How to Handle Breaking Up When Your Whānau Are Friends with Your Ex

The Aotearoa dating pool can feel incredibly small: from double-checking the whakapapa of your date when they mention a familiar name, to an unusually high number of mutual friends on Facebook. This small pond usually results in mutuals whether you like it or not. Some are a lot closer than others.

As those ties grow stronger and become more rooted in your whakapapa than people you’ve met along the way, suddenly a break-up isn’t just about you but about the future of your family. Not only do you now have to deal with the break-up itself, but must find a way to maintain relationships across both sides of the family… or rid yourself of them.

Your whānau might not be able to avoid seeing your ex at events and activities they associate themselves with – they might even want to keep seeing them – and suddenly you find yourself having to “manage” multiple fractured relationship trees between your ex and your family. 

Blood isn’t everything, and you are more than capable of cutting whānau from your life, but when an individual is threatened it can very easily spiral out to everyone.

In some cases, the person who’s in the break-up might think all ties should be severed by default, especially if the break-up was not on mutual terms. 

And that leaves an even more important question: does the couple have a right to tell someone who they can and can’t be friends with?

If you’re feeling hurt about your whānau keeping in touch with your ex, it is probably time to have a conversation with them about how you feel. Whether it’s your mum, brother, or cousin – they can’t know exactly what’s going on in your head unless you tell them.

To communicate best, first you have to figure out your own boundaries: Would your whānau need to do something drastic to betray your trust, or is engaging with them enough? Are you okay with your cousin catching up with your ex as long as you don’t know about it? Or is it more important that you do know? 

Managing one ex-partner-family-member relationship might be tough enough as it is, but it can quickly feel like you have no control when your ex's whole family has ties to your own.

Your cousins and siblings might go to school with your exes whānau. Maybe your uncle and their dad play football together. Maybe they all attend church together. Your aunty and your ex’s auntie ,who have known each other since school (and in cases close to home, lived abroad together), are unlikely to stop catching up for a coffee because their respective niece and nephew broke up.

When things are intertwined like this, you might just have to accept that you no longer have control. You may not be able to ask anyone to alter lifelong relationships, but that does not mean you can’t tell them how you feel. If they care, they will take it on board, even if all it amounts to is them not bringing it up around you.

Once you know where your own lines are you can find out how far you're willing to adjust. Don’t forget that your feelings about the situation are likely to change over time, so ensuring you keep the communication up with them will help everyone.

Being on the outside of this predicament can create unexpected problems for the whānau, too. When a break-up between families happens, suddenly you can view people as opposition. 

Maybe you used to be best friends with your sister’s ex-boyfriend and feel weird about hitting him up to go to the gym. There’s likely no harm in keeping in touch from time to time, but if your sister was cheated on, or experienced abusive behavior with a partner, it might not be smart to remain in contact.

Always ask how you would feel if it were the other way around, and don’t just dismiss someone’s pain because you’re not feeling it.  

The reality of those changes will look different for every situation. You might lay low for a while and wait for things to cool down. Maybe you continue to have those relationships and just keep it out of the ear of the former couple. After all, you’re likely to see these people again regardless, so you don’t want to destroy those connections.

Break-ups usually involve far more people than the unhappy couple, and the ensuing separation can involve a lot of preconceptions about who is allowed to talk to who. Things won’t always end in sunshine and rainbows, and depending on the context of the break-up, it may drive a wedge that destroys decades of friendship. 

When you go through a break-up, sometimes you have to take a step back to think about the lives of your whānau going forward. We live in a small place after all, and you might just have to face the reality that someone who you don’t want to see might not completely be removed from your life.

Your break-up with someone shouldn’t mean their friends and whānau also have to break up with them. But that doesn’t mean you can’t talk to them about it.

Own the Feels is brought to you by #LoveBetter, a campaign funded by the Ministry for Social Development.

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Ryland Hutana is a writer and creator who currently lives in Auckland, Aotearoa