Breaking up31/07/2008 2:15 pm

I had a shock this week, well two, in fact. The first was that some good friends of mine, long and – I thought - happily married, have announced that they are separating. The second was how affected I felt by the news.

Feeling sad, I can understand – it always IS sad when a long relationship ends. But my feelings about this break-up are much more complicated: I realise that I’m a little hurt and angry, too: I didn’t see this coming at all – they’re both good friends of mine, but neither confided in me or even hinted that they were having problems – does it mean not only that their marriage isn’t what I thought it was, but neither is our friendship?

I’m also confused: Will we get to stay friends with both of them, or have to pick one? When my brother broke up with his partner, he was so upset when good friends of his asked his ex and her new partner to dinner, that it affected their friendship permanently. How do we manage things like parties or weddings or landmark birthdays if we can’t invite them both at the same time?

But most of all, it made me feel a bit scared and vulnerable: – theirs was a good marriage, so if that can end, so can mine, or yours, or anybody’s. I felt my world shift under my feet, and long held assumptions and routines being overturned.

Other people's break-ups tell us so much about ourselves: they hold up a mirror not only to the relationship that’s falling apart, but to all the other relationships touched by it. They’re unsettling and upsetting. We build our notions of security and certainty on such flimsy foundations, and when they shake, so does our world. “This is the way things are” we tell ourselves, meaning and hoping “and this is the way they will stay”.

They never do. If it’s not divorce, it’s births, deaths, marriages, empty nests, redundancy or re-invention, and the inevitable, unavoidable cycles of change that keep us all in a state of movement whether we like it or not.

My friends divorce is a mutual decision, based on the fact that after travelling for years down the same road, they've come to a fork and need to go in different directions. They're sad, but would it be worse if they clung together in fear and denied their now very different desires, needs and goals?

If we're lucky, we get to grow and change inside our relationships, but sometimes that's just not possible. When friends break up, it reminds us all to look at ourselves and our relationships and figure out where along the road we've got to, and where we want to go next.

Real security isn’t things always staying the same, but being open minded, open hearted and brave enough to embrace and deal with the challenge of change.