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From: peters@saturn.UUCP (Liz Peters)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: re: friendships with SO's
Message-ID: <2537@saturn.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 14-Dec-84 18:15:18 EST
Article-I.D.: saturn.2537
Posted: Fri Dec 14 18:15:18 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 19-Dec-84 00:11:30 EST
Organization: Hewlett Packard Labs, Palo Alto CA
Lines: 53

> What if your best friend is your SO? 
> I broke up with my SO about 2 months ago when she decided to start going
> out with another person. I don't see her quite as much as I used to, but
> I still enjoy a special relationship with her. We still are best
> friends, sharing secrets and all the other silly things that best
> friends do. In the mean time I have developed other relationships that
> I never had before, but the point I am trying to make is that my ex-SO
> was (and probably always will be) one of the best friends I ever had in
> my whole life. 
> Now for the sad part. In the past two or three months I have witnessed
> several breakups. In about 90% of them there is no more contact between
> the two people who were once so close. Is it really possible to break
> off a relationship like that without remebering all the wonderful things
> that happened between two people? Or is it that I'm expecting people to
> develop something deeper than a mere physical attraction when they start
> "going out"?
> Obviously it's possible to continue a relationship after a relationship.
> What I'd like to know is why it is so rare, and why people don't try to
> do it more often.
> 
> -- 
> ihnp4--\                                        fritzz the Zebra
> 

One reason it might be difficult to maintain such a close relationship 
with former SO's is that current SO's can be jealous of this other 
relationship.  There are alot of insecure people out there, and it can 
be difficult to believe that there isn't something going on.

Another reason (and to me the more important one) is that there is usually 
alot of pain involved when a relationship breaks up (or changes state, at
least).  It usually takes time for the pain to diminish.  Thoughts of things 
that could have been keep fliting through your brain.  It will often depend 
on the people involved.  

In all of the important relationships I've been in, we'd decided that our
friendship was very important to us both, and that we'd want to continue,
even if we broke up.  

In two cases we ended up seeing little of each other for about 6 months.
It can be hard to stop thinking of someone in sexual and "possesive" terms 
(haven't you ever felt deprived when seeing an ex-SO with someone else?) 
and the time apart can be beneficial to the long-term friendship.  

In the last case, we ended up sort of sliding into a friendship state from a
relationship, and things worked out well enough.  There was quite a bit of pain
involved for me (since I wasn't the one who had decided that the relationship
wasn't working).  I realized and agreed that it was better to break up, yet it 
still hurt.  It's often hard to disassociate your logic from your emotions.  


					Liz Peters
					hplabs!peters