The ex expiry date

My friend told me yesterday she was going out for lunch with her ex-boyfriend of a year. I gave her that wide-eyed, half-smirk oh really?! look you give your friends when for a moment, you know them better than they know themselves and you know that what they are about to do will potentially blow up in their faces. 

They didn't end well. But she told me they were just friends now and that it would be like going out for lunch with me, or with one of the other girls. He's not really an ex-boyfriend anymore. It's been three years, it doesn't count.

But...he's seen you naked - is all that I could say.

Sure, 80% of my brain knew (just as well as she did) that by believing he was just a friend now, she was only justifying a situation which I could tell she knew wasn't a good idea, but just couldn't resist. Yet, the other part allowed her words to sink in and I couldn't help but wonder if this was possible.  Do ex's really have an expiry date? You can't re-write history and you can't ignore what you had with someone.

When you're friends with someone, and then you start a relationship, if it ends it almost feels worse - you kind of feel like you lost your friend and wonder whether you should have ever turned the friendship into a relationship in the first place. He had seen her naked, but that's obviously just the half of it. When you've had a serious relationship with someone, can you ever go back to what you had before?

In fact it was this exact analogy that my high school chemistry teacher used to explain the changes between liquids and solids. Kind of. When you bake a cake, you move from liquid to solid - mixture to sponge. You can't reverse it. But when you make an ice lolly, lowering the temperature makes the liquid freeze and voila - ice lolly. Warm it up again and you're back to a liquid. No complications. But when it comes to relationships, can we have our cake and eat it too?

I couldn't blame her, what girl hasn't been in this kind of difficult situation? If you haven't, your lucky. But in my opinion, this kind of re-union will go one way or another. You'll either remember all the things you loved about them - and despite your best efforts, everything will come flooding back. Or, you'll remember all the things you hated about them and sadly will realise what you couldn't put up with in a befriend, you don't want in a friend either. Is there such a thing as an ex expiry date, or is it merely a case of time and how many years it takes to forget the annoying habits, stupid games and ultimately, the reasons why you broke up in the first place.