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Breaking up is hard to do.
So hard, in fact, that we often have a difficult time completely ending a relationship.
Making a clean break can feel too final, too absolute, and too harsh, especially with someone you’ve been so close to. To dampen the hurt of heartbreak, it’s common to try to lessen the pain by maintaining connection.
“We can still be friends.”
It’s such an obvious solution. Yes, the romance is over, but it feels harsh to cut ties entirely. On one hand, it makes a lot of sense, because like good friends, you two have a lot of history. On the other hand, your romantic relationship ended for a reason.
Whether staying friends with your ex is a good idea depends on why you want to preserve the friendship.
What’s your motivation?
The Four Reasons for Staying Friends
Researchers have you covered. To determine people’s reasons for continuing friendships with former partners, 288 adults (ages 18-62) reviewed a list of 29 possible reasons for wanting to stay friends (e.g., “being polite,” “not wanting to be alone”) and indicated how true each was for them (Griffith et al., 2017).
Participants’ ratings revealed four key motivations for staying friends:
Security: Staying friends to not lose the ex-partner’s emotional support, advice, or trust. Keeping them around because of shared memories or to have someone to count on.Practical: Staying friends to avoid losing the ex-partner’s financial support or the social status associated with the relationship. Or staying friends because you have a child together, or shared possessions.Civility: Staying friends simply to be polite, not hurt the ex-partner’s feelings, to avoid confrontation, or because you feel guilty about breaking up with them.Unresolved Romantic Desire: Keeping the friendship because you don’t want to be alone, to maintain sexual contact, and because you still hope to rekindle a romantic relationship.
It Was Never About Staying Friends
Everyone wants a happy ending with minimal hurt feelings. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works out for everyone. The research shows it wasn’t necessarily the fact that people wanted to stay friends. The real issue was the underlying reason for wanting to keep the connection.
First, the really bad news.
Those who wanted to stay friends because of unresolved romantic desire experienced a range of negative outcomes: feeling heartbroken, worse mental health, more depression, greater tension in the friendship circle, and increased jealousy.
Staying friends due to lingering feelings was also counterproductive for forming new relationships, because it made it harder to make new friends and more difficult to find a new romantic partner.
So, what’s going on?
I think it comes down to what I call “the potato chip principle.”
The famous Lay’s potato chips slogan says, “Betcha can’t eat just one.” They’re not kidding.
If you’re really trying to avoid eating a bag of potato chips, it’s a lot easier to succeed if you don’t have any potato chips. Having even just a little, makes the temptation to eat more a lot more difficult to deny.
The same is true for relationships with exes.
Some contact, even if it’s just a little, is harder to handle than no contact.
A clean break sets a clear and unmistakable boundary.Having “just a little” contact forces you to constantly decide how much contact is innocent and harmless, or potentially too much and runs the risk of reopening old wounds.All those little contacts, even just a “checking in” text, keeps the old attachment intact. You call it “only friends,” but it still has unintended consequences.
The attachment to a former partner lingers longer than you may think.
Research on 320 participants shows that the emotional bond to an ex is only halfway gone, on average, at 4.18 years, and doesn’t fully fade until around the eight year mark (Chong & Fraley, 2026). Stay friends while you still feel drawn to them and you risk lengthening a healing process that already takes longer than you’d like.
Those who wanted to stay friends for practical or civility reasons were also more likely to have the friendship end in the future (Griffith et al., 2017). While your “we can still be friends” is a well-intentioned attempt maintaining civility, your ex-partner may not read it that way. They may see it as a reason for hope, “if there really wasn’t a chance at getting back together, they wouldn’t want to stay friends.” In other words, staying friends feels a lot like “let’s stay in reach.” That’s a holding pattern that leaves the door cracked for a return. Even if you’ve said there’s no chance at getting back together, people will read your behaviors as your true intentions.
The fact is, you have other friends who are truly friends without romantic ulterior motives. Instead of giving someone false hope, remember that closure is kindness.
Give them the “gift of goodbye” with a clear break that lets them get started on finding their person, no strings attached.
But the research on staying friends wasn’t all bad news.
If participants kept the relationship intact for security or practical reasons, they had more positive outcomes, feeling more secure and experiencing more positive feelings (Griffith et al., 2017).
The Default Is Distance. The Exception Is Narrow.
Let’s be crystal clear here about the answer to “should we stay friends?”
In most cases, the answer is “no.”
Continued contact is the problem, not the solution. A clean break is easier to hold and faster to recover from than “a little” access you have to keep renegotiating with yourself.
If you’re the one holding on to hope that staying friends will help you get back together, there are two things you want to consider:
First, the desire keeping you in the friendship is often built on a mental image you have of your ex-partner, that doesn’t actually exist.What you miss, you likely never really had.What you miss, is the sanitized positive version of who you wished they were. Memory inflates the good parts and edits out the reasons it ended, so you’re keeping the friendship for future potential access to a person and relationship that is a fantasy.Second, wanting to stay friends often isn’t about your ex-partner at all. Instead, we like to hold onto exes “just in case.” What if you can’t find anyone else, or anyone better. That thought tells you more about your sense of scarcity than it does about your ex and their quality as a partner.
Can staying friends work? Yes, but rarely.
The security and practical friendships are the exception, not the most likely pathway to success. If the connection for both of you is genuinely low spark, no lingering want, no hope you’re feeding, and it gives you real support or handles something practical you actually share, like a child or a co-owned thing, it can work. Everywhere else, non-friends/no contact wins.
You know you need a clean break. But pulling it off, the right way, feels impossible. Below I give you the exact words to send, each tailored to the unique situation based on where you and your ex actually stand. Plus, I give the one rule that keeps all three from unraveling the second they reply.
Who’s More Likely to Want to Stay Friends?
Although it’s not the best idea, overall, the research shows a majority of participants (59% in Study 1 and 65% in Study 2) remained friends with ex-partners (Griffith et al., 2017).
However, some people were more likely to want to stay friends than others.
Men in Study 1 were more likely than women (though Study 2 found no difference).
Personality mattered too: those who were less extroverted and more agreeable wanted to stay friends. Individuals with more avoidant attachment (uncomfortable with closeness) and less anxious attachment (strong desire for closeness) were also more likely to remain friends.
Finally, LGBTQ individuals had more current and lifetime friendships with former partners than heterosexual participants.
How To Handle This
When the romantic side of a relationship doesn’t work out, salvaging a friendship feels like common sense. Lots of people do it. The reasons you want to stay friends matter. If it’s because you still have feelings, the friendship creates more problems than it solves.
Before you decide, answer one question:
What do you want more:
A fulfilling, committed relationship, or this specific person?
Only the first guarantees what you’re actually after.
If the friendship served the relationship you want, it would have worked out.If staying friends is a way to hold onto something that already hasn’t worked, it’s likely costing you the very thing you say you want.
Gary W. Lewandowski Jr.
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