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Daily Inspiration Quote by Timothy Hutton

"Here's one thing I can't understand: people who are friends with their exes"

About this Quote

Hutton’s line lands like a shrugging confession that’s also a quiet provocation: he frames emotional complexity as a kind of everyday absurdity. “Here’s one thing I can’t understand” isn’t outrage; it’s disbelief with a casual edge, the tone you use when you’re trying to sound reasonable while admitting a hard boundary. The target is specific but widely legible: the post-breakup friendship that’s become a modern badge of maturity, good therapy, and well-managed attachment.

The subtext is less about exes than about what counts as “healthy” in contemporary dating culture. Being friends with an ex signals self-control, growth, maybe even social sophistication. Hutton punctures that narrative by treating it as foreign behavior, implying that intimacy doesn’t downshift neatly into platonic companionship. The sentence carries an older-school emotional logic: if the relationship mattered, separation should have consequences. Friendship reads as either denial, unfinished business, or a performance for other people.

It also works because it refuses to specify the reason. That vagueness invites the listener to project their own experiences: the ex who kept hovering, the “we’re still friends” that sounded like an alibi, the lingering jealousy disguised as civility. Coming from an actor, there’s an extra layer: Hollywood is an ecosystem where exes often remain professionally adjacent, forced into cordiality. The line can be heard as skepticism toward the social script of being “cool” about endings, a small rebellion against the expectation that every breakup should resolve into tidy, Instagram-friendly closure.

Quote Details

TopicFriendship
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Hutton, Timothy. (2026, January 15). Here's one thing I can't understand: people who are friends with their exes. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/heres-one-thing-i-cant-understand-people-who-are-168588/

Chicago Style
Hutton, Timothy. "Here's one thing I can't understand: people who are friends with their exes." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/heres-one-thing-i-cant-understand-people-who-are-168588/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Here's one thing I can't understand: people who are friends with their exes." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/heres-one-thing-i-cant-understand-people-who-are-168588/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.

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Heres one thing I cant understand about being friends with exes
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Timothy Hutton (born August 16, 1960) is a Actor from USA.

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