The Post-Divorce Custody Battle for Mutual Friends

There are basically three types of friends in this world. Let’s say you fall of a bridge into the raging river. The first type of friend would jump right in to save you. The second type would look around for rope or anything else that could be used to pull you to safety. And the third type….oh, the third type….they will rush right out and sign you up for swimming lessons.

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my first two years of separation and divorce, making a major life change like this completely tips the balance toward group number three. It’s fascinating to see what happens with friendships before, during and after divorce. You hear all the time about ex-partners fighting for custody of their children. What you DON’T hear about is losing custody of their friends.

Let’s start with the obvious here. The longer you’ve been married, especially married with children, the more likely it is that your non-kid time revolves around other couples with children. Whether it’s school functions, playgrounds or restaurants with crayons at the table, your life centers on kid-centric activities, so naturally you’re going to meet people who share these experiences . Slowly but surely, your social life becomes either joint family outings or babysitter-inspired dinner-and-movie evenings where the grownups inevitably end up talking about the kids they left at home.

Most of the time, husbands and wives come by these friends at the same time in the same place. But then, announce you’re divorcing and the equation changes. The friends who remain have a moral dilemma of their own to resolve. Or at least they THINK they do. Which partner do they stay in touch with? Or do they abandon both so as not to make a choice?

I know what you’re saying. Why do they have to choose? Why can’t they remain friends with both ex-partners? Well, they COULD, but because the perception (but not always the reality) is that the divorcing couple is severing all ties with each other, who wants to get in the middle of that? So it’s actually pretty natural to choose one or the other. Or neither. But seldom both.

I’m not blaming anyone for this. I totally get it. When I was still married, I barely saw my divorced friends after their splits. It wasn’t deliberate. I just figured they were off living their new, exotic single lives and I was a reminder of the existence they were trying to put behind them. Deep down, I probably also (wrongly) figured that those friends would want to spend time taking part in the number one pastime for divorced people – bashing the ex-spouse. I wanted no part of then, or now.

All this changed about three months into my separation, when I was attending an event at my kids’ school. One of the dads I knew pulled me aside to say, “I heard about your divorce. That’s too bad.” At this point, he glanced over both shoulders, lowered his voice, and added “But you must be having fun now. We should get a beer sometime so I can hear all about it.”

That was the end of the conversation because his wife gave him a disapproving stare and he wandered off. I was left feeling like the kid who shows up at school with pink eye and can only watch as everyone steps far, far away from him. As weird as it sounds, divorce is considered by many to be a communicable disease. Spend an evening with someone afflicted with it, and you’ll come down with a case of it as well. Worst of all, the only known cure is very expensive since it can only be prescribed by lawyers.

And so it went for many months. Calls to several couples from the old days to set up playdates with the grown-ups and the kids went unreturned. Most of these people were talkative in public settings, whether it was running into them at a school play or IHOP. And truly, nobody’s looked at me the way my kids treat a bowl of brussel sprouts. Still, there were fewer grownups from my recent past willing to take a prominent place in my social circle. Which by then seemed to have shrunk to the size of Verne Troyer’s pinkie ring.

I know, I know. My sour attitude here could make Prozac crabby, which doesn’t exactly guarantee admittance to the next neighborhood barbecue. However, I promise this story has a happy ending, Or at last a happy middle. About a year out from separation, I happened to run into a former co-worker I hadn’t spoken to in six or seven years, and she and her husband invited me to dinner at their house.

I accepted the invitation, and when I got there, it turned out I was the only guest. We talked well into the evening, and they made it clear I had a place to go whenever I felt the need to have some adult conversation, to order off menus that don’t have chicken fingers and to see movies that don’t feature animated talking animals.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a major turning point. Until that dinner, I was consumed with focusing on the people who wouldn’t talk to me rather than finding those who would. I should have known better. Once you go through a life-altering experience like divorce, it’s obvious that…well, EVERY aspect of your life changes. That includes friendships. Once you’re back on your own, what counts is just expanding that social circle, either with old friends you haven’t talked to in years or new friends you just haven’t met yet. They weren’t invested in your married-with-children phase so odds are they’ll return our calls and want to grill you to find out “what really happened.”

Sure this has meant plenty of evenings rolling along as the third wheel with coupled friends who don’t have kids, which is tough to adjust to. But there are advantages. I get exaggerate all my stories without someone there correcting me with the real information. Plus, I get to pay half as much to cover my part of the bill. Of course, the flip side is I have to spend an entire evening staring at two people who have succeeded with the very thing you failed at – being a couple. Which makes that drive home feel much longer than it is.

While it’s been much slower than I would have liked, I do think I’m finally starting to claw my way back into the real world. I’ve made a vow to meet a friend for some activity – dinner, a movie, drinking lots and lots of wine – at least one day every weekend. The best part of all this? It’s taken off that pressure to date that starts squeezing you on all sides like that garbage room in Star Wars. All that counts is find more than Pay Per View as my Friday night companion.

And, having realized this, let me now correct the commonly held assumption that post-divorce social life is all about finding people to make out with. This is such a wrong way to go, largely because if you start spending your nights making out with new people before adding new friends to replace the old ones you lost in divorce, who can you brag to about making out with people?

Read Craig's last article here.