In the lesbian community it is expected that you will remain friends with your ex’s regardless of circumstance or torture it might inflict. Choosing to remain friends after a break-up is something that is distinctive and unique to lesbian relationships.
Whilst therapists would argue that it’s about ‘trying to keep a connection with that person and not being ready to let go’, there’s no denying that it’s ‘problematic’ for everyone if you no longer get along as avoidance is not an option. The lesbian world is a small one, even in the gayest city in the UK where there’s only one lesbian pub to serve us all.
In conversation on the matter down the pub, the woman I was chatting too looked at me like there was something innately wrong with my personality when I said I had no desire to maintain friendships with my ex’s and don't understand why others do? In retaliation, I questioned that if she wanted so strongly to maintain a friendship with hers when they’d betrayed her, may be they’d no longer been in love and in what I call a ‘dead relationship’*so it was easier to forgive.
My definition of a dead realtionship being, ‘For whatever reason, neither of you is willing ‘to end’ the relationship so it stays in a perpetual penultimate state. Love and intimacy have gone and you’re more like best friends. This may go on for many years, often until one of them meets another’.
Whatever the cause of this distinctive and unique element to our relationships, lesbians could write their own Bible of moral stories around super-human forgiveness following heartbreak that would make Jesus proud. So my inability, with ex’s scattered like landmines, makes me an oddity.
Start dating any lesbian and you get to meet their entire history through their ex-girlfriends (ironically, rarely their ex-boyfriends?!). You have to just cross your fingers their ex will not sabotage any new relationship you have, whether consciously or unconsciously, especially when the ex often becomes the confidante. You also have to just hope that their desire to be with each other is truly over and is not going to rekindle through friendship.
I’m still friends with some of those I had flings with, but no longer have contact with any of my ex-girlfriends, either because we have grown apart over the years and simply have little in common anymore as our paths have divided, or because the actions of the ex at the time of break-up, means I simply don’t want to be friends.
To me, maintaining a friendship for the sake of it, is like trying to salvage something from the wreckage rather than letting the sea bury it all with silt. Whilst I will never forget the good times I shared with all of them, I’m happy to let the relationships I’ve had be consigned to a grave. For just as Steve Jobs co-founder of Apple so correctly said,
“Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new”.
Something us lesbians really are not very good at.
(*I’ve identified 9 types of relationships that lesbians engage in which you can read in a previous post ‘Which Lesbian Relationship Type Are You?’)
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