Bramhall Square Keep your ex-boyfriends closer BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

At lunch, drinking beer and eating cold, Japanese, slightly fishy-tasting noodles, my friend (male) says, "You’re only friends with your ex-boyfriends to keep your options open."

"No," I say. "Cowboy’s fine with it. We both are. We both feel this shows I’m able to keep friends."

Okay, this last part is a lie since keeping friendships can be a challenge and I’m currently devouring a book called The Friend Who Got Away, essays about the shame and confusion of the great female secret: We fight and stop being friends with each other sometimes more painfully than a guy/girl breakup.

"Cowboy just tolerates it. There’s no way in hell he’s okay with it."

"Some people are just more evolved than you are," I point out, hoping this is true.

"No way. Would you all ever go out to lunch?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Well, the ex is in NYC and I’m in Maine."

"So, Cowboy is tolerating a phone friendship?"

"Accepting."

"Whatever. Trust me, he can’t stand it."

"Why? He knows I have no interest in being back with him."

"This is just your little way of having power. Tell me this: Is he in touch with his ex-girlfriend?"

"Well, no . . . but that’s just because she’s stalker material."

"How convenient."

I’m thinking, "Why is this idiot a friend of mine? Do I enjoy abuse?" The ex-boyfriend topic is one that gets dissected by my friend Golda and me often. Her current boyfriend is totally opposed to the mere name-dropping of her exes. I think I came to this with Cowboy because I used to be exactly like her current boyfriend with my ex-boyfriend. I was so jealous I would not even look at pictures of ex-girlfriends. I didn’t want him ever to talk to them or about them. I wanted him to get rid of the mix-tapes the girl I really cared about — the one he’d made pregnant and who’d had an abortion — had given him.

Part of it, I admit, was the pregnancy. I was jealous that he’d gotten someone else pregnant. Angry that he’d wanted her to abort (I know, this all gets very confusing . . . like, why am I mad at that? I think because the fact is that women on a visceral level see men treat one woman one way and worry it will come back to them).

So when Cowboy and I got together, he also coming from a very jealous and possessive relationship, we just sort of said, "Why can’t we share all this stuff?" I admit sometimes when my ex calls me at 1 am, I feel a little weird. But, Cowboy never seems to mind. And I ask him. I promise.

"Yeah right," says my friend. "He just wants to get laid. "

My friend Golda put it beautifully in an essay she wrote. She said, "Ex-boyfriends are repositories of our pasts. That’s why we hold on."

She and I both come from divorced families. It may be that, for us, the past we have with certain men isn’t really about sexual tension. It’s much more about holding with a vice grip onto a sense of history we feel we were robbed of with our parents’ divorce.

I don’t know. I have an Italian ex-boyfriend who used to call when his wife went to Azerbaijan. My college boyfriend would like me to be the stuff that dreams are made of, in other words, be rubbed out like eye goop after a good drug-induced sleep. My high-school boyfriend and I stayed friends until he went literally nuts.

And one of the things I like so much about Cowboy and what we have together is that we’re totally cool with everything. I think. My friend’s voice is in my head . . . Go away, I say!

"Bramhall Square" runs every other week, and Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com