200 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
Refinding Your Friends
Bigamy is having one husband too many. Monogamy is the same.
—Erica Jong
Perhaps the most cogent observation I have ever read on the
tricky issue of friendship fallout following divorce was made by
Abigail Tafford in her classic treatise on the trauma of divorce,
Crazy Time: Surviving Divorce:
You really get two divorces—a private and a public one. In your pri-
vate divorce, you face your ex-spouse, your past and your self. In
your public divorce, you confront the community you live in—the
network of friends, family and acquaintances that you built up as a
married couple. The courtroom becomes a prime setting for a conver-
gence in the twin elements of the public and the private divorce. One
surprising element occurs when people suddenly start telling you
things that they have never shared with you before. Not so surpris-
ing is the friend who confides “to tell you the truth, I could not figure
out why you married him to begin with.” More surprising, however,
is when that same friend now views you as a convenient receptacle in
which to confide their own marital problems, “I’ve never mentioned
it before but to tell you the truth I’ve been having many of the same
problems with Jane that you seem to have at work in your divorce
with Mary.”
It’s easy to forget that your divorce presents a crisis for your
friends, too. Not only are they threatened in their own marriages,
but they get trapped in the hall of mirrors of your divorce. They see
your divorce as reflecting back on their own lives and their own mar-
riage, and it causes them to question the issues underlying their own
relationship.Divorce’s domino effect. Needless to say, the “happily married”
couples in any given circle of friends start getting a bit nervous
when too many of their close cronies start divorcing. The obvi-
ous concern is that many of the underlying problems in all the
surrounding relationships start looking a bit exposed. I have
personally witnessed numerous occasions where the divorce of
one couple within any given social circle began a domino effect
that toppled half the marriages inside that group within the next