Q: I recently broke up with my boyfriend and now I see him everyday on campus! On top of that awkwardness, I can’t decide if it is OK to hang out with friends we used to hang out with together or if I should just try to find new friends. Help!
Broken-up in BrownA: Ah, the ‘ole dividing of assets.
When married couples divorce, they have to divide everything acquired together during the marriage – money, furniture, kids. While your “divorce” was not a legal one, there are still a lot of decisions to be made about how to separate everything you two acquired while you were dating, and that includes friends.
But first, a helpful hint about avoiding the embarrassment of meeting your ex everyday on campus-change the way you walk to your classes! If you find yourself meeting your ex everyday as you walk past Rogers-Stout, park near Warf-Pickel and walk to your classes from the opposite end of campus. If you have a class (or, God forbid, more than one class) with your ex, sit near the door if it really bothers you so you can make a quick exit.
Break-ups are always tricky situations that will inevitably leave at least one partner feeling hurt and one partner feeling guilty. Believe it or not, time really will heal the pain of your break-up, but it may not happen as quickly as you want. If it was a particularly nasty break-up, it may take months (or even years) for you to stop thinking about it on a regular basis.
If your relationship was relatively casual, the “healing process” may take a few weeks. By “healing process,” I mean the amount of time it takes you to realize you didn’t really care that much about your relationship, anyway.
Now to address your question about the dividing of friends. My only advice to you is this: make sure that you never say anything around his friends that you don’t want to get back to him.
If your mutual friends are still talking to both of you, you can be assured that whatever you say about your ex to his friends will get back to him eventually.
Make sure that the friends you hang out with don’t sympathize more with your ex than with you on the issue of the break-up.
If they don’t support you, you should probably leave them alone until everyone has forgotten about the break-up.
Also, make sure that when you hang out with mutual friends that your ex won’t be invited. If you can’t stand to run into him on campus, imagine the wrist-slashing agony of having to sit near him in a restaurant as your friends give you both knowing stares.
A break-up is no reason to ditch all of your friends, but things have definitely gotten more complicated for you if you keep your same crowd. I suppose what you have to decide is whether or not they are worth the complication.
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