Ihave a friend whose father is on his fifth marriage. All of the unions except the last, which he is still in (for the moment), ended in divorce. My friend's mother, who was Mrs. OrigiWife, has gone to all of her ex's subsequent remarriages. "She's very fond of him," my friend says.
But the intimacy between his parents is darkly comic. "My mother always introduces herself to the new bride," he explains. "But it's not just about being friendly to the new stepmother. She wonders if the poor girl has any idea what she's getting herself into. It's almost like a form of entertainment. She's handing over the baton."
A bond may exist between former spouses, but often it's dysfunctional. "The flipside of love is not hate. It is anger," says Linda Chodos, a social worker who specializes in high-conflict divorce.
Tension with an ex is just another way of saying, "I'm not over you." It's an expression of emotional obsession, of heated connection. Like sex between you used to be. If you didn't care about your former spouse, you wouldn't bother to engage.
But is it possible for ex-partners to really bury the hatchet? Can hostility shift completely to respect?
Cate Cochran's new book, Reconcilable Differences: Marriages End. Families Don't., shows that many people who divorce go to extraordinary lengths to recalibrate their relationships. The effort is to create security for their children.
But still, it requires a rare equanimity from both sides.
The book is a lesson in mature adulthood.
Imagine for a moment that your wife comes home after 13 years of marriage and tells you that she is in love with another woman.
Swell. So what do you do? If you are Phil, whose family story is included in the book, you volunteer to move to the basement. There's a bedroom and a bathroom down there. You do it because you want to stay connected to your three children, a motive that overrides any sense of rejection by your wife - even when her new lover moves in a few months later.
She is upstairs sleeping with your former wife on the second floor. The children, aged 6, 9 and 11, are confused and angry, but your presence in the house comforts them. Lots of people think it's odd. Even your mom wonders if there's some kinky threesome going on.
The arrangement lasts for two years. A big blow-up happens, and you decide to move into a little house that the family had purchased that is kitty-corner to the big house. Eventually, you fall in love with another woman and remarry. Your ex-wife weds her lesbian lover. And for 15 years, the arrangement of living close by - in each
other's pockets, really - works, not always easily, but with generous emotional accommodation.
Or consider Allison and Andrew, who had just had their first baby. When Allison was six months postpartum, her husband announced that he was unhappy. Soon it was discovered that another woman was involved.
But with stunning forgiveness, they worked out an almost side-by-side living arrangement so they could be equally involved as parents.
The idea for the Reconcilable Differences started with Ms. Cochran's separation from her husband, Joe, after nearly 20 years together and two
children.
The reason for their breakup was a common one - a personality conflict that had become untenable. Still, they wanted to figure out a way to separate "without nuking the entire family," she writes. A therapist worked with both of them. One sage piece of advice was "to deal with the whole
person I had loved, not the two-dimensional man I'd created in my anger."
