The Taboo of Sleeping with an Exes Friend

Why is it so taboo to sleep with an exes friend after a breakup and yet encouraged to sleep with a random stranger to get over someone?  Bro’s before hoes and other such phrases come to mind.  I have touched on this before, so forgive me if I repeat a few thoughts here.  This is an important concept to question and give some serious consideration to.  We put so much emphasis on the thoughts and feelings of the injured party in a breakup and silly little rules, that I think we forget a few more human details in the process.
When you are newly single, often times, getting over that sexual hump is important.  Sex releases endorphin’s and gets your body moving, so it is natural to seek this out when you are emotionally fragile.  Exercise and new experiences, or really anything positive is a good thing.  So why then do we put possible harmful limitations on ourselves when in this potentially fragile frame of mind?  We are not allowed to seek out human comfort from people that we know.  People who are safer, kinder, and we have relationships with?  Why are we not allowed to go seek a one nighter or a few weeks of fun from someone who is friends with the ex?  Society deems this action as taboo, as a social no no, that with which is frowned upon and just plain shunned from any party who knows about it. 
Now I ask you, why is it ok, and encouraged to go out to the bar and get some strange instead, from well, a stranger?  These people are high fived afterwards, congratulated for getting their ex out of their system and they can proudly brag about just using a person to get over someone else.  How is this healthy?  How is this acceptable?  Why is this sort of behavior encouraged?  All this goes hand in hand with just how sex negative our society can be.
Now let us not forget, that it stings to know that your friend and ex have slept together.  It is not a fun feeling, and it can ruin a friendship if you let it.  I have employed the notion of laughing at an ex and a friend sleeping together, laughing that he is now her problem, or sometimes cruelly thinking about some facet of our old sex lives that I no longer have to deal with.  The visual of two people I know being intimate sucks.  But if you really loved someone, the idea of them sleeping with anyone sucks.  Perhaps it is my enduring empathy that I have for people, even exes, that I would not wish them harm.  I would feel a strange and terrible sadness if they went out to the bar, had a one night stand and were physically harmed or emotional abused in some way.  That is much less likely to occur if they slept with someone they knew, not impossible of course, but there is a smaller chance. 

The long and the short of it is, when you are hurting, opening up to a stranger is tough.  Seeking solace in a friend is what they are there for.  If this leads to sexy times, then it does.  I have used complete discretion when I have slept with exes friends.  It is not rubbed in anyone’s face, and what is more, we are all adults and can and should choose who we sleep with.  Just something to think about the next time you chastise a friend for sleeping with an ex.  In my opinion it should be more socially acceptable than the praise of sleeping with a stranger.  And the one final thought on the subject, when two people sleep together it almost never has to do with the exes.  It has to do with those two people, the moment, the lust, the whatever, and no one else.  Sleeping with someone else, and while having an ex on the brain is a whole other ball of wax ie revenge sex, or evening the scores (it happens of course, however it would take an entire piece to deal with the emotional goings on of a tryst like that).

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