How to handle running into an ex in the same social circle
By Dan Kauna, September 12, 2026Nairobi is a small world wrapped in a big city. Someone always knows someone, and one day that someone turns out to be your ex, standing three feet away at a wedding, a matatu stage, a friend’s birthday, or worse, right behind you in the supermarket queue.
How you handle that moment says more about you than the breakup ever did.
The first rule is simple: acknowledge, don’t perform. A short greeting, a nod, “Uko poa?” (you good?), and moving on beats both an elaborate show of indifference and a dramatic reunion.
Both extremes tell the room the breakup still runs the show. Calm and brief keeps the moment exactly the size it deserves.
Shared friends make this trickier. Nobody wants to feel like a prize being fought over, or a messenger passing updates between two people who used to share a bed.
Skip the interrogation of mutual friends about what your ex is up to. Let the friendship stand on its own instead of turning it into an overmilked information pipeline.
Muting doesn’t mean malice
Social media complicates things further, and the research backs up what most people learn the hard way. A 2012 study published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, led by psychologist Tara Marshall, tracked hundreds of people after a breakup and found that keeping tabs on an ex-partner through Facebook is associated with poorer emotional recovery.
Muting or unfollowing an ex is not petty.
You can be civil at a wedding and still keep their Instagram Stories out of your daily scroll. The two live in different rooms of the same house.
Set the tone early
If you know an event will put you both in the same space, decide beforehand how you will act, then stick to it. A quick text to the host asking who else is coming saves you the shock factor.
On the day, greet once, keep any conversation short, and give your full attention to the people you actually came to see.
Nobody expects a friendship out of a breakup. What they do expect, especially in a shared circle, is enough grace from former lovers such that no one else has to pick a side.