The Joy Of Ex’s Former Girlfriends Can Offer Best Of Both Worlds

For the resolutely unmarried middle-aged guy, one viable but underrated solution is to beat a hasty retreat into the past and accumulate a harem of ex-girlfriends.

It’s an ideal compromise, providing me with a bevy of worthy women whose company I enjoy and feel comfortable with, without any illusions and where all the cards are on the table.

This is that well-known let’s-be-friends stage so often denigrated or fraught with the bitterness of a break-up. For some reason that strikes my friends as peculiar, even bizarre, I’ve stayed friends with half a dozen former girlfriends who have gradually evolved into loyal companions.

No more romance, true, but at a certain age that has its up side: no more game playing, sexual tension, obligations or expectations, misunderstandings or, best of all, no more fights.

It’s a curious thing about my ex’s - we never fight, not even over issues that, when we were involved, caused all kinds of dissension.

Someone should do a nationwide study to determine why the things that annoy you when you’re involved with someone suddenly evaporate the day after the break-up.

For instance, I once dated a woman who was notoriously late, which I secretly thought she was doing on purpose just to test my devotion or something. Now that it’s over I couldn’t care less. I can tease her and it doesn’t provoke a major blow up.

Another woman I went with had a dreary habit of complaining about her son all the time. His presence was so pervasive on our dates that he might as well have joined us in the back seat. Now I listen sympathetically as she rattles on about his misdeeds.

There are any number of benefits derived from taking out ex-girlfriends, such as:

Calling someone to go out at the last minute. The woman isn’t offended and I feel only a fraction of the guilt.

Not calling until you feel like it. In any serious relationship, this is a felony offense. With ex-girlfriends, we talk when we feel like it, have something to say or miss the other person, which to the male mind makes perfect sense. Men tend to use the phone as an answering machine, a device to convey essential data, whereas most women consider it an extension of their soul.

Dating ex’s cuts down on 98 percent of phone calls made for the wrong reasons, such as shame, pity or habit. There’s no reason to manufacture topics of interest or drain your brain of every passing thought recalling the minutiae of the day.

The ability to go dutch with someone you know well who won’t be sizing you up as a skinflint.

What this is all about, I guess, is comfort and candor. It’s easier to be frank and relaxed with someone when nothing is at stake. The more I forgo new relationships for old ones, the more comfortable I seem to be.

It’s almost like being married to several women at once but with none of the built-in conflicts. Going out with former girlfriends is really the best of both worlds - a combination of dating and marriage, but without the bugaboos of romance and sex.

The older you get, the less important - illusory anyway - sex and romance seems when there are such compensating factors, such as an uncomplicated friendship with someone you’re not in love with but with whom you can flirt without having to follow through.

Even so, dating ex’s is not totally devoid of romance because, lurking just below the surface of every date, is the possibility of maybe reigniting something. It’s always possible, anyway, even though it has only happened once, but once is enough to keep alive the spark that something could happen all over again.

This fact creates its own minor sexual tension at the end of the evening, when you need to figure just what sort of goodbye is appropriate - a kiss on the cheek never seems quite enough and anything more seems perhaps too much, which leads to the ambivalent off-center kiss involving the corner of the lips and the cheek.

Conversation with ex’s is instructive, because much of it involves discussing each other’s current dating lives.

You function as mutual counselors, which seems odd at first and then quite natural. You each become the ideal romantic adviser because nobody knows the other person’s heart quite as well.