Best Friend has ended her marriage after 7 MONTHS!!

[mum2toby]

I know this isn't to do with being a parent, but it's really starting to get to me.

My best friend of 10 years married another friend last summer. Her dh is friends with my dp so we socialised quite a lot together (when we got the chance to!!).

I always thought she was getting married for the wedding rather than the marriage and her parents spent a FORTUNE on it and it went ahead. I couldn't say that to her though and I hoped I was wrong. Her DH was a bit of a bad boy when they met (brawling etc), but he turned his life around for her, moved away from his family, sold his car to put her through Teaching school. And now she's decided she doesn't want him anymore and has told him to leave!!! She has not tried, she has just given up at the first sign of a problem, it's driving me mental. There are no children involved.

I am finding it VERY hard to be a shoulder for her to cry on as I can't believe that she is particularly hurt by all this. Her DH is devastated and can't understand what he's done wrong and I have to agree with him. I'm biting my tongue everytime she phones to talk about it. She had her doubts 6 mths BEFORE the wedding, but said she didn't want to let people down!!

I'm so angry with her and I don't know what to say! I don't think she has any idea of how much she has hurt her dh.

HELP!!??

I am really sorry you are stuck in the middle. We are in a similar situation. Our good friends (and DD's god-parents) decided to split up last autumn after 3 years of marriage (although they had been living together for a while before hand). The man decided he no longer loved his wife, and that they were nothing more than friends anymore. This time though there is a baby involved - an 18 month old little boy. The man has now moved out of the family home.

We still are never sure what to say as both have different sides, and they are both supposed to be our friends. We are just around for both of them whenever possible, although we have tried to reduce this amount of time recently, as it was getting to be every weekend!

The thing that angered me and Dh was that they had decided to split before Dd's baptism, and didn't tell us. Even though we had told them that we wanted them as they were a solid married couple, with a new family - like ourselves. I doubt we would have changed our minds but I think they could have said something. Selfish of us I know really.

Perhaps she never really loved him. Many people get caught up in the wedding, rather than the marriage scenario. At least there's no children involved. It's easier to understand couple splits when there's an obvious reason, like adultery, violence, constant rows, etc etc... But when someone simply doesn't love the other person, no amount of doing the right thing can help... Unfortunately, as I have discovered myself the only thing you can do as her friend is to be there when she needs you. Don't try and fix things, or offer advice, just be there for her. To have been swept along with events thinking they were right and then discovering she has made a horrendous mistake probably is hurting her alot. Don't be too hard on her - we all get sad at the loss of our "couple" friends, but we can still be friends with them as individuals too.

To put my comments into perspective, a couple friend of ours divorced recently, and we still don't know the "real" reasons. They still love each other oddly enough. We have been excellent friends as couples for over 12 years and have holidayed together and everything. We were gutted when they split and felt angry at them for spoiling all the future plans we had made with them in mind. The truth is that noone outside a relationship will ever really know what happens within it.

mum2toby

I also left my first husband after just 6 months of marriage and I think that a lot of my friends, and certainly my family, had much more sympathy for my husband than for me. I could understand why they felt like that as he didn't want me to leave and didn't think that we had any problems. And really, WE didn't have any problems, only I had the problem and that was that I didn't love him and didn't want to spend the rest of my life with him.
I don't know your friend obviously and maybe you are right to be feeling the way you do about her. I can only speak from my experience. Although looking back I knew that I shouldn't have married him, I also knew that staying in the marriage would be only delaying the inevitable and probably making it harder when the split eventually came. Although I was happier once I had made my decision and come out and told my husband and our family, the next few months were very hard because I had to face all the 'I told you so' comments and the 'oh poor poor man' comments and I agreed with everything that people were saying. It was my fault. I was wrong to have married him. I had hurt him, and my family, so very much. But, to have stayed in the marriage so as to not hurt those people would have been wrong.

You are probably completely correct to not have as much sympathy for your friend as you do for her husband as it was her decision. But perhaps my comments might give you a different angle to use.

About 12 years ago I knew someone who told her husband she wanted a divorce half way through their honeymoon! Her husband was in the army and had been posted to Germany a year before the wedding, so she hadn't seen much of him in that time, then met a man on her hen night (!!) who did all he could to persuade her to call the wedding off. She tried to talk to her parents about it, but they wouldn't listen, telling her everyone has last minute nerves. So she went through with the wedding.

A lot of people wouldn't talk to her after the event (including me, I'm ashamed to say). Thinking back, she must have gone through hell.

She eventually married the man she'd met on her hen night, and her ex-husband has also re-married. It occurs to me that she might be a mumsnetter and reading this now, in which case I apologise that we behaved like that, at a time when she must have been so torn and needed friends to talk to.

Thanks folks. I know you are all right. It's just that she kinda has a habit of dating men with serious problems (alcoholism etc), making them change until it suits her, then getting bored when they are not the same as when she met them!!!

It's awful to say this about my best friend, but she is an attention seeker. I just hope this wasn't another way of getting attention coz her dh is more devastated than anyone I've encountered during a break-up.