Member- Rumplestiltskin
- 10 years ago
- Wedding: September 2010
Hi. My main circle of friends are the people I went to college with. We’re 5-6 years on from graduation, but despite jobs/distance we’ve all stayed pretty close. Two of these friends, who started dating in the first year of college and married the summer they graduated (6 years ago) now appear to be separating, but are refusing to even admit it. All of us want to offer help and support but this is very hard to do when people are refusing to admit there’s even a problem. It’s getting worse and worse, and I just don’t know what to do for the best, and hate to think of them going through this alone. (I’ve supported parents and siblings through divorce, and I know how awful it can be)
Basically, the couple in question moved countries 2 years ago for the husband’s job. It quickly became clear that the wife was very unhappy. I asked her about this, and she said it was the place and the job that were making her unhappy – she was only working part time, while his job was taking him away evenings and weekends. Another of our friends visited the couple while they were away, and it was clear they were having marital problems. She told that friend that yes, they were, and that they’d admitted they didn’t love one another anymore. That friend (rightly or wrongly) told me this after I had expressed concern over the wife’s mental state in their current situation. That job has now ended, and the husband has returned home to go back to college. The wife has started a new job on the other side of the world (around 5,000 miles from her husband).
I asked her directly about her plan to live thousands of miles from her husband, and she refused to answer, saying that she didn’t understand the question. She and her husband have been living separately for about 2 months now, and, although are still commenting on each other’s Facebook pages as though nothing’s happened, she’s posted photos in which she isn’t wearing her wedding ring.
Both of them are very high acheivers, with very strong characters, which I think is making it really hard to admit that there’s a problem. But I really don’t know how long I can go on pretending that everything’s normal. Worse, in an effort to hide things, the wife is getting really confrontational and angry, which is alienating her friends.
I don’t want to just abandon my friend when she’s obviously unhappy, but if she’s refusing to admit there’s a problem, then there’s only so many times I can try to get her to talk about it, and it feels really false to just pretend that I think everything’s normal. This is making me avoid contacting her.
What would you do in my position?
