you don't have to be friends with your ex

on wishing them hell instead of wishing them well ♡

People act like being friends with your ex is the most mature thing you can do.

After my BIG BREAKUP—you know that one that placed me in the top 0.001% of Taylor Swift listeners on my Spotify Wrapped—my ex and I claimed we would stay friends. We just had so much love for each other and couldn’t imagine our lives without one another.

And for a few weeks, we did. We messaged, I still gave him the birthday gift I had bought for him, and I wished him well. Until I discovered that the girl I had been worried about throughout the last months of our relationship had become his girlfriend days after our breakup, if not before that.

If a friend wronged me, I removed them from my social media, I no longer replied when they messaged, and I stopped wishing them well in my heart. And then I realised that I expected more respect, compassion, and honesty from my friends than I did from romantic partners (don’t worry, this came up in therapy) and that this, this was cooked.

We have this idea that you have to wish someone well after it ends, perhaps not immediately, but at the end of it all. That true growth comes from wanting good things for those who scorned you. Yes, they cheated, they lied, they manipulated, they shredded your self-esteem into bite-sized pieces for them to devour—but you need to be the bigger person. You need to want the best for them in order to be ****healed****.

Well, to put it in French: fuck that.

Fuck wishing terrible people well. Fuck making my healing and growth about forgiving the unforgivable.

I am not friends with any of my exes, and simply put, it’s because I have bad taste in romantic partners and excellent taste in friends. I think you can not be friends with an ex and still wish them well, and I think you can not be friends and wish them hell.

“And I hope it's shitty in The Black Dog

When someone plays "The Starting Line"

And you jump up, but she's too young to know this song

That was intertwined in the tragic fabric of our dreaming

'Cause tail between your legs, you're leavin'”

— The Black Dog by Taylor Swift

My healing is not dependent on my ex-partner. I do not believe in closure. I do not believe in sending long paragraphs outlining how much they hurt me. I’ll write those paragraphs obviously, but then I tuck them away into a dusty corner of my Google Drive and mind. They do not deserve to read my excellent musings on their shittiness. They do not deserve the additional fuel to the fire of their victimhood. I do not wish them well.

At the start of 2025, I got dumped over text. Yeah, a man several years my senior dumped me over text, not even a face-to-face or phone call. I told him my thoughts on this, and he never responded. Literally, months later, and neither of us has said a peep since those two messages.

Everyone in my life was astounded by this and blamed him for not reaching out again. But in all honesty? I was relieved he hadn’t. There was nothing more to say. He had shown me who he was, and there was nothing more to say. My closure didn’t come from telling a grown man what a piece of trash he was, as trust me, he knows. My closure came from shutting myself in a cabin with my phone on aeroplane mode for two days, reading books, staring intensely at a fireplace, and listening to an audiobook about anxious attachment styles in dating. It came from resisting the urge to rebound and focusing on my work. Guess what? I have no urge to contact him, but I still don’t wish him well.

That isn’t to say I waltz around filled with anger, as that won’t help anyone either. But I don’t need to be friends with an ex to prove I’m a mature, healed person. I don’t need to have the last word with them, as my Google Drive will do just fine. As always, Taylor said it best: “Move through the world with the heartbroken” and let yourself feel all of it. Those feelings are a sign that you’re still alive, even if they’re dampened by Lexapro or whatever SSRI you’re taking.

Instead of directing all that positivity to them, direct it to yourself. Fuel yourself, wish yourself well. Spend time with your besties, cry on your couch, go for long walks in nature, pay a ridiculous amount for pilates classes, bake cookies and then eat the raw batter until your tummy hurts, read smutty books about faeries, listen to sad pop girlies on repeat, go to the cinema and cry in the dark, write letters no one will ever read, wait until you feel happy again to go on a date, meet someone who makes you smile and listen to Taylor Swift on the walk home, let them into your heart and know that they wish you well, right now, right here.

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Who wrote this?

Fleurine Tideman is a fake Brit whose passport claims she is Dutch. She writes for Betches, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Insider, and Screenshot. Her work is usually accompanied by a twenty-syllable coffee order and an unhinged Taylor Swift playlist. Find her on Twitter @byfleurine or Instagram @fleurinetideman.