Just a few weeks after Lee and Deborah Steelwright started dating, he surprised her with an introduction to a very special person in his life–his ex-wife.
Lee had remained close to his ex-wife, Carol, and invited her and her boyfriend to dinner with him and Deborah one night.
“I thought, ‘Wow, this is a friendly group,’ ” said Deborah, 49, a Towson, Md., art teacher who eventually married Lee in 1983. “I didn’t keep in touch with my ex-boyfriends. To me, when it was over, it was over.”
But it was different with Lee Steelwright and Carol Ratkoff, who have made it a priority to stay good friends since their seven-year marriage ended in 1977.
When it comes to relationships between former spouses, the models we see often are contentious, bitter and much like the one in the vicious divorce film “The War of the Roses.” However, Steelwright and Ratkoff are among the growing number of exes in America choosing to remain friendly after splitting up.
The phenomenon even has a trendy name, “divarriage,” as outlined in the new book “Generation Ex” (Bloomsbury, $24.95), which tells true tales of divorce. And family and marriage experts are advocating the merits of former spouses being friends.
“In every divorce, there’s always some bad feeling–otherwise you’d probably be staying together,” said Tony Jurich, professor of family studies and human services at Kansas State University and former president of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy. “But particularly when you have children, an amicable relationship with your former spouse becomes a necessity. If the two most important people on the face of the Earth to the child can’t stand each other, that’s a difficult situation to be in.”
And divorced couples, it seems, increasingly are realizing this. Sure, the high-profile divorces that have dominated headlines recently include the rough Tom Cruise-Nicole Kidman battle and the Rudy Giuliani-Donna Hanover split that’s been logged blow by blow in the New York tabloids. But there also have been many celebrity exes who have tried to remain friendly–or at least civil–from Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan to Demi Moore and Bruce Willis. Last year, rocker Rod Stewart had an interesting Christmas celebration when his two ex-wives and an ex-girlfriend converged at his Beverly Hills mansion with their children in tow. And then there’s Britain’s Prince Andrew, who still lives in the same house as his ex, Sarah Ferguson, even though they split five years ago.
“Meg and I still talk. Almost every day,” Dennis Quaid told W magazine recently. “Our relationship is good. We were together for 13 years, we have a child together. She knows me like nobody else.”
The trend extends to everyday people as well, said Karen Karbo, author of “Generation Ex,” who reported that about half of the 200 divorced people she interviewed for her book were friendly with their exes.
Karbo, who is based in Portland, Ore., defined divarriage in her book as “people who have done the paperwork, but still rely on each other as if they were married.” Karbo not only is divarried herself but is married to a man who is too.
Leaning on each other
“Pretty much without exception, if the couples had children, they were still involved in each other’s lives to a degree that was surprising,” said Karbo, who chats on the phone and occasionally lunches with her ex-husband, with whom she shares custody of an 8-year-old daughter.
“They lent each other money, they would pick each other up from the airport, they were involved in celebrating each other’s birthdays,” she added. “If there was a death in the family, even couples who hadn’t been involved in 10 or 15 years, the ex would sometimes hop in and resume the role of a spouse–if they hadn’t remarried.”
But friendly breakups don’t always involve children. When Julia Roberts recently broke up with Benjamin Bratt, she reportedly turned to her ex-husband Lyle Lovett for support. Mimi Rogers, whose three-year marriage to Tom Cruise ended in 1990, has remained friendly enough with her ex to speak in support of him in stories about his recent divorce troubles.
And there are people like Lee Steelwright and Carol Ratkoff, who have the same circle of close friends and see each other frequently at parties and dinners. In fact, Carol has become so close to her ex and his new wife that all three recently enrolled in a yoga class together. Carol and Deborah Steelwright also belong to a group of women who regularly go on weekend trips together.
“It really has been a good thing,” said Carol, 51, a nurse who lives with her second husband, David, and two children. “We’ve got lots of history. It’s been wonderful being able to maintain the same friendships that we’ve had. I would have felt very sad if that whole part of my life was gone.”
But Lee, Carol and their spouses sometimes have to deal with people who find their connections surprising. At a recent dinner, the Steelwrights and Ratkoffs found themselves chuckling over their history while introducing themselves to a newcomer to their circle of friends.
“We were like, `Let’s all go around the table and say how we all know each other,'” Deborah Steelwright said. “And Carol begins, `Well, I was married to Lee,’ and this woman looks at me and goes, `Wait, did you know that?’ And I said, `Yeah, we’re all good friends.'”
Jurich, who remains close enough to his ex-wife that they occasionally meet for dinner, said friendly splits have become common because divorce has become more accepted. Perhaps a mark of its acceptance in society is the emergence of divorce ceremonies, a parting ritual in which both parties symbolically forgive each other. A new book “A Healing Divorce: Transforming the End of Your Relationship with Ritual and Ceremony” by Phil and Barbara Penningroth (1stBooks, $13.95) even offers instructions on planning your own divorce ceremony to end your marriage on a good note.
Writing a new script
“We believe in the scripted, in what we’ve had in our culture, our past,” Jurich said. “We have scripts for boy meets girl, girl meets boy. We have scripts for people getting married and living happily ever after, but before, there was no script that says I can still care about you if I care about my new wife. So I vilify you, and somehow that frees me to have another relationship. But now, we’ve become sophisticated enough as a society to consider multiple situations at the same time. We can multi-relationship better.”
Robert Billingham, an Indiana University professor of human development who has studied the evolution of families for 20 years, said friendly divorces also are more common because the courts have been more sympathetic to parents who try to work out an amicable split.
“In the past, the parent who was the most problematic had the most power,” Billingham said. “The least cooperative parent actually controlled how the divorce worked by saying, `No, I’m not going to agree to that.’ And historically, there was nothing that would be done to the person who interfered.
“In the past five years, states have started recognizing how damaging this is to children,” he added. “Now, more courts are requiring parents to bring what they refer to as a parenting plan, which covers the minutiae on how the two of them are going to continue to be the best parents for this child. In situations like this where if you don’t cooperate, you might lose your child, we find very quickly that people can cooperate in ways they never thought they could, and their behavior changes.”
In Lee and Carol’s case, they didn’t have any children together. But they had met in high school and dated for about six years before marrying and were reluctant to give up their long friendship.
“A lot of people, they have attraction and strong desire and stuff like that, but I’m not sure that they have a good relationship as well,” said Lee Steelwright, 52, a psychologist. “Carol and I were always friends; we were always able to talk and share. … I used to say that we got a divorce to save our friendship.”
Even so, remaining friends after a split isn’t easy, he said. They initially had tried to be friends right after he moved out but rapidly realized that they needed a break from each other to “shift gears and readjust.”
And there was potential for misunderstandings throughout the transition.
“We would talk about people we were going out with, and I would say, `Well, I don’t like this guy,’ and at first I think she was a little suspicious that I was jealous,” Steelwright said. “But it turned out that I would be right about the guy, and she started listening to me.”
A tricky transition
The transition from spouse to friend can present additional problems if the desire to split wasn’t mutual. Karbo warned that some exes may use the pretext of friendship to remain prominent in their former spouse’s life and perhaps interfere in any budding romances. In her book, she mentions a woman who called her ex-husband so much that his girlfriend left him.
Experts also warned exes that their friendliness may run the risk of offering children false hopes of a reconciliation.
“Children will hope beyond hope that you might get back together,” Jurich said. “So it’s up to both of you to consistently set a firm boundary and send a message that, `We’re not in love with each other. Don’t hold that out as a hope. It’s not going to happen.’ If the message is consistent with little variation and no animosity, then I think the kids after a while will get it.”
Even when the ex has no ill intentions, it sometimes can be hard for new partners to understand a close friendship with former spouses.
“When I first met Carol and found out how great she was, I wondered, `Well, why did they get divorced?'” Deborah Steelwright said. “They’re both so nice and they like each other. But I realized she was kind of like his sister. She’s just a wonderful person. I recall when we first met, I said, `Don’t expect me to go shopping with your ex-wife. This isn’t gonna happen.’ . . . And now we go away on women’s weekends to Berkeley Springs.”
The fact that she has become close to her husband’s ex has helped Deborah accept and embrace Lee’s friendship with Carol. Through the years, Deborah’s felt bound to Carol in other ways–they married within a year of each other, gave birth to daughters a week apart in October 1986, and share affection for the man who brought them together.
“At one point I just realized that Carol would always love Lee, and Lee would always love Carol, and that was a fact,” Deborah said. “But it’s important to realize that it’s a different kind of love. And that was good, that was OK.”
Tips for a healthy `divarriage’
To streamline your transition, consider the following:
– Take a complete break from each other right after the split for at least a couple of months. It’s important to have time to shift gears and adjust to being friends instead of spouses. “You can’t keep doing the same thing and expect a different result,” said Lee Steelwright, a Towson, Md., psychologist who remains good friends with his ex-wife.
– Don’t listen to discouraging friends. “You’re going to wind up having a lot of friends sit there and tell you you can’t have a relationship with your ex and you should just put that idea to bed,” said Tony Jurich, Kansas State University family therapy professor, speaking from personal experience. “Realize if the person’s been important in your life and you still want them in your life, you have to not listen to anybody else.”
– If there are children involved, a friendship between their divorced parents may offer hope of reconciliation. Both former spouses need to send a consistent, firm message that even though they are friends, they aren’t getting back together.
– Communicate openly and frequently with your new partner about his or her feelings about your relationship with your ex.
– Consider inviting your former spouse to your wedding. If your ex sees you marry someone else, Jurich said, it’s a great way to send the message: “Regardless of whatever relationship I had and have with you, this is my new marriage.”
— Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
