Your friends or mine?

“Friends don’t take sides in a divorce,” the marriage counsellor assured us, “you just imagine they do.” My experience suggests this is generally, but not universally, true. Some of our friends clearly took sides, at least in the sense that they stopped seeing or being friends with one or the other of us. But Julie has made a concerted effort to lobby friends to her side, to round them up like Nancy Pelosi might legislators on the eve of an important vote. Typically, Julie’s hypocrisy is in full view in this effort, even if not immediately evident to the friends she’s lobbied, including people she didn’t even really like before, but, if you’re primarily interested in votes, you don’t really need to like the people, I doubt Nancy Pelosi is really pals with half those old fogies sitting near her.

One women who took Julie’s side in an act of sisterly “solidarity” is someone Julie could never really stand: she and her husband used to visit us at our weekend house, and this then-friend felt that she was “off” on weekends since she stayed at home with the kids during the week, so never contributed to the cooking, cleaning, shopping, or housework that was going on busily around her while she read her book. This drove Julie up a wall, and she never stopped fuming about it during their entire visit (she also mocked the wife's underwear as it came out of the dryer, which she found oddly sexy for a devout Mennonite), but this seems to have been forgotten now, particularly since the husband is one of the handiest people you’ll ever meet and is always good for a minor home repair.

Other weekend guest friends, even closer, tried to stay at our summertime vacation spot in Maine, and Julie actively blacklisted them, asking the owners to tell these good friends that the camp had no vacancies should they call. These same friends often suggested renting a house together in Italy for a group vacation, and Julie said she would “kill me” if I ever agreed to that, finding the woman, an entrepreneur, too wrapped up in her business and too interested in talking about mine, and the husband, a banker, uninteresting. This hasn’t stopped Julie from making this couple, post-separation, into some of her most-often-seen friends, taking advantage of their full-time nanny for childcare and playdates, doing some freelance writing for the woman’s business (now suddenly very interesting!), and mooching untold meals (this generous couple is unwaveringly quick to pick up tabs when checks are dropped at a restaurant).

There are other examples, but mostly variations on these themes, people Julie didn’t like before but who are now convenient to have as friends, and the more she can count on her side of the aisle means the fewer on mine. Some of these “defections” sting a bit and many of these people I miss (and although I see most of them, there is always the unspoken third piece of the triangle lurking in the background), particularly since I know how Julie really felt about many of them before we separated, but even I won’t blow her cover: I assume everybody is old enough to decide who they want to spend time with, and, yes, whose side they want to take, even if it’s not said so directly.