Indeed, a 28-year-old apple lover calls this the "passive-aggressive, love-me-forever" impulse, characterized by wanting to move on yourself, but hating any idea that the other person might ever be happy without you. Apples blames that tendency for making friendship with an ex "impossible."
Mutual benefits
Which brings me to the subject of benefits — the kind that come with friends, even ex-boyfriends.
Some say that being FWB is equally unfeasible. One person in the non-relationship relationship always wants more, right?
Consider complicated FWB Example A, between Practicalista and her former FWB (though Practicalista hates that term because "it sounded so cheap").
"Even today we have trouble defining it," Plista says of the relationship, in which they saw each other about once a month for years, and considered each other best friends . . . who were sexually attracted to each other. Here's texting evidence, from just a few days ago.
PLISTA Well if someone asks if we were friends with benefits, I don't know what to say because . . . sort of. But we really cared about each other, right?
FWB Right.
PLISTA So what would you call it?
FWB Hell I don't know. What would you call it?
PLISTA I don't know. You were like, "the man in my life."
FWB Oh, man.
PLISTA Hahaha! Okay, but really. If you had to sum it up. With pros and cons. One obvious pro being that I was such a hot piece of ass.
FWB Obviously.
PLISTA What would you say?
FWB Like you said, we were friends who had feelings for each other, but lived three hours apart. We enjoyed each other, but it never seemed to work out. Although, when we were together, we were like . . . together. I guess the pro is the good times we had. The con is that we never really gave it a shot to see what it could have been.
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