I don’t want to be friends with my ex.
Not once in the year following Chris moving out of our home did it cross my mind that Chris and I would someday be friends. I don’t even know if what we’d call our relationship type is even “friends” now. Co-parenting is really its own thing.
Since we cooked up Redefining Family and the Integrated Divorce Method, I have been concerned people will assume Chris and I are promoting some Kumbaya vision that divorcing parents should all be best friends someday.
How close former spouses eventually become is not a measure of a successful divorce. You’d think it would be as simple as “friends equals good, strangers equals bad, enemies equals really bad” – but not so. Being at odds and even feeling like strangers for a time is actually important.
It might feel counterintuitive, but wanting closeness too early in the process can be a real setback. Here’s why. Divorce is a stripping away. Identities fall apart. Assumptions we’ve held or invisible rules we thought would keep us safe personally and socially are called into question. I like the butterfly metaphor less for the beauty of the butterfly and more for the real mess inside that cocoon.
What’s more, it’s rare that both spouses are at the same place in the grief cycle that divorce triggers. I know when our divorce process began, Chris was angry and confused. I was resentful and resigned. We were both devastated.
People need space to rebuild themselves after divorce. Actual, lived separation. Time to form new habits, independent skills, and figure out who they are outside of their marriage. A true cleaving also allows for a relationship reset where co-parenting dynamics can be new and not simply mirror the marriage.
It’s hard work. When given what feels like an easy way out, we tend to take it. Maintaining intimacy with long talks, engaging conflict patterns, and physical closeness make it easy to create a crutch that takes on the label of “conscious uncoupling” or “respectful co-parenting” when it’s really a kind of bypass.
And the evidence of that shows itself the second someone wants to move away from the quasi-married dynamic by, for example, starting to date seriously or wanting a vote on medical treatment when they would have been silent during the marriage. Suddenly it becomes clear that the true separation and rebuild hasn’t actually happened yet.
A respectful co-parenting relationship takes time. It has to be learned. It has to be earned. And it will look different for every pair of co-parents. Our approach isn’t about becoming friends. It’s about reducing immediate damage in the divorce process. Damage to ourselves, our kids, and our future options as co-parents. It’s about starting to drop coins into the co-parenting trust bank.
Coins look like: showing up on time, saying please and thank you, not speaking badly about the other parent to the kids. Pennies, really. They may feel small, but the magic of these pennies is that when you do snap or behave poorly – that nickel or dime-sized misstep doesn’t put you in the red or threaten your progress the way it might if that bank were empty.
The way you start a divorce often sets the tone for everything that follows. When a divorce begins in litigation and unchecked vitriol, even small disagreements years later tend to end up in court. When it begins with structure and restraint, something different happens. Five years down the line, it can mean asking to swap a week of spring break and hearing, “yeah, sure,” and if you’re lucky, “thanks for taking them skiing, that’ll be really nice for them” instead of “yeah, right” or a lecture.
So, are Chris and I friends? Have we reached some ideal end state? The truth is, what we are requires boundary management and sometimes uncomfortable conversations. Sometimes we’re colleagues, sometimes we’re family, sometimes we share an inside joke or a treasured memory, and sometimes flashes of marital conflict creep back in and need to be managed. What we have is an alliance and a fluctuating, but always in the green co-parenting bank account.
