Is it wrong to sleep with your friends ex, even if they have moved on to a new relationship?

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Great question!

As the other answers on this question seem to indicate, sleeping with a friend’s ex-boy-girl-friend does seem to rub a lot of people the wrong way.

It violates what I call a group norm. These are values held by most people in a group. If you’re in a relationship, and you knew that doing a certain thing is going to make somebody mad, even if there’s nothing really wrong with doing it, the fact that it makes the other person mad has to be taken into account when deciding what to do.

You accept a constraint on your behavior for the sake of the relationship. It’s part of the price you have to pay to enjoy the ability to spend your free time with this person.

Group norms are the same way. Every group is different, but this is a very very common norm you’re going to run into. Sex tends to be very, very personal to many people. and people with the same values tend to run together and have the same kinds of friends. A sense of ‘ownership’ over your former sexual partners is also just really really common.

There’s another thing to consider, and that’s what relationships tend to do to the cohesiveness of a group. If a married couple that you’re friends with gets divorced, most people are going to pick ‘sides’. the group bifurcates along the lines of the divorce.

Nobody wants animosity in social situations if they can avoid it. If you’re at a party with a bunch of your friends, and the ex-husband of one just happens to show up, like that’s a major party foul. Who invited him? What made him think he could show up at this party?

Sleeping with a friend’s ex has this same effect, of bringing a person that should have been expelled from the group back into the group, just asking for a fight.

Your friend also now has to deal with hard questions. Were you guys sleeping together before we split up, did he/she cheat on me with you? Is the reason we broke up mostly because you two couldn’t keep yourselves away from each other?

So I guess this depends on a) how tight your group is, b) how tight your friendship is, c) if there’s animosity between you and your friend’s ex, and d) if you’re so attracted to this other person that you’re willing to give up your friend group in order to give a relationship with them a shot.

My family and I use the concept of an ‘inner circle’ of friends. That is, you have the small group of friends that you spend the most time with. Everybody else, you might call them a friend, but really they’re just acquaintances you’re friendly with. Your inner circle is going to stick around even through divorce and all your exes. I absolutely would never ever sleep around with an inner circle friend’s ex. Outer circle friends, well, sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. Let how much you care about this other person’s feelings be your guide.

As far as d) is concerned, as they say, all’s fair in love and war. Everything I just said above, about what sex tends to do to group dynamics, goes totally out the window if you meet the person you are positive you want to spend the rest of your life with. It’s a life-changing thing that’s truly worth throwing friendships away over.

If this is really true, and you guys end up in a really solid relationship, then your other friends will understand. At least, the ones that are your real friends will. Once the dust settles and all your friends have chosen sides, everybody’s going to be in a happier place, because friends that are in a really solid relationship tend to uplift the whole group.

Thanks for the A2A!