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Instructions for Living: How to Deal with Friends’ Breakups
What do you do when you’re a blissed-out twosome and your favourite double daters are breaking up? Em & Lo, authors of Buh Bye: The Ultimate Guide to Dumping and Getting Dumped (Chronicle Books, 2007), offer a few tips:
- Allow each of them to vent to you, but avoid badmouthing a when you’re with b (or vice versa) to make them feel better. Encourage them to air their really dirty laundry with someone who’s free to take sides.
- Make it clear that neither of you will be a “messenger”: Anything that a shares stays with you and you have no intention of passing it on to b (and vice versa).
- Rather than picking one to come to your party/wedding/baby shower, invite them both and let them figure it out. If they both RSVP, put them on opposite sides of the room.
- Don’t try to pretend that you can “relate” by sharing or exaggerating problems in your own relationship—that’s condescending and annoying, especially when you use the “we” voice and poke each other playfully as you do it.
- Don’t always hang out with each of them as a unified couple. Your newly single friends will take comfort in some one-on-one time.
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