Relationships | Friendship & Loyalty

My Friends Celebrated My Divorce by Blaming the Woman Who Paid My Rent

When someone we love is hurting, agreement can feel like loyalty. Sometimes it is just the easiest story to tell.

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My friends raised their coffee cups to my divorce and handed me an easy story about her that I told for seven years.

At that coffee table, they weren’t trying to be cruel. They just thought agreeing with me was how you get a man through a divorce.

There were four of us at a café that week, drinking small cups of black coffee and talking about my marriage as though it were a problem we had finally solved. One of my friends said she had never been a good fit for me. The other jumped in and said she had an employee mindset and I had an entrepreneurial one.

I said nothing.

But that particular phrase stayed with me because I knew something they didn’t. She had paid my rent for six months when I had nothing. The money came out of her account while I worked twelve-hour days trying to build a business that wouldn’t start. She stopped buying things for herself. She stopped going out. She carried the bills while I chased the possibility that the business would…