As if all that upheaval and heartache at once wasn’t enough, many women report losing friendships after a divorce. Unfortunately, it’s exactly what happened to Capsule reader Mandy, and sadly, she’s far from alone in experiencing this phenomenon. We talk to Mandy about her firsthand experiences, and then hear from the experts as to why this so commonly happens.
Welcome to the Divorce Diaries. In our past instalments over the last year we’ve covered everything from when you’re most likely to divorce to whether they’re contagious to whether being on the contraceptive pill can effect your chances (?!) and have now spoken to dozens of women – including one whose husband announced he was leaving her to have an open relationship with a 19-year-old, another who was quite literally ghosted by her own husband and one who discovered the real reason her husband divorced her was because he had a baby with her SISTER.
If you have a topic you’d like to discuss, share your thoughts, experience or advice about, drop a line to alice@capsulenz.com.
A few weeks ago, Mandy was standing on the sidelines of her son’s football game when she struck up a conversation with another mum who was from the opposing team.
The chat quickly deepened from discussing the weather and their go-to merino brands, to the state of their marriages. Mandy talked about how she and her husband Carl were now divorced after separating a couple of years earlier – while her new friend confided that she and her husband were contemplating separating. They were in therapy but were worried things had already gone too far and their marriage might already be unrepairable.
Then, this woman moved closer to Mandy and asked her a question:
“Is it unbearably lonely?”
Mandy says she thought for a second about what she should tell this woman. “I didn’t want to lie to her, but I also didn’t want to frighten her,” she says.
Mandy told her that it was pretty lonely at times, but not at all for the reasons she would have assumed before she got divorced.
Mandy and Carl’s separation had really been a long time coming. “We argued a lot,” she says. “There was a lot of resentment.”
She says they’d often bicker and exchange little barbs at each other – it no longer mattered where they were or who they were with. “Looking back, I hate that we did that in front of the children,” says Mandy.
But at the time, it felt normal. Bickering with your husband and feeling like he was constantly driving you up the wall seemed like it was probably something everything did. “You see it everywhere – the jokey things on Instagram about how insane and infuriating husbands are,” says Mandy. “And my friends and I would always trade stories about what our annoying husbands were up to. I thought that was just normal”
But suddenly, Mandy and Carl started to see that maybe it didn’t have to be like this, and perhaps they could be happier apart. They were already living quite separate lives. There was a lot of hurt and sadness about their marriage ending, but Mandy says the surprising feeling was relief and conviction in the decision. They both knew – although it was difficult – that it was the right call.
In the years since, Mandy says she misses being married sometimes, but she has never regretted that decision to divorce. Yes, she has felt tremendously lonely in the last two years – but it isn’t her ex-husband she’s been missing.
Mandy remembers back at the start of their separation, feeling like one of the saving graces of the situation was that they both had great family support, with both sets of parents living within a 20-minute drive away. She felt grateful for that and the fact they had quite separate groups of friends. Mandy got along well with her husband’s friends, and their wives, but her real friends were a separate group of women and their husbands.
“It wasn’t like they were one shared jumbled group, that might make it feel awkward having to take sides, or wonder who to invite places,” says Mandy. “I felt really grateful I’d keep my friends.
“But… I was so wrong,” she says.
Mandy found herself heavily leaning on her family in the year or so after her separation, because slowly – or very quickly in some cases – she found her friends backing away from her.
“Most were very supportive at the start, going out for a wine with me, or sending me text messages saying they were thinking of me,” she says, “but things quickly shifted.”
Her phone just went completely quiet – which was particularly hard to deal with when she suddenly had every second weekend entirely to herself in a now very empty, quiet home.
“I’d message around, seeing who wanted to go out for dinner, or go to different things with me, but everyone would say they were busy or had to stay home with the kids,” she says.
One time she’d asked a friend over for dinner who had said sorry, she had to be home with her kids, only for Mandy to discover that actually, she’d gone for dinner with her husband and another couple in their friend group.
“I felt weird about saying anything, but I said that I would have loved to have come to that dinner,” she says.
“My friend said sorry, that she hadn’t thought of it – but that maybe it would be weird and awkward because it was just couples. That really made me feel hurt. It wouldn’t be awkward for me. Was she saying it would be awkward for them?”
One of the strangest interactions, Mandy says, came a few months after the separation when she went over to one of her closest friends’ house, had dinner and a couple of glasses of wine – and then several more once her friend’s children and husband had gone to bed.
Mandy’s friend lived a good 45-minute drive away, so in the past, whenever they did this they’d stay in each other’s spare room and then drive home early the next morning.
But this night, when it got to about midnight and her friend was tired, she asked if she should call Mandy an Uber.
“I said it’s so far and expensive and I was all good to crash in her spare room, if that was still okay,” says Mandy. “It’s what I’d always done and I also didn’t want to have to think about how I’d get my car back in the morning. But she kind of laughed and said it wasn’t like that could happen anymore.”
When Mandy – quite confused – asked why not, her friend said:
“You’re single! I can’t have a single woman staying over at our house.”
Mandy says she was so shocked she didn’t really know what to say. She wondered if it was all the wine they’d had, doing the talking.
“I tried laughing and saying, ‘You don’t really think I’d try to hit on your husband, right?’” says Mandy. “And she said, it just wasn’t the right thing to do anymore – particularly with her sons at home. She has three boys – two of them are under 10 and her stepson, who was home at the time was 19 at this stage. I was so offended. Did she really think I was going to try to jump into bed with her husband? Or even worse, their kid!?!”
Sadly, Mandy’s experience is alarmingly – and surprisingly – common and in actual fact many women lose a significant number of friendships after going through a divorce.
But, why on earth would this be the case?
Some experts point to the fact that some people fear that divorce may be contagious and just don’t want to be around it. It might sound silly, but it’s a real phenomenon.
One scientific study (conducted by McDermott [Brown University], Fowler [UCSD] and Christakis [Harvard]) found that you are 75% more likely to get divorced if you have a close friend who is divorced.
And from there, it only amplifies. If you have several divorced friends in your social network, your odds shoot up to 147% (compared to people who are married and socialise with mostly married friends).
It also, unfortunately, makes sense. Talking with a friend about their separation and what led to it, can bring up fears in some people about their own marriage or might make them take a closer look at the workings or their marriage and see where the faults lie.
For a lot of people, this can be an uncomfortable or frightening thing to do, so, they’d prefer to just avoid these conversations and therefore avoid their friend going through a separation.
For others, a continuing friendship can be particularly difficult if one of their shared bonds was over their respective marriages and venting about their husbands.
In Mandy’s case, this could very well have been true, as there were a couple of friends in particular who she would often get a wine with and vent – and these were the first women who backed away from her.
Clinicial psychologist Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten says this is very common.
“Many more friendships than people realise are predicated on shared unhappiness and venting sessions,” she says. “’Misery loves company’ is not a joke. If two women were bonding over their husbands being difficult and insensitive, and bonding over their shared feeling of being trapped in their marriages, it can be very destabilising to the friendship if one friend decides to leave her husband and pursue healthier, happier relationships. ‘Marriage sucks’ was the religion of the friendship, and when one friend converts, the friendship often cannot survive.”
And unfortunately, for Mandy, one of the other reasons women can back away is for fear of having a single woman around their husband – and the sometimes irrational fear that she may now be a love rival.
In the two years since, Mandy has very much missed her friends, but, she’s also made some news ones – interestingly, these new women are all divorced, forging a similar path to her.
She’s had one friend who has stuck through it all – who yes, did go through a patch of being a bit distant with Mandy – but she came right back into her life.
“She was going through a rough patch in her marriage, which she hadn’t wanted to tell me,” says Mandy. “I guess she didn’t want to have to really confront the idea that sometimes marriages don’t work out. They’ve since worked things out and I’ve appreciated her honesty.”
Her other friend – who wasn’t comfortable with her staying the night at her house – got back in touch recently because she’d heard Mandy was seeing someone and wanted to ask them both over for dinner.
“She got the wrong end of the stick – I’m not seeing anyone,” says Mandy. “But I never replied to her. I don’t want a friendship that is so conditional on me being in a relationship.”
It’s not all bad news for friendships post divorce though. As Dr. Samantha Rodman Whiten says, going through a divorce can actually deepen some friendships. “Especially with friends who were previously divorced,” she says. “Divorced people tend to want to show one another the ropes of post-married life.
“Another bright spot is that people tend to make many new close friends post-divorce, often with other divorced people, but also with people from new activities that they try or new neighbuorhoods they move into. If you try, you can recreate your social life in whatever way feels fulfilling to you, although it is natural to still mourn the loss of old friends (some of whom you may reconnect with later in life).”
