Friendship - Part 2

14 years ago we moved to Chicago and I didn't know anyone. I was nervous about making friends as I'm just not very good at meeting new people.

My husband (then fiancé) was starting his residency so was going to be working long hours and would pretty much only be meeting other residents. When you spend 80-100 hours a week working with people those are usually the last people you want to see on your time off. The onus was on me to fill our social calendar.

There was another girl who started the same day as I did. She was in many ways the extroverted version of me. She had gone to college and worked a few years in Chicago so had lots of friends. Her boyfriend at the time and my husband hit it off pretty quickly. The rest of the company was also a social bunch and it didn't take long before Friday night happy hours became the norm, and it wasn't unusual for those happy hours to last past midnight.

Fast forward 6 years. I stopped working when Little Reader was born, she and her boyfriend got married and had kids of their own and she stopped working too. They live pretty close by us and our husbands have a weekly tee time at the local course and we would all hang out at the beach in the summer.

This past weekend my husband was late coming back from golf and at first I was pretty pissed as I had to take all three kids with me to Little Hugger's dance class and couldn't go running as I had planned. Found out later that the reason for the delay was that his friend had told him that they are getting divorced. They had been having trouble for a while and she recently admitted to having an affair.

At this point I'm not really sure what to do. Despite being in close proximity and often seeing each other and having fun in group settings, she and I haven't done anything together just the two of us in ages (if ever, now that I really think about it). Obviously our husbands are closer friends than we are at this point. I've been going back and forth trying to decide whether to contact her and if so how.

We never talk on the phone, so it would be awkward if I called out of the blue. A Facebook message or email seems too impersonal. I thought about a good old-fashioned letter but not even sure what to say. At this point I'm sure she knows that I know, and as more time goes by it's going to get more awkward. Our next group event is a friend's kids birthday party next month. That seems too long to go without any contact. Our circle of friends is mostly people we met through her at some point.

If it were just irreconcilable differences or whatever the term is these days, I think it would be much easier for me to reach out to her. Say I'm sorry to hear they're getting divorced, let her vent if she wants to, and move on. I've had other friends get divorced but in those cases I had a definite allegiance to one of the people. This is the first time I've been friends with both of them.

The ironic thing in this whole situation is I vividly remember a lunch room conversation about the movie Unfaithful with Richard Gere and Diane Lane back when we were working. Someone was raving about the performances and suggesting we should all see it and she vehemently refused. She said she could watch scary movies, suspenseful movies, but she couldn't stand watching movies about infidelity as it was the worst thing you could do to another person.

I guess as my Mom always said, you have an opinion til you get another.