I am living with my ex. Should we have some physical distance between us?
I’m living with my ex-partner after mutually deciding to break up a few weeks ago. We rent a two-bed house and have a cat. The issue is my ex wants to stay in this living situation for the next few months and has no urgency to find alternative accommodation. I feel the urgency but don’t know what to do and whether to move back with my parents or stick it out.
I feel this is very unhealthy and the ritualistic habits developed over time are still happening … dinner, sleeping in the same bed, cleaning duties, shopping. Am I unrealistic in thinking that we should have some physical distance between us, or is this normal? I’m not sure what to do. It may sound selfish but I don’t want to be the one with all the upheaval, especially as I have worked so hard to make this house a home.
Eleanor says: I think you already know this, but might want permission to really believe it: as a fairly firm rule, you can’t move frictionlessly from being in a relationship to being close friends.
People try to break that rule all the time. They think they’re emotionally intelligent or mature enough that, while everyone else’s breakups involve fights and silence, they can get through one and keep the relationship more or less intact, still spending all their time together or saying things like “they’re my best friend”.
I’ve done it – your ex is doing it now. It makes sense: it’s a way of minimising how much pain we have to deal with in any one moment. Maybe getting through the breakup conversation itself was so hard that, for a while, you decided to spare yourselves the devastation of actually separating.
As an analgesic, it works: as long as you’re coming home to each other or texting all the time or “being there for whatever you need”, you don’t experience the pain of pulling apart.
But you don’t experience the good of pulling apart, either – the rawness, the learning, the solitude, the feeling of the unfamiliar, the freedom, the ability to see yourself through your eyes only.
