When you share a workplace, a lease, a class or children, full no contact is impossible — so the goal changes from zero contact to zero OPTIONAL contact. Keep what the situation genuinely requires, cut everything that is really an excuse to be near them, and decide where the line is before you are standing in the doorway.
Most no contact advice is written for people who can simply vanish. Plenty of people cannot. You work together. You are on the same lease until March. You have a child. You share every friend you have.
The rule still applies — it just needs restating, because "never speak to them" is not available to you, and pretending otherwise sets you up to fail by Monday morning and then conclude you are bad at this.
Required contact is what the situation genuinely demands: the handover, the bill, the meeting you are both in. Optional contact is everything else, and it is where almost all the damage lives.
The hard part is that optional contact rarely announces itself. It arrives as a reasonable errand. Returning something you could post. A question you could ask someone else. Being in the kitchen at the time they are usually in the kitchen.
Before any contact that is not strictly required, ask what you want the reply to feel like. If there is an answer to that question, it is not logistics.
The aim is not coldness. Coldness is a message too — a loud one — and they will read it, respond to it, and now you are in a conversation about the temperature of your emails.
You do not owe colleagues the story, and you do not have to perform being fine. Two sentences to whoever needs them — "we are not together any more, I would rather not get into it" — closes more doors than an explanation does.
Practically: stop the small optimisations that used to put you near them. The route past their desk. The coffee at 11. Those are not neutral, and nobody else notices you dropping them.
This is the version where the advice everywhere else actively does not apply, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than pretending the same rules scale down.
Contact is permanent and non-negotiable. What you can control is scope: about the child, not about you two. A parenting app or a dedicated thread does more work than willpower here, because it makes the boundary structural instead of something you have to hold at every handover.
Shared friends are the version nobody warns you about, because the contact is secondhand. Someone mentions where they were on Saturday and you have the whole evening. You did not break anything and you still lost the night.
You are allowed to ask people not to update you. It feels rude and it is not — most friends are relieved to be told, because they have been guessing what is allowed and defaulting to telling you things.
Say it once, lightly, and to everyone rather than singling out the worst offender: "I would rather not hear about them for a while, nothing personal." It holds better than you expect.
Not a clean streak. Nobody in your situation gets one, and a tracker that resets you every time you have to speak to them is measuring something you cannot control and calling it failure.
The win is that the contact you had was the contact the situation required, and nothing more. That is a genuinely different metric, and it is the honest one for your case. Some weeks it will be four conversations and still a good week.
If you're thinking about hurting yourself, please don't sit with it alone — call or text 988(US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline), or your local emergency number. We're peer support, not a crisis service, and this is the one thing we'd never want you to use us for.
It's 2am, and a number can't answer you. NO CONTACT CLUB puts 3–5 real people at your exact stage on the other end of one shared streak — so when the urge hits, you text them instead of your ex.
download on theApp Store