attitude that it’s much cooler to stay friends with Exes. Tabloids judge Cameron Diaz for going postal on Justin Timberlake’s new girlfriend and revere amicable Exes. Just think of Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Ashton Kutcher together on the cover of Vanity Fair. How seemingly idyllic: the sun, the sea, the smiling faces, and on the surface, no hard feelings. Granted, no one has any idea what really goes on between them. This is just another way that we’re sold a bill of goods about perfection, just like feeling the pressure to look like an actress in a magazine (even though she’s all airbrushed). These Ex images are no different. The impression they leave trickles down to expectations of how people should be.

The EXtra Pressure of an Ex-Husband versus an Ex-Boyfriend

Taking vows increases the stakes and expectations. You merge your belongings, your finances, and your gene pools. It’s a different club. Ex-boyfriends, no matter how significant, tend to blur together into one hairy heap. Ex-husbands (unless you’re Elizabeth Taylor) are few and far between. They stand out more, because you were willing to be legally tied to them: marriage takes strangers and turns them into family. And if you have kids, that bond increases exponentially. How you feel about dissolving a marriage depends on your family history, what part of the country you were raised in, your religion, and your own personal beliefs.

After things end, there are different expectations from Ex-husbands than from Ex-boyfriends. There is still usually a financial obligation from Ex-husbands. There might still be the belief that Ex-husbands will be there if you are sick or have a family crisis. And if you share children, you could expect them to continue tasks that, from the outside, seem as though you’re still married (anything from fixing things in the house to going trick-or-treating).

With an Ex-husband there is also the loss of the life you had, and that makes it more difficult for everyone. A married couple becomes an institution in the community that everyone wants to count on being there forever. It’s painful for each part