Envision Media Arts"We’ve worked on -- and mastered -- a different kind of post-breakup arrangement: We do everything together except bone."My best friend is one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met. She’s smart, but not a know-it-all, which makes her curious and wide-eyed. She’s funny, but she never goes for the cheap laugh, which makes her surprising. She’s a knockout, but she doesn’t know it, so, yeah, she’s humble. She’ll give you the shirt off her back, but, boy, will she make you work for it (I owe her 60 bucks at the time of writing). She’s tough as nails, but if she breaks her own? Forget about it. She’s responsible, works harder than anyone I’ve ever met, takes nothing for granted, believes in me and doesn’t scare easy. She is, perhaps, the perfect girl.
Oh, yeah, she’s also my ex. We ended our traditional boy-meets-girl relationship over five years ago and have since embarked on something a touch more unconventional. Some exes continue their sexual dalliances long after they’ve split. Just because I hate the way you breathe heavily when you watch TV and you hate the way I peel an avocado doesn’t mean we can’t keep going down on each other, right? But because a total lack of sex was the reason we decided to end our relationship in the first place (more on that later), we’ve worked on -- and mastered -- a different kind of post-breakup arrangement: We do everything together except bone. We’re everything but f*ck buddies. Friends with different kinds of benefits. It’s our non-relationship relationship.
But before I explain exactly how this works, and how it’s changed our lives, here’s a brief history of how we got here.
We dated for almost a year, but it went by in a week. The honeymoon phase -- which, for all you relationship neophytes, is the period when things still feel fresh and exhilarating (that is, the sex is still good) -- was cut short when I moved to New York for a job opportunity.
Sure she visited me, but there was no denying that our relationship had been permanently stained by the “who are you going out with tonights?” and the “why didn’t you call me backs?” and the “when are you coming homes?”
When I did return home, things fit again, like a shoe in mud, but it was clear from the start that something was missing. The expiry date on our relationship had been accelerated, because that’s what long distance does. It stuffs everything into a vacuum and forces you to confront a top 10 list of typical relationship problems right here, right now. Communication breakdowns, questions about the future, jealousy and accusations, the measuring of expectations, trial breakups. These are issues that couples in more traditional relationships face one at a time, like pit stops on a cross-country road trip. They’re spread out and there are signs, so you see them coming. When I moved to New York, we had to confront them all at once. Next Page >>
