When you're in a relationship with someone and you both click extremely well you can easily come to the conclusion that this person is your boyfriend and your best friend. However, just because that's the way you think of him, it doesn't mean it's true, regardless of whether you were good friends before you started dating or not. This is just what I think, personally. It would be interesting to see what others think.

I'm going to use my own experience as an example.

I was with my ex for only three months, but I think I fell in love with him. We were good friends before we got together, and there was something between us that made us click really well, and no one else could understand why. We've known each other for two years and he had a habit of saying to me, "You're my best friend." When we were together and when we were just friends, he would say this to me. I considered him a best friend for a while, too. But, if that was the case, then how come after he broke up with me he started to act like I didn't exist and that nothing had ever happened between us?

What I'm trying to say is, is that your boyfriend can hurt you in so many ways that a best friend wouldn't. Obviously he can be your friend at the same time, but once the relationship is over it's almost impossible to stay friends afterwards because you've both been hurt and find it hard to forgive, therefore there's nothing to fall back on when you break up.

My ex cheated on me with more than one person, and even though he never cared to admit it me himself, he admitted it to my friends, who were also his friends, and they rang me up and let me listen to what he was saying to them, just so I could be at rest about whether he cheated on me or not. And this makes me wonder if, by saying that I'm his best friend, he played on that throughout our relationship, and made it seem as though it was okay for him to see other people as well as me - but just without me knowing about it. I kind of started to look back on myself as his friend with benefits, and the whole time I wasn't aware that he was thinking of me in that way.

So I was thinking to myself that when people say they can still be friends with their exes, are they actually still in touch with no hard feelings, or once they were finished did they just stop talking to each other altogether?

Because I don't understand why my ex started to act like I didn't exist and started talking to people about me in a very horrible way. And because he's been doing just that, we obviously couldn't have been "best friends" at all, and our relationship couldn't have meant that much to him. Or at least, not in the same way that it meant to me.

Overall, what I'm saying is, your best friend is not your boyfriend/girlfriend, and it seems to be extremely difficult to stay friends once the relationship is over despite wanting to keep the peace. I do know few people that stay friends with exes, so I was just wondering what other people think about this matter and what experiences they've had.