Saturday, 02 April 2011

• When Your Couple Friends Divorce

  

  I have this friend, we'll call him Darren. He is the type of guy who only has female friends, perhaps because he is so aware of how awesome he is that other guys find him obnoxious or intimidating. Anyhow, Darren and I were friends for two years before he introduced me to his  girlfriend, Beth.

  Darren, Beth and I all became very close throughout the subsequent two years, and we formed a sort of quartet with another friend, Joanne. The four of us had family dinners three times a week and even went on spring break together to the Caribbean, where we had the kind of epic time you think only happens in movies.

  But after we graduated, our quartet fell apart when Beth and Darren broke up.

  Because Beth and I ended up traveling together after graduation, our friendship evolved into a best friendship while the one between Darren and I took the backseat. After six months of traveling, Beth and I both moved back to the city of our alma mater, where Darren was still living. Beth had taken the breakup really well while we were abroad - but now that we were all back in the same city, the drama began.

  They tried to be friends, and couldn't. And because I was friends with Darren first, I refused to stop being friends with him now, which Beth tried to be cool with. Perhaps this could have been predicted - but pretty soon shit started to fall apart between Beth and I. This is how it would go: she would get wasted, and she would attack me for various aspects of my friendship with Darren, and I would end up crying and feeling bullied by her.

  And Darren, while much more stable, also used our dinners together to talk about Beth - usually about how crazy she was and how he didn't want anything to do with her anymore and what should he do when she calls?

  I felt like a pawn in an endless game of emotional chess, a tool to be manipulated in order to achieve a certain effect on the other. It got to the point where I finally told them I couldn't discuss it with either of them anymore, which later had disastrous consequences for my friendship with Beth. 

  Have you ever been caught in the middle of a breakup? Did you side with one friend or try to keep them both? Do you think it's possible to keep both, or was I being naive?

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