Just Friends... Or Whatever
A new perspective on finding friendship and freedom post-divorce
Updated May 8, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills
Whatever happened to Vicky and Glen, our irrelationship protagonists from the early days? We don’t know. They are, technically, fictional—composite characters we’ve been writing about since 2014, the patient-zero couple in our work on irrelationship. Their marriage ended. That much is on the record. After that, the trail goes cold because they were never real people, and the people they were composited from went their separate ways.
But we have time on our hands and an unhealthy attachment to our own creations. So we permit ourselves the fantasy . Somewhere, in one of those multiverse worlds the Hollywood physicists keep dangling, there is a Vicky and a Glen who got it right after they got it wrong. They are not bitter exes. They are not performing friendship for the kids. They did not reconcile. They did not go cold. They did something else, the something else that doesn’t have a tidy name, the one most couples in their position never find.
Here, in the twilight zone, they are at a chai café on the Lower East Side.
Vicky thinks the chai is decent. She spent time in Kerala in her 30s after the divorce and has firm views on cardamom-to-ginger ratios that she will share if asked and, increasingly, if not asked. Glen, who once would have either taken this very seriously or made it into a joke designed to land somewhere between flirtation and mild humiliation , just nods. He’s heard it before. He admires her curiosity and passion, even if he is more of an espresso snob.
They walked over together. Their kid—the younger one, just graduated, living in the neighborhood now—had asked them both to lunch, and they’d lingered after, walked a few blocks, found the café. The older one is upstate at school. The younger one is figuring out what to do next, and there are decisions to be made, who handles what, some financial stuff, and more, who their kid is, what their world is like, and how to be there for them without being there too much. And really, money ties people together. It’s easier if you are friendly.
They look exactly the same to each other as they did when they were young. They also look entirely different—and each can see, in the other’s face, the years they themselves have lived. It is one of those vertiginous things you can only experience with someone who knew you before, and only if neither of you is trying to argue about who you used to be.
The conversation moves. Vicky has views about what the kid should do; Glen has views; the views are different. There is a moment, 15 years ago, when this would have been a fight—when Glen would have gently managed her concern as a problem to be soothed, when Vicky would have received the soothing while privately seething, when the entire thing would have ended with one of them feeling unseen and the other feeling unappreciated, neither of them remembering what they’d actually been talking about. That moment doesn’t happen here. It doesn’t get handled, doesn’t get processed, doesn’t get repaired. It just doesn’t happen. They don’t notice.
What they notice is that they are sharing their views. Not as a gambit for intimacy or approval—just sharing them. What was remarkable was exactly how unremarkable it was. What was more present was enjoying time with their kid, feeling decent or even good about how things had gone, not making it complicated or overly in need of active efforts to manage strife.
It was just chai and being proud parents, free from the tension between them. Much nicer.
We have a name for the process by which two people can arrive at this kind of room. We’ve been writing about it for years: the DREAM Sequence (Discovery, Repair, Empowerment, Alternatives, Mutuality). In Vicky and Glen’s case, the discovery was that what they thought were their personalities—the performer and the audience—were closer to what Selma Fraiberg called “ghosts in the nursery”: figures from their own childhoods, taking up residency in the marriage and running it from the back room. The repair was, in part, learning to welcome home the ghosts. The empowerment was the capacity to finally share a view without it being a gambit for anything.
The alternatives were where the DREAM Team (that’s us) used to expect couples to arrive at: the obvious good ending of staying friends. We thought of friendship as the prize for doing the work. We were, it turns out, not quite right about that.
The prize, when there is one, is the freedom to choose what comes next. Friends is one option. Functional co-parents who happen to like each other is another. Cordial acquaintances who handle logistics by text is another. Ten years of distance and then something new is another. The empowerment isn’t in landing on friendship. It’s in being able to choose at all, rather than defaulting into the next song-and-dance with a different soundtrack.
For Vicky and Glen, in this universe, what got chosen was hard to label. There is no romantic spark. There is no nostalgia . They are not reminiscing about old times, because old times are not where the action is. The action is in the kid, in the chai, in the unremarkable conversation, in the years still to come.
Glen says, near the end, looking at her: At the beginning of our friendship, I could feel how we were more together apart than when we were trying to be together in all the wrong ways.
Vicky doesn’t answer right away. She tastes the chai. It is, she decides, decent. Not Kerala. But decent.
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Mark B. Borg, Jr., Ph.D., Grant H. Brenner, and MD, Daniel Berry, RN, MHA are the authors of Relationship Sanity .
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