How People Will Treat You After Divorce
For better or worse, people will treat you differently.
Why hello there!
Happy Friday,
I do hope you’ve had an excellent week. Can you believe it’s almost February? At times it feels like days are dragging, but then I look at the calendar and wonder where Halloween went.
I do hope you enjoy what I have to write today. And I wanted to let you know what I’ve started recording interviews for my new podcast! If you messaged me about being a guest I’ll be connecting with you next week to possibly set up a time! And if you haven’t emailed me (greysonferguson@gmail.com) about being a guest and don’t mind talking about a particular relationship in your life, feel free to email and say hi (or just email me and say hi even if you don’t want to be a guest).
As always, thank you so much for reading what I have to write. It’s truly a humbling pleasure.
Your friend,
Greyson
How People Will Treat You After Divorce
A million thoughts. A thousand voices. A single mind.
What did people think? Why did I care? Did I even care?
Following the announcement of my divorce, I felt the eyes of the world on me. I felt the eyes of friends and family. The eyes of acquaintances I barely knew. All wondering what went wrong. Making up narratives. Crafting backstories and feeding imaginations.
The final words of the judge for my divorce felt like the eulogy to a family death. Parting thoughts for what no longer existed. What no longer would return. The end of a relationship very much mirrors the loss of a close family member. The tears. The frozen chest and empty heart. With a death most will offer condolences and move on. Yet with divorce, a blanket apology is offered, often covering suspicions and judgments.
Many relationships stay the same. But others didn’t. Others, despite having no tangible connection with the divorce itself, fundamentally changed at the core and even broke apart entirely.
For better or worse, relationship death isn’t isolated. It’s accompanied by the death of other connections.
Family
For the longest time, I didn’t want to communicate with family. I didn’t want to go out and spend time with them. I didn’t want to leave my home and feel the sorrow of their eyes. I didn’t want to hear the apologies. I wanted to avoid the funeral-like responses that would continually bubble up. And yet, if I didn’t respond on occasion, if I didn’t answer the phone or send a response text, people (cough *mom* cough) would put me on suicide watch or something. That basically forced me to choose between suicide watch family members and always reminding me of my failed marriage family members.
Not great.
Perhaps your experience is different. But in the end, whether family realized what they were doing was detrimental or not, they do it out of caring for you and, in the end, they are there for you. In some instances, failed marriages can bring you closer together with your family. They might share stories of their own failures with you that simply had no place in other conversations. My father had already died at the point of my own relationship flatline, but my mother opened up and told me things I don’t know if she’d talked about in decades.
So while family may act differently, it’s because they may not know how to react (especially if divorce isn’t something that’s common in your extended family). And, in the end, your family might be tighter knit due to the experience.
Family-In-Law
My former mother-in-law emailed the man my wife cheated with. Perhaps I’ll share that in a bit of future writing. But she did so out of love for me. Out of wanting to defend me. She never had a son, so in many ways, I became the son she didn’t have.
And then things changed. We went from being close to being as distant as two points on an infinite line can possibly be. I have my guesses as to why this happened, but, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Because, in the end, my former mother-in-law was never going to forever side with me. Once divorce became inevitable it instantly put an expiration date on every single “family-in-law” relationship I had.
That can be a hard pill to swallow. Heck, in some instances it’s not even something you swallow. It becomes a hard suppository to take. Ultimately it doesn’t matter who caused the divorce (I know I didn’t want to admit it at the time, but both sides usually have a hand in it, regardless of who made the final push), because family will side with family.
It’s what family is there for.
You have your family, they have theirs. It can be heartbreaking, but sooner or later, chances are every single one of those relationships will crumble away. One or two might linger around, although it’s up to you to decide if this is healthy or not. The last thing you want to do is maintain a relationship with a family-in-law member because you’re hoping it will help you eventually rekindle the failed relationship. That’s not healthy, and you need to let it go.
Sometimes losing these adopted family members can be harder than the divorce itself.
People From Church
I grew up in the church. My father was a pastor, so there really wasn’t any question about whether I’d be attending every week or not. Mandatory Sunday attendance was more strictly enforced than the school week.
The reason for this was two-fold. First, my mother wanted me there. Not that my father didn’t, but if something came up that happened to land on a Sunday, he understood if I couldn’t go. Not the case with my mother. And second, it came down to what the church congregation would think of the minister’s son not being there. What kind of example would I be if I wasn’t there? People would talk. They’d whisper. They’d make up their stories and their reasons.
So I had to be there because of what others might think and how they’d view my father.
So when news of my divorce came out, well, things became interesting.
Perhaps interesting isn’t the right word.
Many of these people had known me before I knew myself. They watched me grow up, so they felt a special connection with me. Some tried to contact me. They tried to step into my father’s absence and give me fatherly advice. I’m sure they meant well, but I didn’t want it. I didn’t need suggestions from people out of their element.
Others acted the way my family did, wanting what was best but also being a little too persistent with asking how I was doing, all with sorrow-filled puppy eyes afraid that speaking too loudly to me would frighten me away. Again, they meant well, so I can’t really complain.
And then there’s the third category. The shunning category. Following the divorce I had a number of people unfriend me on Facebook. They were her family members and church members. One guy who accompanied me on a first-grade field trip, a guy who had been a close friend of my father for decades, dropped me. The wife of a friend deleted me just as quickly. Others followed.
Funny how love turns to shun at a moment's notice. All by people who didn’t understand. Maybe they didn’t want to.
Hopefully, this kind of thing doesn’t happen to you. It didn’t bother me that much. Ideally, if it does happen it doesn’t bother you either. If people are going to step over you as you lay there, holding your bleeding heart, they are no use to you, so let them keep walking.
Your Friends
When discovery turned into reality and the realization of a cheating spouse and a dead relationship only began to percolate in my simmering brain, it was my friends that picked me up. I had run away from home. Run away from our house when everything became clear and she told me everything. I didn’t want to stay. I couldn’t stay. So I just ran. Ran away. From my thoughts and the present and a crumbled future and the pain. But I couldn’t run forever. My friends picked me up from wherever I stopped.
I don’t remember where that was now.
But I remember the car ride.
They didn’t know how to handle the news. They didn’t know what to say. They didn’t force it. Just asked what I wanted to do. Where I wanted to go. Whatever their plans were for the day no longer mattered.
Good friends. Best friends. They are the ones that somehow know what you need, even when you do. They are the ones that pull you out of the basement and force you to hang out with them after weeks of isolation. Because they know it’s better to be with friends than to wallow in a glass of whisky and poisoned dreams.
While everyone else might treat you differently, look at you strangely, block you on Facebook or delete you on Instagram, it’s your friends that will always be there. They were there for you before the relationship, and they will be there after.
The two friends that picked me up that day, I’ve known one since I was six. The other nine. We don’t always know what to say and emotions aren’t always on full display. But we’re always there for each other.
Your friends will do the same.
So while it’s easy to focus on what changes with a failed relationship, instead focus on what remains. Because however hard of a time you’re having, your friends will be there by your side to pick you up. Even if it’s after running away from home.