Separation and divorce doesn’t just cause stress and trauma to the immediate parties — the husband, the wife, and the children. It can be devastating to other family members and it can cut a wide path through the emotions of those people who are close friends with the couple.
How does your best friend and his wife react the first time you introduce your new girlfriend (the one you dumped your wife for)? He may not have too many words to say, but how will his wife react to the woman who’s sitting across from her at the dinner table. The woman (“bitch” is the word that comes easily to her mind) who is sitting where your wife should be sitting? Will she be civil? Does she have a right to show her anger? After all, your wife is her best friend!
What do you do? He’s your best friend. They are a team. He likes you, while she may think you’re the world’s biggest snake. She feels that she’s being a traitor to her best friend if she is even civil to your girlfriend — even if she can find a few qualities to admire about her. And, now that you’re single, she may be very uneasy about the two of you getting together at all — afraid you’ll influence him and destroy their marriage.
Splitting up family and friends when your children are friends with their children or when the grandparents, aunts, uncles, neices and nephews on the ex’s side want to remain close becomes a juggling act. If the divorce is fairly amicable, there may not be any problems. If the divorce is a war between the two of you, you’ve just added a new stress situation to handle. And a lot of people are going to get hurt in the process.
So how do you handle the social events when your ex is invited? Can you enter a room and be civil when he or she is there with their new lover? Is your bitterness over the divorce causing your friends to exclude you from social events? Does your family still invite your ex to family functions — despite your objections? Does your ex’s family still invite you to family functions — despite your ex’s objections?
Dividing up the property is a whole lot easier than dividing up family and friends. It’s a given that your family remains loyal to you, and your ex’s family remains loyal to your ex — or is it? Why must you divorce your in-laws if you get along well together? Aren’t they your family, also? Particularly if you’ve been married for 20, 30, or more years!
Some of these relationships may be stronger than your marriage ever was. How do you — should you — give them up? Does holding on to your ex’s family mean you’re trying to hold on to your ex? Or does it mean that you’re simply trying not to lose people you love just because your marriage has ended?
Under ideal circumstances, family and friends will remain neutral and let the two of you deal with the issues that have caused the divorce. Divorce is far from ideal and sometimes some family members and some friends may become active participants in the divorce war.
You can reduce interference from family and friends by keeping as many details about your marriage and its downfall to yourself, sharing only necessary details with your attorney and your counselor or other trusted, impartial individuals. Family members have their own agendas when they advise you. So do friends. Their personal feelings about the disruption to their lives when you and your spouse divorce will color their responses to you.
Divorce is never easy. Not on you, not on your family, and definitely not on those people you’ve added to your world as a result of being married.