The Other Woman: How to Start Making Peace with the Girlfriend
Divorce is an excruciating process, even when it only involves the two people who are splitting up. Some people like to add in an additional dangerous element to their divorce to keep you on your toes – it’s another woman. She goes by all kinds of names – girlfriend, mistress, home-wrecker, eye candy, younger version, mid-life crisis, and “it’s that girl I suspected something was up with”. Whatever you call her, it hurts.
It doesn’t matter whether she showed up while you were married, while you were dissolving, or after your divorce was final. Either way, it’s messing with you. If you’re on the receiving end of this unwelcome new addition, I’ve got a few suggestions for how you can start making peace with the new partner:
Let it out.
The emotions that get triggered with another woman cut to your core. Don’t pretend it doesn’t. You will need to cry, wail, scream, and resist everything about this situation. Get a journal out or pull in a sympathetic friend and list off everything about how this is unfair, how it proves what you suspected, and how it makes everything the two of you had seem worthless. Talk about how it’s affecting the kids, how it’s unhealthy, and how it is never going to last. Stuffing it down and acting like it is nothing will only produce a backlog of emotion for you to deal with later. Watching the person who used to love you first and only start to give the best of their energy to someone else is a pain like no other. You need to allow it to get through your system.
Acknowledge that you are at different points in the divorce process.
The mental and emotional transition through the change of divorce follows a largely similar path for everyone through denial, anger, confusion, frustration, stress and then onto impatience, and ultimately, hope and energy. However, some will compress that path and finish it quickly; others will take years to make progress. Some will walk the path so privately you’ll think they skipped over it; others will take so long you wonder if they will ever get themselves back together. The thing to understand is that you are NEVER in the same recovery spot as your former partner. Your downfall will be to think that you are. Your partner is acting like this because they are not in the same spot that you are. When you can release them to be where they are, you can invest more energy into working with the priorities of where you are in your own recovery.
Resolve to be the bigger person.
The temptation is to be small – to vilify the new woman, to reduce your former partner, and to let everyone know just how wrong this is. Do that, but do it back on step one where you let it out. Do it as regularly as you need to do it, but save it only for a select audience. Most days, strive to rise above. Seek to disentangle yourself from their story and invest in your own. Agree to let this happen. Let your partner get away with it (they will anyway). Commit to being the most beautiful person you can be in it.
Get off their social media.
Now. Unfollow your partner and don’t look the other woman up. It leads to further anger and despair and isn’t an act of kindness to yourself. Speaker and author and Byron Katie talks about the concept of your business, their business, and God’s business. This new relationship is their business and God’s business. It is not your business. And that is the hardest part of all, because, for years, maybe decades, your partner’s business was your business. Leaving them to their own business is a critical step in divorce recovery. Give your heart a wide berth to heal; don’t invite reminders of what they are up to with each other.
Carve out where this person intersects with your life and figure out how to work with that.
I can hear you saying, “But she’s with my kids now!”. I know. And you don’t like it. But unless true threats to your children’s health and safety are at stake, she’s going to spend time with your kids. This part is your business. Working through expectations, boundaries, and general protocols are part of being the bigger person and it says you are willing to work with this inevitable and unwanted twist in your story.
The other woman presents us with a crisis of identity and security. It can trigger enormous pain as you process your way through it. The initial shock and adjustment will fade as you apply yourself to these steps and work to create an inner capacity to welcome this new part of your story. Your kids will thank you for it.
