When a man gets divorced, it’s almost inevitable that he will lose friends. Some friends will side with his ex-wife, while others will simply back away from both parties. Divorce is a seismic shift, not just for the couple but for the social circles around them. In my own divorce, I experienced this firsthand.
My closest marital friend group consisted of three couples, including my own. We met more than a decade ago at our church on the East Coast and bonded through dinners and other events together. Then, over the course of five years, we all moved to Colorado and enjoyed even more shared experiences here. As soon as my divorce journey began, however, they cut me off entirely, and I haven’t heard from any of them since.
Something similar could happen to you for a variety of reasons. Your friends may have internalized the cultural message that divorce is always a bad thing, even though they have no idea what was happening in your marriage. Or maybe they see divorce as a contagion, fearing that hanging out with divorced people could destabilize their own relationships. And there’s some truth to this concern—research shows that having friends who divorce increases a couple’s own likelihood of divorce by 75%, and even friends-of-friends divorcing raises the risk by 33%.
Here’s what you need to remember as your social community shrinks or shifts:
- It’s not about you. Friends’ reactions say more about their fears and assumptions than they do about you. Don’t take it personally. The fact that some of your friends have abandoned you doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong.
- Some of your friends will step up. Some friends who weren’t very close before might show up in unexpected ways. When I reached out to one such friend as my divorce started, he offered up his guest room and invited me to a Kansas concert he had tickets to the following weekend.
- You will lose friends, but you’ll gain new ones. Also as my divorce started, I shared the news with a men’s group I attend at a local church. That very day, a man in the group tracked me down through my professional website and scheduled a meeting with me that afternoon.
- Other divorced men are your gold mine. Both of the friends I just mentioned were also divorced. They understood what I was going through. As you build your social network, look for healthy men who have been through divorce, even if they’re now remarried, because they are more likely to have the understanding and compassion to support you.
- Now you know who’s truly there for you. You may have always wondered which of your friends would be there for you through thick and thin. Now you know. Be grateful for the clarity and choose to invest in relationships that uplift and support you in the years to come.