How Friendships Change After Divorce
Be Prepared For Friendships To Change After Divorce
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Divorce. It’s not something anybody ever thinks will happen to them. Even though everyone knows divorce is still common, nobody thinks they’ll be one of the statistics. The Center for Disease Control reported nearly 747,000 divorces in 2019 (court closures during the 2020 pandemic made accurate numbers hard to collect.) The good news is that divorce rates have actually dropped substantially over the last 20 years. In the year 2000, there were nearly 945,000 divorces. So, there should be some optimism in the air. But still, divorce exists, and research out of The National Center for Biotechnology Information shows that it hits women the hardest, leaving them more at risk for poverty and single parenthood than men.
So if your friends seem worried about you after a divorce, they have good reason to be. But, worry isn’t always the emotion friends display. People can get a little weird after you get divorced. Not everyone in your network can be quite certain how to respond. And, it can be surprising to learn just how much of your dynamic with a friend relied on your being married. For that reason, at a time you need friends the most, you might see some the least. Here are reasons friendships change after divorce.
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Hesitant pillars of strength
Some friends can worry that if they let you lean on them after divorce, you’ll lean on them too much. People can hesitate to become too involved in your grieving process, and want to set certain boundaries, which makes it seem like they’re pulling away. So while some friends might tell you their home always has an open door to you, and you can show up any time you need company, others might want to make it clear that is not the case. Remember that some people are not comfortable around grief, and others may not be as generous with their love and support as you thought. Some friends do disappear when supporting you becomes “too much work.”
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Overbearing pillars of strength
While some friends will become distant, others might be a little too involved in your grieving process, micro-managing it, forcing you to go to group therapy, pushing some sort of timeline on you, making you go on dating apps, and generally trying to oversee the process. It can be too much, and might cause you to pull away from these friends, and stop sharing things with them. However, it is understandable that friends who really care about you want to make sure you eventually move on with your life. They might know this data from the NCBI: mismanaging grief can have health consequences. And while most people rebound from divorce, some never do.
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There can be jealousy
This is quite immature, but it’s usually just friends projecting their marital issues onto you. Some friends may see you as a threat to their marriage once you’re single. They may fear that now their partners will take a romantic or sexual interest in you. Maybe before, when you were married, you were “safe.” Getting a divorce can sometimes reveal the trust issues happening in other unions. If there have been trust or fidelity issues in a friend’s marriage, she may not like bringing single, attractive women around her husband. And now, that might describe you. This isn’t your fault and cannot be helped.
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Jealousy, part II
There’s another way jealousy might pop up here. When you do recover from the grief and are ready to get back out there, you will be back in the single life. Maybe you’ll even have a lot of fun. Maybe you’ll be very free. You’ll travel. You’ll take up new hobbies. You’ll go to fun singles bars. You’ll make new singles friends. Your married friends might become jealous seeing this. Their married life may not allowed for this type of fun, and it can create envy. Furthermore, if being divorced has encouraged you to make new single friends (maybe other divorced friends), then your married friends can be jealous of your new friendships.
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They preferred the double date life
Some couples can become rather codependent and struggle to have individual social lives. You might find out just who those couples are the moment you become single. Perhaps some friends only saw you in the double date setting. That’s how they socialize. They don’t break apart – one going off to see one friend, and another going off to do his own thing. They always socialize as a pair. So when you’re no longer part of a pair, that presents a problem. Sometimes you just want to invite the woman from a couple who you used to double date with, out for a girls’ night. But if her husband isn’t comfortable with her doing things like that, that friendship will suffer.
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Some friends miss the ex
Not all of your friends will agree with your decision to get divorced. Maybe they saw the entire thing unfold, and they never agreed with your outlook on it. Maybe they really liked your ex. Hey, maybe, for them, he was the best part about hanging out with you. It’s painful to feel that, but it might come up. Over the years, friends who started as your friends might have become very close to your now-ex. So they can feel that you betrayed them by breaking up that dynamic. They can even feel like you really screwed them over, because they made the effort to get to know and like your spouse, and now you removed him from the equation.
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It’s “contagious”
Some people have the misguided notion that divorce is contagious. They can fear that, by spending time around someone whose marriage fell apart, their own marriage will become unstable. And it is true that hearing someone talk about everything that was wrong with their marriage will make others evaluate and shine a light on their own unions. But anyone who is in a strong and healthy marriage shouldn’t worry about that. So as for friends who disappear because they don’t want your ideas getting into their head, and fear that you’ll make them see the issues in their own marriage, well, that marriage might be in trouble either way.
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Your simple geography can change
Your entire social life while you were married might have been dependent on your geographical location. You and the ex lived in the house within the good school district, near the park where all the parents like to meet up for playdates, near the shopping plaza where some of the parents grab lunch, and so on. The divorce may have made it such that you could no longer afford to live in that neighborhood. So now, when the texts come in, “We’re meeting at the park. Join us!” The park is now a 45-minute drive for you. It used to be a five-minute walk. But the whole group is in the old neighborhood, so you know it’s unreasonable to ask all of them to drive to you.
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Some don’t want their kids around it
Some people don’t want their children to hang out in single-parent homes. It’s very judgmental, but it does happen. They can fear that their kid will pick up unhealthy ideas about marriage and family life. They might fear that you alone cannot properly supervise their kid, and you need a partner there to do it. If you had some friendships that existed primarily because your kids played together, these can go away after divorce. Once your home is no longer the “picture perfect” image of a family house, some parents might cancel those weekly playdates. This is one way you might discover that friendship relied on your being married.
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Side-choosing
Things can get awkward when there were couple friends involved. Maybe with one couple, it was the husbands who were the closest. Maybe they were the originating friends. Your ex had a really good buddy. That guy got married. You became friends with his wife over time. But ultimately, the men were the foundation of the friendship. So after the divorce, even though you really liked that other wife, she might feel disloyal for seeing you. Maybe her husband will even ask that she not see you, out of loyalty to your ex. It’s petty, and adults should be able to decide who their friends are, but it happens all of the time.
