Could It Happen to Us?

It's a sad given of modern love: People divorce -- and lots of them. Nearly one of every two married couples parts ways. Indeed, many of us looked on as our own parents' marriages dissolved into bitterness, anger, tension, and (after Mom entered the workforce) mushy Crock-Pot dinners. Even so, when a set of your own friends announces their impending split, it can seem sudden and shocking. "Nobody really thinks divorce is that close to home," says Jane Greer, Ph.D., a marriage and family therapist in New York City and author of How Could You Do This to Me? "Even when married friends behave abrasively or combatively, people assume that's just their way of getting along and working out their differences, until it almost becomes normal." Divorce is especially unnerving, though, when it happens to a couple that seemed genuinely happy together. "To see a friend who you thought had a solid marriage -- to see that come apart, you can get frightened and think, If they can't make it, what are the odds for us?" says Greer.

That's how Diana, 38, of El Paso, TX, felt when her cousin's 22-year marriage came to an end after she learned her husband had been having an affair. "My husband and I were in complete shock," says Diana, who's been married 12 years. "He was the most devoted father and husband. He provided well for them financially, but he was very involved at home, too. When they had parties, he set everything up and he did all the cooking. He coaches his son's baseball team. He always called my cousin during the day from work to see if she needed anything. They argued, but no more than anybody else we knew. After he told her he was having an affair, they tried to work things out -- twice. But in the end he's left her for this other woman, who has three kids of her own. My husband and I talk about their divorce -- a lot," Diana continues. "It made us both nervous."

When a friend's breakup is precipitated by infidelity (his or hers, it doesn't matter), your anxieties can quickly flare into suspicion and even paranoia about your own partner -- and that particularly long time he took at the Home Depot last Saturday afternoon. You don't necessarily suspect your guy of having an affair, but you do suddenly realize how easily he could if he were so inclined: It's not just desperate housewives who get betrayed and dumped -- it happens to women just like you.

But there's an upside to all this bystander anxiety: Divorce is a little less scary to talk about in the context of someone else's situation. "Sometimes it's actually easier for your husband to talk about issues in the abstract than directly, because there's less performance anxiety," says Scott Haltzman, M.D., author of The Secrets of Happily Married Men. "There's less concern that he's going to get it 'right' if he talks about another couple." And, though it might seem counterintuitive, talking about divorce -- how it happens, how it might happen to you, and how to prevent it -- is one of the best ways to avoid it.

This is all the more true when someone you care about has cheated or been cheated on: Their experience can be the sensible opening for a conversation that reestablishes the rules of your own marriage. "Whenever I say to Ned, 'Can you believe he did that?' it's really just my way of saying, 'You can never do that to me -- these are my values, and these are my fears,'" says Amy, 37, a mother of one in Pittsburgh. These difficult, even painful, conversations can be a blessing, says Tina Tessina, a psychotherapist and author of How to Be a Couple and Still Be Free. "It's not an entirely bad thing to internalize some of someone else's divorce -- you shouldn't jump to conclusions that divorce is never going to happen to you," she notes. "If you have been taking each other for granted, it might motivate you both to pay a little more attention."

How Strong Is Our Marriage?

Of course, getting your guy to pay attention to the same questions and worries that plague you is another matter. If you've ever told your husband a friend's getting divorced, you already know that men don't always greet the news with the compassion we might expect. "Men are very detail-oriented. He's not so concerned with, 'Wow, your friend must have been really hurt by that,'" says Haltzman. "He's thinking, I need more pieces to the puzzle here. He may become analytical: 'Was her husband acting that way for a reason? Maybe you don't know the whole story.'"

Naturally, this ticks us off -- but it shouldn't, says Haltzman. "It's just your husband's way of making sense of things, his way of understanding cause and effect." And that's actually good news for you as a wife. "You want him to figure out what it is wives are looking for, what things you think are important when you hear other women are divorcing," says Haltzman. "Instead of getting upset, you can use it as an opportunity to educate him."

Besides, talking to your husband about your relationship might be a welcome switch from slicing and dicing it with your girlfriends. With them egging you on, it's all too easy to fall into the habit of only discussing the bad patches of your marriage (the same way people are more apt to go on and on about miserable, rainy weather and generally let crystal-clear, low-humidity days pass without comment). And while you may get reassurance from your friends that being annoyed with your husband and occasionally arguing with him are just part of being married, you may also forget that these are issues you need to discuss -- with your spouse. "Some friendships are bonded around life's problems," says Pamela Berger, a therapist in private practice in Brooklyn. "But connecting around complaints about your husband makes it easier not to truly confront the problems in marriage."

What's worse, when a friend who's vented the same way you did (or seemed to, anyway) decides she's had enough, you may start to wonder if your grievances are divorce-worthy, too. Thus commences the microscopic reevaluation of every facet of your marriage -- a research project your soon-to-be-single friend is sure to join in on. "I went out with my newly divorced friend for a drink one night, and she told me, 'Wow, it sounds like yours isn't going to last, either,'" says Jessica, 33, a mother of two in northern New Jersey. This harsh comment made her incredibly angry. "But it also got me to make a concerted effort to invest time in making the bad things in my marriage better," she says.

Instead of looking at your marriage through the gloomy lens of your friend's heartbreak, you may need to see the friendship in a new light. "If you're so close and intimate with a best friend, and your paths have been so similar -- you get married around the same time, you have a kid around the same time -- it's hard at the point where your paths diverge not to think that it will happen to you, since you had so much in common," says Amy. "But then you're forced to see that your friendship is changing rather than that your marriage will fail in the same way." Amy, like Jessica, figured out that the best thing for her friendship and her marriage was to stop the pattern of garden-variety whining to her pal about her husband. "I didn't want her to feel like I was on the same page with her, because I was not," says Amy. "I think I just made a decision not to stir my own pot."

If you and your husband were especially close to the divorcing couple, you may both be feeling something that approximates mourning -- not just for the end of their marriage, but also for the memories you expected you'd continue to make together. "If you have very close friends who are getting divorced, it can feel like you're losing part of your family," says Michele Weiner-Davis, a couples therapist who has authored several books about preventing divorce, including Divorce Busting. In an effort to process the loss, you may find yourselves endlessly analyzing what happened, comparing he-said, she-said notes that aren't likely to yield helpful truths. "Of course, what your girlfriend is going to tell you about why the marriage fell apart is going to be very different from what the husband is going to say," says Weiner-Davis. "What you really learn is from observation. If you can stand back a bit -- without taking sides -- and think, What did each partner do to contribute to the downfall of their relationship?, you might be able to learn something.

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