How Should You Act When a Befriended Couple Is Breaking Up?
You’ve done a lot together. You and your partner went on vacation with the other couple and had parties together. Now they have separated. How do you deal with that?
When a partnership breaks up, it is usually hard for the people involved. Each of them has to reorganize their lives and come to terms with the fact that the once-great love has disappeared.
In a situation like this, everyone needs friends. Nothing is worse than when in addition to your partner, half of your old friends suddenly disappear.
People tend to take sides for one side or the other when there is a conflict. In the event of a break-up, a couple’s circle of friends often splits into those who stand by the man and those who support the woman.
This division is all the more serious when the friends are themselves couples. The women tend to defend the other woman, while the men protect the man. In this way, the break-up of a couple sometimes leads to ugly arguments in other partnerships.
You should never let it come to that. When couples separate in your circle of friends, it has nothing to do with you. You can never judge what the real reason was for the partnership to fail, and you should not try to do so.
A break-up, just like a relationship, is a very intimate matter that only concerns the two partners involved. There is no reason to take sides.
If there is a separation, both of them will still be the people you have been friends with for years. Your relationship with them has not changed in the slightest.
You and your partner must understand that you are not judges who have to evaluate other people’s partnerships. If you were friends with both of them, there is no reason to change that just because they are now going separate ways.
The man needs his old friends just as much as the woman does. It is not your job to decide whether his indifference or jealousy caused the relationship to break up. There are always two sides to a split. How could you determine who’s to blame from a distance?
So how do you best deal with a situation like that? What if you want to celebrate a birthday and can’t decide which one of them to invite?
The answer is simple: Invite both of them and tell them that you have invited their ex-partner as well. Now it is up to them to decide how to deal with it.
Either both decide to accept the invitation and deal with meeting the ex-partner, or one of them will cancel. You do not influence this and can leave the decision to the others. The main thing is that you signal to both of them that nothing has changed for you.
You should neither interfere nor e should you try to take away others’ personal decisions. Let them choose whether they want to meet you individually in the future, or whether they will tolerate their ex-partner being present when you meet.
Of course, there is nothing to prevent you from accepting invitations from both.
For example, my wife and I go to both the wife’s birthday party and the husband’s if a befriended couple has broken up.
If they have separated in a dispute, you can listen to both sides without making a judgment. Everyone will have their own version of the story, and no one will admit that they alone were to blame for the separation. You don’t have to agree with either of them, and you don’t have to tell them each other’s tales.
Your role in such a case is not that of a judge. Your purpose is still that of friends.
Perhaps it helps to ask yourself what you would wish for yourself if your partnership were to break up. Would you want your circle of friends to break up because of you? Would you want to lose half your friends?
When two people part, it is not your job to choose sides. Both friends still need you, especially in such a difficult time.
Be there for both of them. That’s what friends are for.
René Junge a published author writing on ILLUMINATION.
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