G&STC Director Jesse Kahn talks with Jay Deitcher at Vox about How to Stay Friends with an Ex
Check out G&STC’s Director Jesse Kahn talking with Jay Deitcher at Vox about how to stay friends with your ex.
“If you need to not be friends, and you need that space, that’s okay,” says Jesse Kahn, a psychotherapist and the founder, director, and sex therapist at The Gender & Sexuality Therapy Center in New York City. “But that isn’t what you have to do because of what seems to be expected [by society].”
After a cleansing period, if you are ready for the reset, you and your ex have to be on the same page as to what the friendship will look like. To help visualize what you want in a friendship, it can be valuable to think about how you relate to your other friends, says Kahn, because the expectations we have for how we engage with our friends can differ from person to person. Ask yourself how emotionally intimate you are with your friends. Are you comfortable with them touching you or are you big on personal space? How often do you see your friends in person: Weekly? Daily? Every couple months?
Some people need to process old wounds before jumping into a friendship, and others just want to “move on and create something new,” says Kahn. What you don’t want to do is make believe that everything is okay when it’s not. “We don’t want to be like, ‘I’m cool as a cucumber,’ and I can let it go, but really you are someone who needs to process.”
More from G&STC Director Jesse Kahn on this topic:
Places to potentially set limits/boundaries around your new relationship:
How often you communicate with each other
How much you emotionally rely on each other
How much information you share about your personal lives
Whether you're going to share information about your dating lives or new partners
Whether you feel comfortable spending time alone together or prefer group hangouts only
What level of friendliness is comfortable when you see each other in person
How much time or energy you each expect from one another
And consider WHY you want to stay friends. Is it because you think you’d make great friends and want to continue to be in each other’s lives or is it because you want to get back together so you want to keep close proximity?