You can stay friends with your ex- spouse

May 27, 2004

WHEN Anne speaks of Brian she makes him sound like great husband material. ‘I have always laughed at his jokes. Even if I hear the same joke 20 times I will still laugh every time, he is such an entertaining character.’ But Anne is not married to Brian.

WHEN Anne speaks of Brian she makes him sound like great husband material. ‘I have always laughed at his jokes. Even if I hear the same joke 20 times I will still laugh every time, he is such an entertaining character.’ But Anne is not married to Brian. He is her ex-husband: they divorced over 30 years ago. They are still good friends, and Anne even gets on with Brian’s new wife. ‘I am good mates with her. I like her very much and I think she likes me - we get on well.’
And indeed, why should a basic incompatibility as man and wife get in the way of a good friendship? ‘There are many parts of our relationship that worked very well,’ says Anne Hooper, 57, a best selling author on love, sex and marriage, and now the long-term partner of therapist Phillip Hodson. ‘Brian and I were genuinely fond of each other and I had a lot of affection left over at the end.’
You are not really supposed to stay good friends with someone if you are divorcing them. If they’re so great, then why aren’t you staying with them? The modern way, however, is a very grown-up one.
At Demi Moore’s wedding to Ashton Kutcher next month Bruce Willis, Demi’s husband of 11 years (they split in 1998), is to be the best man. The three of them regularly go on family outings with Bruce and Demi’s children, Rumer, 15, Scout, 12, and Tallulah, 10. Willis has even defended the 15- year age gap between Moore and Kutcher: “We are all 25 in our heart,” he says generously. “He is a pretty cool guy. I love Demi. We are still great friends. I wish her nothing but the best and happiness, whatever form that takes.”
Patsy Kensit also spoke recently of her warm feelings towards ex- partners, saying it doesn’t bother her to look back on the famous Vanity Fair cover of her and Liam Gallagher in bed together: “I am lucky that I have a fantastic relationship with both the fathers of my children.” (She was married to Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr for four years and Gallagher for three.)
Other celebrities with warm post-marriage sentiments often have a professional link - a boon for civility. British Hairdresser Nicky Clarke and wife Lesley continue to run their emporium as a family business following their split eight years ago. Jimmy Mulville and Denise O’Donoghue, co-founders of TV production company Talkback in London, maintained a multi-million pound business partnership despite their divorce: “I think it is one of our proudest achievements,” Mulville has said.
Chef Rick Stein and his wife Jill, a designer, worked together on his latest Padstow, south-west England, restaurant, Stein’s Fish & Chips, despite their marriage of almost 30 years breaking up in 2001. He recently said: “We both thought, right, we are not budging on the business after all these years and hard work. It is a family business - we have worked with some of the staff for years. I thought: I am not buggering their lives up just because we are not seeing eye to eye.”
Joanne, 34, a travel publicist based in London, is the best of friends with her ex-husband and worked with him during their break-up. She invited him to her wedding five years after their split.
She finds the idea odd that you can write someone out of your life once a relationship finishes. “I’m still friendly with most of my old boyfriends. If you’ve been in love with someone and you’ve given them all those feelings, how can you not be close friends with them? My mother didn’t speak to my father for years when they split up, and it could just be that I always wanted the opposite to happen in my life.”
Some people are just not meant to be married to each other, even though they get on, says psychotherapist Christine Webber, author of How to Mend a Broken Heart (Help Yourself). Too many people get married just for the sake of it: “I see a lot of people in my practice, men and women in their 30s, who really want to get married. They have decided it is the right time: the next person they meet, they end up focusing all those hopes and dreams on them.
“Some marriages are just not right. At least half the marriages that go wrong were never right in the first place. If there were more hoops you had to jump through beforehand, a lot of people would not get married to each other in the first place,” Webber says.
Elena, 30, a store manager from Manchester who split from her husband, Steve, after a three-year-marriage in their early twenties, agrees: “We are very different people and although I really loved him, in the end I couldn’t put up with the way he lives, with the way he is at home. As a husband he turned out to be a very unreliable person - no sense of responsibility. He got depressed about his work but wouldn’t talk about it - he was miserable the whole time. I couldn’t watch somebody do that to themselves - I wanted a more stable life.”
As soon as she left, their relationship as friends changed for the better. “There are so many things I like about him as a person which attracted me to him in the first place. He now gets on well with my husband-to-be and we spend a lot of time together. As soon as I stopped being his wife he started behaving in a much better way towards me. One of the problems in our marriage was that he never wanted to tell me much about himself because he didn’t want to burden me. Now we talk on the phone the whole time about stuff and try to help each other out. My fiance is a bit jealous of my past with Steve but he knows I can’t live with Steve, and that is why I have moved on.”
Once the obstacles of the relationship are removed, some people find they can remember why they liked each other in the first place. Anne Hooper says it is the everyday things that finish off a marriage - once they are out of the way, there is nothing to stop you from being civil to one another.
“It was an incompatibility to do with how to live together - it wasn’t about how much we entertained each other. We developed different interests, had arguments, had different ideas on how to run our finances. But because of our children we overcame that, shared their upbringing and spent an enormous amount of time together, even though that was quite strange.”
Children are a major factor: for Anne Hooper and her husband they were the incentive to finding an amicable way (their two boys are now grown up and she has another child with Hodson). But children can also be as divisive as money: “It is better if the children have left home, and the couple have just stopped loving each other,” says Simone Katzenberg, a London-based divorce lawyer and author of I Want a Divorce? (Kyle Cathie).
Divorce lawyers agree that there is an average time for a split to become amicable - around three years after the initial decision to separate. The best odds for a future happy friendship is when there is a two-year separation with consent. Usually within six to nine months after this, says Katzenberg, “they have come to terms with what is happening, they know they are better apart than together.”
You can tell when a divorcing couple walks into the room if they are likely to remain friends, says family law specialist Susan Clark from Haywards Heath in Sussex, southern England: “When you can see they have obviously thought about the reasons for the breakdown, you know it will be an easy case, especially if they have really thought about the money, and there are no restrictions on time spent with the children.
Not everyone is convinced by this display of divorced happily- ever-after, however. Tricia Lockhart divorced 10 years ago and has found it impossible to maintain a relationship with her ex-husband. She thinks it is extremely difficult to re-establish a friendship: “I have seen it work but it is sometimes a bit fragile. You have got boundaries, and if you go past them it shatters.”
She blames the lawyers. “I dislike the legal process because generally you have to have grounds for divorce, and so it is almost as if the legal parties have to whip you up into a frenzy to find something wrong with each other.” But if you can get past this and remain on speaking terms, you have a chance of rekindling that elusive Bruce and Demi spark of friendship.
Anne Hooper remembers it took her four years until she really felt friends with her ex: “Divorce is awful, painful, full of recriminations - it is vengeful. But I fell over backwards to keep a dialogue going. Even though we did get angry with one another, as long as you keep talking and are able to go back and talk even when the other person is furious, you can actually have a relationship.”

Guardian

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