I could not have survived my divorce without my friends. If you don’t have supportive friends, you’d better go find some. It’s okay for a sister or cousin or other family member to be a girlfriend, but don’t try to dump all your troubles on a family member—and especially not on your kids, a route that can be very tempting if you’re lonely. It’s too much of a burden for a child, whether that child is five or thirty-five.
I talked to many divorced women for this book, and just about all of them mentioned the importance of girlfriends in surviving divorce. For instance, Melissa Tanner, a fellow Woodstocker whose husband left her at sixty-one after twenty-seven years of marriage, told me, “I opened my heart to other people to feel better. I let other people in. I had done it before but not as much because I was so involved in our life. I had a friend say to me ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’ I found that my friends really wanted to be with me.”
Girlfriends You Will Need For Support
These are a few of my closest girlfriends. They all played different roles in my recovery. You will also need a bunch of girlfriends who, hopefully, have different outlooks on life and a variety of viewpoints to offer. When I complained to Kali about how lonely I was, she asked me to list all my friends. By the time I finished, I felt a lot better.
Kathy: The Been-There-Done-That Girlfriend
I have been lucky enough to have Kathy, whom I described in the introduction, as my been-through-it girlfriend. We had both struggled with rigid, argumentative, angry exes with whom we had to co-parent, and we both had kids with problems. Whatever I was going through, Kathy had usually gone through already. As the queen of Match.com, she also shepherded me through Internet dating. I helped her down the line when she had legal problems with her ex-husband because I’d done so much research for my own settlement. Most importantly, Kathy is funny as all hell and could turn my worst moments of post-separation angst into the kind of black humor that never failed to crack me up. You will need a girlfriend with a great sense of humor to lighten you up during your inevitable bouts of self-pity. You will also need a girlfriend who has been through a divorce and come out the other side healthier and happier. She will provide a role model for your recovery.
Minda: The Devil’s-Advocate Girlfriend
You will also need a Minda. Your Minda has to be willing to tell you the truth even when you don’t want to hear it. You might want all your girlfriends to mindlessly agree that your ex is a rat and you are a saint, but you need someone to play devil’s advocate. My Minda is happily married and got me off the pity pot on many occasions.
“Erica, we weren’t surprised at all when he left,” Minda would say. “We thought he should have done it long ago. You were always putting him down and bullying him. You two were miserable together. I hope you don’t get offended by my telling you this,” she’d always add apologetically. Even though I tried to defend myself by explaining how Zeke was Dr. Jekyll in front of her and Mr. Hyde alone with me, I realized that it took a lot of guts to tell the truth to a woman as opinionated as me.
Whenever you get stuck totally in victim mode, have the presence of mind to call your Minda to force you into a reality check. The more she helps you look at the interlocking neurotic LEGOs that you’ve built into a shaky marriage, the more inevitable the breakup will seem. That inevitability is comforting. Being a victim has its rewards—hey, you get a lot of sympathy—but it also feels crappy being so helpless over your own fate. You need a girlfriend who will force you to look at yourself straight-on and take responsibility. If you’re smart, you won’t defend yourself, you’ll just listen. It may sting, but in the long run it will help.
Roz: The Moral-Compass Girlfriend
Roz, who like me loved dining out and the movies, was my regular Saturday-night date after the breakup. Single at fifty-five, she’d had many torrid affairs and was a riveting storyteller, especially when it came to her own love life. Like Aesop’s fables, all her tales had morals, which were very instructive, though not always in ways you would expect.
My favorite was Roz’s story about a man she’d been seeing who was seemingly the perfect guy. She adored him and they were planning to marry. Then during one Thanksgiving dinner at his home, he blew up at his teenage daughter for a trivial incident, becoming so enraged that he threw the turkey on the floor. Roz had never seen him that angry before. She broke up with him on the spot, refusing to ever see him again, despite his desperate pleas for forgiveness. No way was she going to keep seeing a man who had that kind of rage bottled up inside, especially one who bullied his own child.
I was blown away by this story. My ex-husband had gone into rages repeatedly before I married him—always for insignificant reasons. Why didn’t I dump him the first, the second, or even the fifteenth time he blew up at me? Why did I marry the guy? I was incredibly impressed with Roz’s ability to make that kind of decision and never look back. If, like many of us, you didn’t have much of a role model in your mother, who may have put up with all kinds of mistreatment, it helps to have a girlfriend who knows how to set limits with men, especially once you start dating again. Roz was also adamant in her outrage about Zeke’s affair. A strong-minded girlfriend with an old-fashioned sense of right and wrong can help you sort out the moral and ethical dilemmas of divorce and dating.
Wendy: The Living-Alone-And-Loving-It Girlfriend
You would be extremely lucky to also have a Wendy. My Wendy lives a few minutes away from me and was there when I really needed her, which was often. Like Peter Pan’s Wendy, she is sensible and down to earth and gives great advice. In addition to being a therapist who has a great deal of insight into people, Wendy is a role model for living alone and loving it. At fifty-seven she’s perfectly happy with her dogs, her books, and her imagination. Whenever I start feeling really lonely, she reminds me how miserable I was when I was married and how desperate I was to get away from my husband and hang out with her. You will need some single girlfriends who live alone and like it to remind you that that’s possible.
Joanie And Avigail: The How-To-Deal-With-Your-Kids Girlfriends
My girlfriend Joan is supermom. A foster mother who has taken in a few children with major problems and turned them around, she can deal with just about any issue involving kids. When I bemoaned my inability to deal with my daughter, she reassured me that it wasn’t my fault; that it was an impossible job to deal with a child with Dorothy’s problems alone at my age. Then she’d give me a few helpful tips in a nonjudgmental way. She supported me, guided me, alleviated my guilt. Because she was supermom, I believed her. If you have kids at home who are troubled by your divorce, it really helps to have an expert mom like Joan to give you advice, not to mention a single mom like Avigail who went through a similar scenario with her kids after her divorce. Avigail’s tales of her experiences with her kids made me feel I wasn’t alone.
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