Can You Ever Go Back To Just Friends?

On staying friends, talking to your ex, and shit- I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.

It was my first summer in London and we met under the London Eye for our first date. I was running late as always, having gotten lost at Waterloo. He rang me as we both waded through the stream of tourists to find each other.

“Is this where I find out you’re a catfish?” He said on the other side of the phone.

“Yeah, I’m the old man eating the ice cream.” I said back, watching as the sticky syrup ran down the man’s forearms wondering which of these faces was going to be my date.

“I think I can see you.” He said and I searched the crowd for a familiar face but of course, his wasn’t familiar, not yet.

We walked along the river and I don’t really remember what we talked about but we walked until we got to Battersea Park and it was 1 in the morning. A 30,000 step count later and despite being the most skeptical person I know when it comes to romance, a small sliver of hope drifted out of me as I slept that night.

For one reason or another, after a short stint of dating, it became clear it wasn’t going to work out between us. He’d reply to my texts every few days and like with everything in my life, I wanted more.

“I’m glad you’re still in my life, I’m glad we can be friends” He typed a few months later, and out of habit, I wanted to type back in agreement. But the truth is we were never friends and this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Often I’d end things with a guy I was seeing because they weren’t what I needed them to be or more often than not, they weren’t what they’d promised to be. I’d say, ‘yeah of course, we can stay friends’ and then they’d disappoint me again because they didn’t know how to do that.

When I think of a friend, I think of how lucky I am. I’ve got a group of friends in London, friends scattered around the country, and now thanks to Substack, I’ve even got friends all over the world. But what makes a friend a friend?

I think of my best friend & flatmate who listens to me talk for hours and makes me laugh like nobody else. I think of my sister who I can spend unlimited time with. I think of my university friends that keep in touch even when we’re busy because we care about each other. I think about my new friends I’ve made this year who take the time to talk even when we’re separated halfway across the world. I’m not sure a man off Hinge can compete with any of them. So why do they always insist on staying friends?

Why are we obsessed with staying in touch?

We’re trapped into staying in low-effort communication with everyone from our past. Even just someone you went on a few dates with stays permanently on your social media watching our lives silently. In fact in order to remove someone it takes consistent effort - to unfollow, to remove, to block. Blocking phone numbers, Instagram stories of mutual friends, TikTok friend suggestions, your best friend’s mouth, there are remnants of them everywhere. It can almost feel too dramatic a decision to remove someone when nothing that bad even happened between you.

Sometimes I think we imprison people into our lives through our phones long after they were meant to leave. Keeping them hostage as mutuals in order to never admit things are truly over, and that one day you will see them for the last time. This is good, and this is right. Let people be experiences, not possessions. Let the dead stay in the past, gut your life out and make way for new people to come in. We cling to the hope of it all because it feels safe, but every time we do it stops us finding what’s meant to be ours.

Is it really friendship they’re offering?

Maybe it’s that the men I date don’t really know what a friendship between us could look like, that it wouldn’t be me just listening to their problems but also caring about mine. Sometimes I think it’s more sinister, that it’s actually they just want to not feel guilty for how they treated you. They offer friendship but what they actually mean is silence.

I wrote a substack a few months back mentioning someone I used to know and they weren’t too happy about it which is their choice, as it was mine to write it. He said he thought we were friends, and I think this is a perfect example of what friendship meant to either of us. To me, we hadn’t spoken in months, hadn’t done anything as friends in years, yet to him he thought this title of friendship meant it was everlasting. Is it just a word to absolve all guilt or is it genuine? I don’t know.

But what I do know is I don’t want to be your friend because you’ve never really been mine.

-Shit, I think my prefrontal cortex just developed.