No Contact When You Work With Your Ex

The distinction that matters

Work contact is about work. Personal contact is what you're limiting. The goal is to keep the work channel functional and professional while removing the personal content from it entirely.

This includes: not sharing life updates, not continuing old in-jokes, not processing the breakup through work conversations, and not treating work proximity as soft permission for contact that wouldn't happen otherwise.

Managing the physical reality

You're going to see them. That's unavoidable. What you can do: don't engineer unnecessary proximity, don't choose seating or scheduling around monitoring them, and don't linger after necessary interactions.

Having a polite, functional manner for work interactions decided in advance — not freezing them out to the point of disruption, but not extending anything beyond what's work-relevant — is cleaner than improvising each interaction.

Managing what goes on inside

The fact that you're around them doesn't mean the emotional processing happens publicly. Your journal, your private app, your trusted people — that's where this goes. Not visible from across the office.

Why the coworker situation requires a different strategy

Standard no contact assumes you have full control over your physical proximity and contact channels. A coworker situation removes that control: you may share a physical workspace, attend the same meetings, or have job functions that require direct communication.

Modified no contact in a workplace context means: no social contact, no contact beyond job-required communication, no monitoring of their behavior in the shared environment, and no using the workplace as a context for having conversations the relationship would have had elsewhere.

This is harder than standard no contact in some ways (you can't avoid the inputs entirely) and easier in others (the professional context provides natural structure for interaction that stays within defined limits).

Setting the work communication boundary clearly

The most useful thing to establish early: what does work-required communication actually consist of? Email about shared projects, meetings where you're both required to attend, brief professional interactions in shared spaces. That's the category.

Everything that's not in that category — catching up at the coffee machine, asking how their weekend was, lingering after meetings — is social contact that should be gradually reduced, not immediately eliminated (which would be noticed and awkward) but consistently not extended.

If anyone asks about the change in dynamic, a simple 'we ended things and are giving each other space' is a complete and professional answer. You're not obligated to provide more detail.

Managing your own state in the shared environment

Shared physical space is an ongoing input. Seeing them regularly prevents the full circuit-breaking effect of standard no contact. Acknowledge this honestly rather than expecting the same timeline you'd have with a different kind of ex.

Give yourself explicit permission to take the long route, the later lunch, the seat that doesn't face their desk, without treating this as dramatic or excessive. These are practical input-reduction moves in a constrained environment.

If the shared workspace is making recovery genuinely impossible — if the daily contact is severe enough that you can't function or that the recovery keeps restarting — that's worth discussing with a manager or HR if you have that option, framed professionally. Requesting a schedule or seating adjustment is legitimate.

Common questions