When You Need Friends That “Get You”

Where does a girl go for post-divorce advice?

It's hard for me to take advice from someone I don’t know. That doesn’t keep me from googling things and reading blog posts and tips about how to do x, y, or z, or seeking out people who I believe might have valuable pointers to share. 

Unless I have some sense of who you are and what your values are in life, I don’t trust that where you’ve been in your life can be a credible road map for helping me make my way through my life. 

This added a new struggle into my life when I first divorced, as I didn’t know many divorced women to whom I could turn. My still-married friends have been a lifeline of encouragement, but because they have not walked in my shoes, most of them have not been able to offer much in the way of helpful advice or empowering post-divorce success stories. They haven’t been where I am, and may never have to go where I am going. 

There is a different quiet in the house when you are now sharing custody and your kids are with their dad. A quiet that can be oppressive and isolating and isn’t understood by still-married friends. There is a whole new sort of emptiness that emerges once a spouse moves out that can be hard to understand, much less explain to others who haven’t experienced it for themselves. There is an added weight of being responsible for every part of your life, with no one to share things like bill paying or the responsibilities that come with home ownership. 

Still-married friends haven’t had to decide if and when to dive into online dating. They can’t begin to imagine the time involved in setting up a dating profile and sorting through those of potential dates. They can’t help me work through my own body insecurities that rise up when I try to grasp what relationships (and sex!) might be like at this age. 

Dating mid-life involves a whole host of issues that simply were not present or even imaginable in those single days decades ago, and what applied back then isn’t necessarily helpful to me at this new stage of life. 

That’s where some of the beauty comes from in what we are building here at GoodBetterNext. 

We are a community of divorced women inviting other divorced women to join us for conscious conversations about all that we are encountering within our lives. We build trust within our small group discussions by sharing our stories, which has multiple benefits. Sharing our experiences, our perspectives, our fears, and even our pain meets the very human need to feel connected to others and to be heard. Exchanging ideas that have helped us solve our own problems and kept us afloat during rough waters helps each of us learn, grow, heal, and transform. In this community, you can trust that someone has surely been where you are and has their own story of survival and the steps they took to move forward to a better place. 

Armed with some new ideas and in the company of women who are on a similar path, you can embark on a more rewarding journey that can take you from Good to Better…and then on to whatever you decide should come Next. It is a uniquely rewarding community, far greater than the sum of its individual parts. New groups are forming now. Learn more about us and join our community on our “Get Involved” page.