This was not on the Starbucks menu

Shortly after getting divorced, a client of mine told a story about her ex wanting to stay friends. She asked to meet him at a local Starbucks. He was hesitant to meet because she was very upset that he wanted a divorce from her. But he agreed to the meeting mainly because he didn’t want her ex to tell her two grown children that he was being a jerk. After ten or fifteen minutes of civilized small talk, she turned to him, stared into his eyes, and yelled at the top of her lungs for everyone in the establishment to hear, “Does your bitch girlfriend like your dick?”

Needless to say, a post-divorce friendship wasn’t in the cards for the two of them. But it dramatizes the difficulty of trying to return to the low-emotion friendship relationship after losing the high-emotion relationship of a 20-year marriage.

What we are told about the “remaining friends” after the divorce does not tally with what we see

Everywhere you look you can find therapists and self-help authors extolling the virtues of staying friends after divorce. Also, everywhere you look, it’s hard to find ex-spouses who have actually remained friends after their divorce.

Terry Gaspard provides insight in his January 7, 2020 article on magazinedivorce.com“7 Reasons Being Friends With Your Ex Usually Doesn’t Work Out,” in which he identifies seven problems with remaining friends after your divorce:

• More often than not, a post-breakup friendship is a setup for further heartbreak.

• It doesn’t give you or your ex time to grieve the loss of the relationship or marriage.

• You need to forge a new identity.

• It may cause confusion for your children.

• They may not have been true friends, and it is troublesome to start now.

• You need energy to “take care of yourself.”

• Acceptance is the final stage of mourning the loss of a loved one..

OK, so there are problems with that. We do not know yet because it’s so weird. The answer may lie in how friendships develop.

Friendship by Addition – Friendship Based on Hope

When we talk about friendship, we usually mean a relationship that grows step by step over time between two people who hope to establish a non-intimate connection that will enrich their lives.

The way we typically “cultivate” a friendship is by meeting people we have something in common with and then continuing to spend time together as we find more in common, we find more ways we can validate who we are and find more ways to reach out. to an agreement on the social situations we share. The process takes place over time as we add to and solidify our commonalities and our shared interpretations of our shared social environment. It is a process of adding piece by piece over time with the result that the friendship deepens as we add each piece to the growing whole.

Summarizing the benefits of friendship, friends come to:

1. SHARE COMMON INTERESTS with his friend,

2. VALIDATE COMMON BELIEFS AND LIFE PERSPECTIVES with his friend,

3. Help each other reach a consensus on the MEANING OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT that they share and

4. Help each other in developing a more accurate”SENSE OF SELF“with his friend.

Friendship by subtraction – Friendship based on loss

Most marriages start out as normal friendships and the initial basis of your relationship is the same as regular friends.

Just like normal friendships, they share common interests, validate each other’s beliefs and viewpoints on life. They reach a consensus between the two about the meaning of their shared social environment and give interpersonal feedback that helps each other to integrate their identity within their common social context.

When a divorced couple wants to remain friends, their initial friendship remains intact. They share the same benefits of a typical friendship including:

1. They manage to maintain their right to SHARE COMMON INTERESTS with his ex,

2. They manage to maintain their right to VALIDATE COMMON BELIEFS AND LIFE PERSPECTIVES with his ex,

3. You can keep your right to help each other reach a consensus on the MEANING OF THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT that you share with your ex, and

4. They get to help each other in developing a more accurate”SENSE OF SELF“with his ex.

However, this is where things get complicated. Regular friendships start from scratch and add positive brick by positive brick to the friendship foundation. However, for exes to “stay friends” after their divorce, they must abandongold subtractThey treasured many aspects of their marriage until they divorced. These losses are a painful reminder of what they used to have when they were married. Befriending your ex becomes an exercise in acknowledging one loss after another. These losses include:

5. The spouses lose the right to have SEX with his ex

6. The spouses lose the right to affirm the SEX ATTRACTIVENESS of his ex

7. The spouses lose the right to have INTIMATE PHYSICAL BEHAVIOR with his ex

8. The spouses lose the right to have INTIMATE EMOTIONAL BEHAVIOR with his ex

9. The spouses lose the right to register INTIMATE CONVERSATIONS with his ex

10. The spouses lose the right to have unlimited PHYSICAL ACCESS with his ex

11. The spouses lose the right to have unlimited EMOTIONAL ACCESS with his ex

12. The spouses lose the right to REVEAL PRIVATE BELIEFS AND THOUGHTS to his ex

13. The spouses lose the right to REVEAL YOUR DEEPEST HOPE AND FEAR to his ex

14. Spouses lose the expectation of FULL TRUST Your ex

15. Spouses lose the right to enjoy very few PERSONAL LIMITS with his ex

16. The spouses lose the right to EXPRESS THEIR LOVE in an intimate way.

17. The spouses lose the right to have a RANGE OF EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION with your ex, both positive and negative.

Normal friendship vs. post-divorce friendship

Whereas a normal friendship is about adding one positive experience after another as the friendship grows, staying friends after divorce requires acknowledging that major surgery was performed to cut the heart of the marital relationship, leaving only the friendship to survive.

In terms of the list of relationship benefits listed above, wanting to stay friends with your ex means that you keep the first four items on the list (items 1 through 4) while acknowledging the loss of the other thirteen benefits (items 5 through 17). ).

Forcing your ex, as well as yourself, to regularly live with the memory of heartbreaking losses suffered in divorce simply to maintain a “normal” friendship seems difficult at best and self-serving and selfish at worst. No wonder it happens so infrequently.

So what is the point?

The harsh reality is that the relationship is dead and gone. The divorce is final, or soon will be. Now is the time to invest your energy in recovering from the traumatic event you just went through and preparing for the next chapter of your life.

Your ex can continue without your friendship and you can continue without your ex’s friendship. Simply put, staying friends with your ex is too much, too soon, and too hard. Let sending your goodwill to each other be enough and put your fantasies of friendship to rest.