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Someone asked me about this recently so I thought I’d offer my thoughts here.

I think it’s good to stay friendly with past husbands, wives, boyfriends or girlfriends, as long as the relationship was, overall, healthy. If that person was meaningful to us, if we shared love, and especially if we shared having children, it’s good for our soul to honor what was good in that relationship and the lessons we learned.

I hope you won’t mind, but I need to digress a bit: If you haven’t done this process yet, of discovering the lessons to be learned, especially if the relationship has you still angry or hurt, I would highly recommend it. I am a strong believer that we are drawn to people, all kinds, not just lovers, because there are lessons to be learned, on both sides. The bigger place they hold in our lives, the more and bigger the lessons to be learned. You can go back to any experience (no matter what it was and with whom and discover the gold buried there. Even something that happened when you were 4 years old.) The gold is whatever lessons can be mined that will enhance, improve, or enrich our lives. If you want to learn how to do this process you can go here:
http://www.AliveWithLove.com/wise/lessons.html

Okay, back to those old lovers. The operative word here is friends. What do you mean by friends. If you hang out with them, go to movies with them, go to lunch or dinner, go hiking, you’re playing with fire. Fire because you could re-ignite old feelings and fire because you are most likely hurting your partner. I am friendly with my ex-husband of 29 years. We had kids together. We work together whenever he hires me to do interior design work (I was an interior designer in Montecito for ten years) on one of his projects. When we’re in the middle of a project, occasionally, we’ll go to lunch. We talk on the phone once in a while to catch up. But that’s it. Because we have kids together, and own property together, and are friendly, we also enjoy family functions where I bring my fiance’ Chris and he brings his wife. So instead of calling my ex a friend, I say we’re friendly.

With much love,
Kara