I Found A Way To Stay In Love With My Ex. Maybe You Should Too.

Life is full of choices if you open yourself up to receiving them

I’m not going to bore you guys with details of our relationship or how me and my ex met. In the bigger scheme of things, I don’t think it matters. Everyone will face this situation and there will be two choices (or at least that’s what society has ingrained in all of us). I am here to tell you that life is full of choices as long as you open yourself up to receive them. I found fulfilment in the in between.

To set things straight, I don’t think this would work for all relationships. My ex at one point in my life, was my best friend and my partner. Our romantic love was just one aspect of our connection. Amongst the cute dates and gestures, we had layers of intimacy : shared moments where we bared our ugliest truths for each other to see. And we both found helped each other through the messy maze of gay teenage hood.

I Broke Up With My Ex Boyfriend Four Years Ago. Now We’re Best Friends.

Ex or Best Friend? I broke up with my ex of four years in 2020. My friends never felt we were meant to be. He was fire, I was rain. I’m stable and serious – he’s wild and cavalier. My life revolved around the next career milestone – for him, it was chasing the wildest of rollercoasters in life. And that’s okay. We had our differences and we managed. We worked through our problems, we focused on what we had and believed that in our differences, there is balance. What wasn’t okay was the infidelity that followed, that escalated a…

Nothing mentally prepares you for the morning after a breakup. My ex leaving me felt like hell.

TLDR, we had a pretty bad break up. And it was way more devastating that I had anticipated it to be. Nothing mentally prepares you for the morning after. I’ve grown to figure why breakups hurt that bad — it’s because we’ve grown to accept that, that’s the end of everything. Then the emptiness, existential loss and grief kicks you in the gut and makes you feel nauseated — so much so that no amount of pills except time mellows it out. The longer and more genuine the relationship, the harder it hurts. 

We broke up, blocked each other and essentially went no contact for almost 2 years. I made multiple attempts to reconcile but he got into another relationship and shut me out of his world. I learned to bite through it and move on. And I actually did move on. 2 years later we reconnected, as friends.

Memories are stored forever in our bodies, minds and souls. I stopped lying to myself.

I think that was the moment it struck me — despite all the arguments, the bitterness or the pain, and us falling out of ‘love’, the connection remained there. Logically it makes sense. Memories are stored forever in our complex bodies, you can’t just extract them out of your being because they’re an integral part of your present. Genuine connections don’t just disappear or erode over time unlike everyone likes to believe. I stopped pretending that it does either. Part of that realisation scared me but the more I opened myself up to my confused emotions, I came to accept that there was no shame nor fear in it. 

We went through what we did and nothing would ever change that. The only people that had the power to take the beauty in that away was us. So why do it? I knew we weren’t romantically together anymore. But I could still love him as a friend. Love is just an expression of your feelings, it does not have to be sexual or romantic. We prescribe the boundlessness that is love to exercise control over it.

Love has endless forms. It can take the form of a harsh scolding, a gentle kiss or deafening silence.

I think love takes on many forms and the way it changes is non linear. It takes the shape of a scolding from our Asian parents sometimes or it takes the form of a gentle hug. Other times it takes the form of complete silence. Love can coexist. Love can be romantic. Love can be platonic. Love can be a connection. 

We’ve gotten a lot closer again in the past year. And I think we’ve navigated our relationship very maturely. We’re there for each other for our downs and we know we can trust each other. Honestly I don’t know anyone else who has this relationship. My friends say it’s unconventional but I think that’s the very condition of being human. Convention only applies when it’s relative to the norm. We’ve made it work and I don’t see anything wrong in it.

What have we lost? Nothing What have we gained? The continuation of a genuine connection that would probably last for life. Break-ups can hurt and may be permanent. But breakups don’t have to mark the end of your love for something pure.

Do you have an unconventional relationship?