My significant other of seven months maintains a friendship with his ex-wife. They have no children together. He tells me that they talk on the phone and get together for dinner and lunch. Before we met, they also spent holidays together. Neither of them is native to the U.S. (they’re from different countries, however), and she doesn’t have many close friends in our city, according to what he tells me.
I’m troubled by some things. He divorced her, and for a while, things were very nasty between them before they became friends. Secondly, I’ve never met his ex-wife, so I don’t know how they interact together. To wit: I feel as though this friendship exists apart and aside from our relationship — sort of like it’s a secret, and I’m being kept in the dark.
I also have an ex-husband, but I learned the hard way that maintaining a friendship with someone I divorced was impossible. He had hidden expectations, and those eventually surfaced when I started dating someone new. Then our “friendship” (?) had to end, at my discretion. In retrospect, I was clinging to my ex because I was lonely and afraid of moving on as a single woman.
My relationship with my S.O. is otherwise fine, and there’s no doubt in my mind that he has NO amorous feelings toward his ex. Whatever the case, I still feel uncomfortable with this friendship, and I can’t comfortably take things to a deeper emotional level with him because of it. The worst part about this is that I don’t know how to bring this up without sounding as though I’m forcing him to “choose.” The one thing I learned from being married is that people cannot change — they have to [i]want[/i] to change!
