<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" When Julia met Michelle in the stands at their husbands&amp;#039; softball game, the two women clicked instantly. They quickly became close friends, and together with their husbands made a tight foursome. Over the next four years, they had double dates at hip restaurants in their San Diego neighborhood, met for movies, and took mini-vacations together to the wine country nearby.   One weekend, Julia and Michelle (whose names, like some of the others in this story, have been changed) and a few other friends were enjoying a long-planned winery tour to celebrate Michelle&amp;#039;s husband&amp;#039;s 27th birthday. Halfway through the tour, a mutual friend whispered to Julia, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t believe Michelle is really leaving Mark!&amp;quot;  A stunned Julia blurted a hasty response. &amp;quot;I know,&amp;quot; she lied, as she struggled to process the news. Despite the fact that Michelle and Mark had bickered frequently -- something Julia and her husband had talked about in private -- their problems hardly seemed insurmountable. But in the ensuing weeks, Julia would learn more from Michelle: that she&amp;#039;d been deeply hurt by Mark&amp;#039;s little, public rejections (pushing her away when she tried to hug him, for instance); that Mark had wanted desperately to try marriage counseling, and that Michelle agreed, but after one session she felt it was already too late. Within weeks, Michelle had a new boyfriend. Nine months later, her divorce from Mark was final.  For Julia, 29, it was a heartbreaking end. &amp;quot;These were the people my husband and I did everything with. Selfishly speaking, we were sad for that reason alone,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We eventually came to see that for them, it was for the best. And it&amp;#039;s nice to see they&amp;#039;re both happy now, separately, after what must have been a fairly painful divorce.&amp;quot; Married eight years herself, Julia can&amp;#039;t help feeling a little vulnerable, too. &amp;quot;My husband and I trust each other to be honest in our relationship, and I think we&amp;#039;re both motivated to make our marriage last,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;But when Michelle and Mark divorced, it was just a reminder: You never know what could happen. It&amp;#039;s a sad given of modern love: People divorce -- and lots of them. Nearly one of every two married couples parts ways. Indeed, many of us looked on as our own parents&amp;#039; marriages dissolved into bitterness, anger, tension, and (after Mom entered the workforce) mushy Crock-Pot dinners. Even so, when a set of your own friends announces their impending split, it can seem sudden and shocking. &amp;quot;Nobody really thinks divorce is that close to home,&amp;quot; says Jane Greer, Ph.D., a marriage and family therapist in New York City and author of How Could You Do This to Me? &amp;quot;Even when married friends behave abrasively or combatively, people assume that&amp;#039;s just their way of getting along and working out their differences, until it almost becomes normal.&amp;quot; Divorce is especially unnerving, though, when it happens to a couple that seemed genuinely happy together. &amp;quot;To see a friend who you thought had a solid marriage -- to see that come apart, you can get frightened and think, If they can&amp;#039;t make it, what are the odds for us?&amp;quot; says Greer.  That&amp;#039;s how Diana, 38, of El Paso, TX, felt when her cousin&amp;#039;s 22-year marriage came to an end after she learned her husband had been having an affair. &amp;quot;My husband and I were in complete shock,&amp;quot; says Diana, who&amp;#039;s been married 12 years. &amp;quot;He was the most devoted father and husband. He provided well for them financially, but he was very involved at home, too. When they had parties, he set everything up and he did all the cooking. He coaches his son&amp;#039;s baseball team. He always called my cousin during the day from work to see if she needed anything. They argued, but no more than anybody else we knew. After he told her he was having an affair, they tried to work things out -- twice. But in the end he&amp;#039;s left her for this other woman, who has three kids of her own. My husband and I talk about their divorce -- a lot,&amp;quot; Diana continues. &amp;quot;It made us both nervous.&amp;quot;  When a friend&amp;#039;s breakup is precipitated by infidelity (his or hers, it doesn&amp;#039;t matter), your anxieties can quickly flare into suspicion and even paranoia about your own partner -- and that particularly long time he took at the Home Depot last Saturday afternoon. You don&amp;#039;t necessarily suspect your guy of having an affair, but you do suddenly realize how easily he could if he were so inclined: It&amp;#039;s not just desperate housewives who get betrayed and dumped -- it happens to women just like you.  But there&amp;#039;s an upside to all this bystander anxiety: Divorce is a little less scary to talk about in the context of someone else&amp;#039;s situation. &amp;quot;Sometimes it&amp;#039;s actually easier for your husband to talk about issues in the abstract than directly, because there&amp;#039;s less performance anxiety,&amp;quot; says Scott Haltzman, M.D., author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s less concern that he&amp;#039;s going to get it &amp;#039;right&amp;#039; if he talks about another couple.&amp;quot; And, though it might seem counterintuitive, talking about divorce -- how it happens, how it might happen to you, and how to prevent it -- is one of the best ways to avoid it.  This is all the more true when someone you care about has cheated or been cheated on: Their experience can be the sensible opening for a conversation that reestablishes the rules of your own marriage. &amp;quot;Whenever I say to Ned, &amp;#039;Can you believe he did that?&amp;#039; it&amp;#039;s really just my way of saying, &amp;#039;You can never do that to me -- these are my values, and these are my fears,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; says Amy, 37, a mother of one in Pittsburgh. These difficult, even painful, conversations can be a blessing, says Tina Tessina, a psychotherapist and author of How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not an entirely bad thing to internalize some of someone else&amp;#039;s divorce -- you shouldn&amp;#039;t jump to conclusions that divorce is never going to happen to you,&amp;quot; she notes. &amp;quot;If you have been taking each other for granted, it might motivate you both to pay a little more attention. Of course, getting your guy to pay attention to the same questions and worries that plague you is another matter. If you&amp;#039;ve ever told your husband a friend&amp;#039;s getting divorced, you already know that men don&amp;#039;t always greet the news with the compassion we might expect. &amp;quot;Men are very detail-oriented. He&amp;#039;s not so concerned with, &amp;#039;Wow, your friend must have been really hurt by that,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; says Haltzman. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s thinking, I need more pieces to the puzzle here. He may become analytical: &amp;#039;Was her husband acting that way for a reason? Maybe you don&amp;#039;t know the whole story.&amp;#039;&amp;quot;  Naturally, this ticks us off -- but it shouldn&amp;#039;t, says Haltzman. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just your husband&amp;#039;s way of making sense of things, his way of understanding cause and effect.&amp;quot; And that&amp;#039;s actually good news for you as a wife. &amp;quot;You want him to figure out what it is wives are looking for, what things you think are important when you hear other women are divorcing,&amp;quot; says Haltzman. &amp;quot;Instead of getting upset, you can use it as an opportunity to educate him.&amp;quot;  Besides, talking to your husband about your relationship might be a welcome switch from slicing and dicing it with your girlfriends. With them egging you on, it&amp;#039;s all too easy to fall into the habit of only discussing the bad patches of your marriage (the same way people are more apt to go on and on about miserable, rainy weather and generally let crystal-clear, low-humidity days pass without comment). And while you may get reassurance from your friends that being annoyed with your husband and occasionally arguing with him are just part of being married, you may also forget that these are issues you need to discuss -- with your spouse. &amp;quot;Some friendships are bonded around life&amp;#039;s problems,&amp;quot; says Pamela Berger, a therapist in private practice in Brooklyn. &amp;quot;But connecting around complaints about your husband makes it easier not to truly confront the problems in marriage.&amp;quot;  What&amp;#039;s worse, when a friend who&amp;#039;s vented the same way you did (or seemed to, anyway) decides she&amp;#039;s had enough, you may start to wonder if your grievances are divorce-worthy, too. Thus commences the microscopic reevaluation of every facet of your marriage -- a research project your soon-to-be-single friend is sure to join in on. &amp;quot;I went out with my newly divorced friend for a drink one night, and she told me, &amp;#039;Wow, it sounds like yours isn&amp;#039;t going to last, either,&amp;#039;&amp;quot; says Jessica, 33, a mother of two in northern New Jersey. This harsh comment made her incredibly angry. &amp;quot;But it also got me to make a concerted effort to invest time in making the bad things in my marriage better,&amp;quot; she says.  Instead of looking at your marriage through the gloomy lens of your friend&amp;#039;s heartbreak, you may need to see the friendship in a new light. &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;re so close and intimate with a best friend, and your paths have been so similar -- you get married around the same time, you have a kid around the same time -- it&amp;#039;s hard at the point where your paths diverge not to think that it will happen to you, since you had so much in common,&amp;quot; says Amy. &amp;quot;But then you&amp;#039;re forced to see that your friendship is changing rather than that your marriage will fail in the same way.&amp;quot; Amy, like Jessica, figured out that the best thing for her friendship and her marriage was to stop the pattern of garden-variety whining to her pal about her husband. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t want her to feel like I was on the same page with her, because I was not,&amp;quot; says Amy. &amp;quot;I think I just made a decision not to stir my own pot.&amp;quot;  If you and your husband were especially close to the divorcing couple, you may both be feeling something that approximates mourning -- not just for the end of their marriage, but also for the memories you expected you&amp;#039;d continue to make together. &amp;quot;If you have very close friends who are getting divorced, it can feel like you&amp;#039;re losing part of your family,&amp;quot; says Michele Weiner-Davis, a couples therapist who has authored several books about preventing divorce, including Divorce Busting. In an effort to process the loss, you may find yourselves endlessly analyzing what happened, comparing he-said, she-said notes that aren&amp;#039;t likely to yield helpful truths. &amp;quot;Of course, what your girlfriend is going to tell you about why the marriage fell apart is going to be very different from what the husband is going to say,&amp;quot; says Weiner-Davis. &amp;quot;What you really learn is from observation. If you can stand back a bit -- without taking sides -- and think, What did each partner do to contribute to the downfall of their relationship?, you might be able to learn something. Divorce can be a little like Ludwig Bemelmans&amp;#039;s fictional pint-size Madeline and her appendicitis: Her little schoolgirl friends see her in a hospital bed, and rather than thinking about the painful ordeal she suffered, they see her flanked with toys and jealously declare, &amp;quot;We want to have our appendix out, too!&amp;quot; Similarly, now that your friend has had a 185-pound North American Domestic Jerk surgically removed from her life, she might feel a profound sense of freedom, followed by shopping sprees for sexy clothes and hot interludes courtesy of Match.com. And of course, while you know how wrenching the separation was, all you see now are the fun rewards.   &amp;quot;I know it was really hard for my friend Cathy, and of course there have been times that she&amp;#039;s slept with a new guy and regretted it or has been waiting for the phone to ring,&amp;quot; says Sarah, a 36-year-old mother in Los Angeles. &amp;quot;But on the whole she seems to be having a lot more fun than I am as a married mom. I got kind of jealous when she started going out to bars, dating, seeing last-minute Friday-night movies without a thought.&amp;quot; For Annie, a 45-year-old mom in Croswell, MS, it&amp;#039;s been &amp;quot;strange&amp;quot; to watch her formerly married friend change gears to life as a single woman; Annie can&amp;#039;t help but feel envious. &amp;quot;Her ex-husband has their two daughters every other weekend, and she recently took an impromptu trip to Florida,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I have four children, and my husband and I have never been away for a weekend without the kids.&amp;quot;  Julie, a 37-year-old mother of two in Minneapolis, sees the glow that her recently separated friend has &amp;quot;from dating someone new, from hearing &amp;#039;I love you&amp;#039; for the first time.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s a glow that even the most loving married couples can&amp;#039;t maintain day-to-day, Julie notes: &amp;quot;People who say otherwise, like &amp;#039;I still get butterflies when I look at him,&amp;#039; are liars, I think. If Julie sounds bitter, she&amp;#039;s not. &amp;quot;I know that my husband and I have something different and deeper than new love,&amp;quot; she says. Likewise, when Sarah really takes stock of her situation, she&amp;#039;s glad to be sharing her life with her husband. &amp;quot;I kind of look at my own marriage in a harsh glare and rosy glow,&amp;quot; says Sarah. Some days I think, Man, I could just walk, like so-and-so. Other days, I think, Boy, am I lucky.&amp;quot;  Such is the meteorology of marriage, the alternating cold fronts of resentment and what-ifs, followed by the warming thank-heaven-I-have-him thoughts. News of a friend&amp;#039;s divorce can bolster your most positive beliefs about your marriage -- or it can reinforce the most negative ones -- depending on when and how the news hits you, and even more so, on how you take it. Because for every question that a friend&amp;#039;s split creates in your mind, there&amp;#039;s an answer that can strengthen your own relationship.  Would I be happier single, too? &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t compare the best moments in your single friend&amp;#039;s life with the worst moments in your own,&amp;quot; says Tessina. &amp;quot;Develop a skill that will serve you well throughout your life: reality checking. What would your life be without your spouse? Financial status? Household workload without someone to share it with? Going to bed alone?&amp;quot; Suddenly, a man whose biggest offense to date may be forgetting your wedding anniversary doesn&amp;#039;t seem so bad. Even if the image of your footloose single future is appealing, that doesn&amp;#039;t mean it&amp;#039;s time to call a lawyer. &amp;quot;If there&amp;#039;s something you&amp;#039;re really longing for,&amp;quot; says Tessina, &amp;quot;you need to talk to your husband about it.&amp;quot;  How strong is our marriage? A friend&amp;#039;s divorce, says Tessina, is a great opportunity to discuss the health of your relationship with your husband and reaffirm your commitment. For Diana, her cousin&amp;#039;s divorce has led to talks with her husband about their fears and desires for their future. &amp;quot;I think in the end we&amp;#039;re closer,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Seeing the extreme pain the divorce and the affair have caused my cousin and her children has showed us what we don&amp;#039;t want.&amp;quot;  But ideally, you&amp;#039;re not waiting until someone else&amp;#039;s marriage hits the rocks to nurture yours. Keep the temperature of your marriage from reaching boiling (or, just as bad, cool) by instituting &amp;quot;state of the union&amp;quot; meetings, suggests Tessina. &amp;quot;Set aside a sacred period to talk about what&amp;#039;s working, what&amp;#039;s not, then focus on solving problems. If you do this regularly, you&amp;#039;ll find problems are usually minor and easy to solve,&amp;quot; especially because you&amp;#039;ll be tackling them before they fester into the resentments that put your marriage at serious risk.  Which brings us back to the original question: Could it happen to us? The marriage-smart answer is...yes. In fact, one of the more dangerous feelings a friend&amp;#039;s divorce can inspire is invincibility. &amp;quot;When you take comfort in thinking, That couldn&amp;#039;t happen to us, you have to be able to answer, Why not?&amp;quot; says Greer. &amp;quot;You have to see concretely what your strengths and resources are and how you work together to overcome problems.&amp;quot;  Watching a marriage dissolve is one thing; watching a couple make it back from the brink can be the most bracing lesson of all. &amp;quot;We certainly have friends who were in a downward spiral, but then recovered,&amp;quot; says Jessica. &amp;quot;I think you have to make a decision: Do we want to do the work to improve this relationship and make its cycles of ups longer than the cycles of downs?&amp;quot; Lisa, a 40-year-old mother of one in Madison, WI, admits that when she was single in her 20s, she felt a little smug every time a friend got divorced. But now that she&amp;#039;s married, when a couple she knows splits up, she just feels sad, she says: &amp;quot;It reminds me to let my husband know how much I love him, to take better care of my marriage, and to hold it dear.&amp;quot; Don&amp;#039;t pick sides  &amp;quot;I wish fewer of my friends had chosen sides. They could have cared about both of us as individuals, not as a couple anymore. Two of my women friends told me that they had to go with who their husband was friends with, meaning my ex, as their husband had so few friends, they wanted to &amp;#039;encourage the male friendship.&amp;#039; This still baffles me five years later -- couldn&amp;#039;t the guys have nurtured their own relationships, and not have their wives make their relationships for them? The friends who didn&amp;#039;t choose sides and were concerned about each person had greater hearts and love than I had imagined. I admire those friends.&amp;quot; -- Linda, 49 Don&amp;#039;t gang up on the ex &amp;quot;Friends have to understand that even though you&amp;#039;re divorcing and things might have been really bad, you married the person because of the good you saw in him. The instant someone announces a divorce, it&amp;#039;s not okay to rip him to shreds (&amp;#039;I always hated him!&amp;#039; &amp;#039;What a jerk!&amp;#039;). No person is all bad or all good. Divorce is the death of a dream that you thought was going to last.&amp;quot; --Julie, 39 Don&amp;#039;t be jealous of her dating life  &amp;quot;Having been married, I know what I want, what I don&amp;#039;t want, and where I&amp;#039;m going in life. I&amp;#039;m interested in a relationship rather than a couple of casual dates for the sake of companionship. I&amp;#039;m surprised that there are still so many people -- men and women -- in my age group who don&amp;#039;t mind just seeing someone a few times and then moving on as if you&amp;#039;d never met. This has been a real shock to me and has made dating a lot less fun and interesting than I expected.&amp;quot; --Nicole, 33 Offer an ear -- and a night out &amp;quot;Nothing was more frustrating than to hear friends who&amp;#039;d never been divorced say, &amp;#039;I know exactly how you feel.&amp;#039; While their intentions were good, they really couldn&amp;#039;t understand the undercurrent of conflicting emotions. So just listen. And keep inviting your friends to join in &amp;#039;girl fun&amp;#039; even if they keep turning you down. When they&amp;#039;re ready, they will let you know.&amp;quot; --Lara, 48  Don&amp;#039;t throw a party &amp;quot;When the divorce is final, please, please, please don&amp;#039;t throw a celebration party. There is nothing to celebrate when a love-of-a-lifetime has permanently failed. Instead, be there for talking, venting, distraction -- but not celebration. Try instead to include her in group settings, but not individual dating situations. Help her see that being alone can be a healthy, good thing, not merely a stepping stone to a new relationship. Help her learn to love herself as she is -- show her she is complete whether or not she has a partner.&amp;quot; --Maggie, 48 "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.redbookmag.com/love-sex/relationships/advice/a1686/friends-divorce/>