Who gets the Toaster?

It’s no secret that I’m divorced. I’ve joined the other half of the population that didn’t end up in marital bliss. As a perfectionist, this probably should bother me, but I actually found the whole process to be quite liberating.

As a planner, I pretty much planned every detail of the disentanglement, but life is not like that list I wrote down on paper and surprises did pop up along the way. I was talking to a friend who has recently decided to join my side of the population, and the conversation veered toward the effects of divorce on other areas besides living standard. What people don’t talk about is that along with the divorce settlement of who gets the toaster, the community property settlement involves the splitting of friendships.

In the divorce everything gets split in half, and it seems as though friends hurry to choose which side of the great divide they’d like to end up on. I’m not complaining about my settlement of the few friends who I managed to negotiate, but I do question how people who you called your friends for years choose to pick sides.

In elementary school there were these groups of girls that if you were lucky enough to be invited to be one of them, you’d have the whole group as your instant BFF’s. Of course, that only lasted until you did something that the group’s leader didn’t like and then you lost the entire group as your friends. This is how it feels as you walk away from your old life.

The problem I have with this whole system is that my definition of a friend does not include someone who stops being friends with me because I do something they don’t like. In elementary school, those girls weren’t really friends. I’m sure they were quite successful in whatever career they had chosen to train for so young.

Maybe I expect too much, but if I call you my friend, I expect a little more than being dropped because I’m no longer the “her” in the his and her. I’m not saying that it isn’t difficult balancing two people who’ve decided they no longer can stand to be in the same room with each other. But a friend should mean a little more than that toaster.

It’s actually been quite a liberating experience for me to lose all those people who at one time treated me like a friend. The people left around me, the ones who have been there every step of the way, are the people I can truly call friends. All those others who chose so easily to kick me out of the group were only acquaintances. The same acquaintances who now don’t even bother to tell me hello in Wal-Mart as if it is dangerous to talk to the enemy on the other side of the divide. I will have numerous acquaintances that come and go throughout my life, but it’s always nice knowing who your real friends are and who only pretended to be.

Agree or disagree with me? Voice your opinions under comments.