The Challenges of Divorce

Take our Relationship Satisfaction Test

Find a therapist to heal from a divorce

Friendship after divorce isn't forced but chosen and can take various forms.

True progress can look like sharing thoughts without conflict.

The ultimate freedom is choosing what relationship comes next after divorce.

Whatever happened to Vicky and Glen, our irrelationship protagonists from the early days? We don’t know. They are, technically, fictional—composite characters we’ve been writing about since 2014, the patient-zero couple in our work on irrelationship. Their marriage ended. That much is on the record. After that, the trail goes cold because they were never real people, and the people they were composited from went their separate ways.

But we have time on our hands and an unhealthy attachment to our own creations. So we permit ourselves the fantasy. Somewhere, in one of those multiverse worlds the Hollywood physicists keep dangling, there is a Vicky and a Glen who got it right after they got it wrong. They are not bitter exes. They are not performing friendship for the kids. They did not reconcile. They did not go cold. They did something else, the something else that doesn’t have a tidy name, the one most couples in their position never find.

Here, in the twilight zone, they are at a chai café on the Lower East Side.

Vicky thinks the chai is decent. She spent time in Kerala in her 30s after the divorce and has firm views on cardamom-to-ginger ratios that she will share if asked and, increasingly, if not asked. Glen, who once would have either taken this very seriously or made it into a joke designed to land somewhere between........

© Psychology Today