Don’t gatekeep your ex

Halifax might technically be a city, but in reality, it’s a small town — everyone knows your name, who your friends are and who you’ve hooked up with. The city’s population is made up of horny university students free from their parents’ supervision for the first time; relationships here spark, fizzle, and erupt rather quickly. From my observations, many university friend groups are borderline polycules.

Nineteen per cent of the Dalhousie Gazette’s Dal Purity Test respondents admitted to hooking up with a friend’s ex, and 29 per cent have hooked up with two or more people in the same friend group. Are university students terrible people, or do they just lack options? 

Hooking up with your friend’s ex should be normalized in places where there’s a small pond to fish from. Think back to high school, where certain friend groups always seemed to be speed dating amongst themselves. 

The dilemma reminds me of my time working in Provincetown, Mass., a LGBTQ+ vacation destination, over the summer. Much like at small-town high schools and in Halifax, the gay community is relatively small. I’d watch groups of summer tourists visit for weekends at a time, and I could never determine the dynamic of any given two in the group. Were they lovers, exes, friends, enemies? I’ll never know. What I am certain of: the lines were blurred.

It’s easy to look on in astonishment at such blurry situations. Don’t they get jealous? 

I used to consider myself a jealous person. That changed a few months ago, when I began to suspect that my ex-boyfriend and our mutual friend were together. 

I was actually relieved to think he’d moved on. He was a good boyfriend, just not the one for me. I was happy for both of them.

Despite ending amicably, I haven’t spoken to either of them in over a year, so I wasn’t offended they didn’t consult me or ask for my blessing. If I thought of him negatively, maybe I would’ve reached out with a “Hey girly” text, but this wasn’t the case.

“Girl code” and “bro code” don’t need to be abandoned, just altered. Think about it like a vetting process. You already know whether your ex is a good partner or not, saving your friend the trouble of finding out for themself. Sharing is caring after all.

In this dating economy, it’s bad karma to gatekeep a quality ex. The community of datable people is small, specifically datable men. 

You can’t stake a claim on somebody forever just because you used to be together. Your ex is their own person, separate from the history you share. If your friend wants to hook up with them, let them. 

As Lisa Kogan wrote for Oprah.com, “If you say yes and they end up clicking, you’re going to be just fine. You’ll be fine because you’ll know you had a choice and you chose generosity, compassion, and goodness.”

This won’t apply to everyone’s ex, but strict rules around who can date whom shouldn’t be enforced on everyone.