15/12/2020
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How did Gabe and Lisa go from being spouses to divorcees to best friends? Do they hold any residual anger toward each other? Hurt feelings? Secret attraction? How do their current spouses feel about their friendship?
If you’re curious to understand their unique journey, join us as they tell all on today’s podcast.
(Transcript Available Below)
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About The Not Crazy podcast Hosts
Gabe Howard is an award-winning writer and speaker who lives with bipolar disorder. He is the author of the popular book, Mental Illness is an As***le and other Observations, available from Amazon; signed copies are also available directly from Gabe Howard. To learn more, please visit his website, gabehoward.com.
Lisa is the producer of the Psych Central podcast, Not Crazy. She is the recipient of The National Alliance on Mental Illness’s “Above and Beyond†award, has worked extensively with the Ohio Peer Supporter Certification program, and is a workplace su***de prevention trainer. Lisa has battled depression her entire life and has worked alongside Gabe in mental health advocacy for over a decade. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband; enjoys international travel; and orders 12 pairs of shoes online, picks the best one, and sends the other 11 back.
Computer Generated Transcript for “Divorce to Besties†Episode
Editor’s Note: Please be mindful that this transcript has been computer generated and therefore may contain inaccuracies and grammar errors. Thank you.
Lisa: You’re listening to Not Crazy, a Psych Central podcast hosted by my ex-husband, who has bipolar disorder. Together, we created the mental health podcast for people who hate mental health podcasts.
Gabe: Welcome, everyone, to this week’s episode of the Not Crazy podcast, I’m your host, Gabe Howard, and with me, as always, is Lisa Kiner. Lisa?
Lisa: Hey, everyone, today’s quote comes from the website, Live Happy: When two friends become lovers, that’s ordinary. When two ex lovers become friends, that’s maturity.
Gabe: Lover. That’s all I hear, like in that whole quote, remember that Saturday Night Live sketch?
Lisa: Yes, yes.
Gabe: And then we became lovers. The word lover just has this awful connotation that I’m very uncomfortable with, especially in the context of you, Lisa.
Lisa: It’s making me more uncomfortable the more you say the word, frankly.
Gabe: Right, but that is weird. It is weird that at one point in my life you were my wife and I spoke to you like a wife, you know. Hey, honey. Hey, Pookie. Exactly what you would expect in a romantic relationship.
Lisa: Right.
Gabe: We were married for five years. We dated for three years before that. I mean, two years.
Lisa: Is that right?
Gabe: I don’t know. We were together for a long time. This wasn’t, this wasn’t a cuffing season situation. We were together for years.
Lisa: What’s cuffing season?
Gabe: You’ve never heard of cuffing season?
Lisa: No.
Gabe: Cuffing season is when it gets cold outside and you don’t want to go out and date because it’s just hard.
Lisa: OK.
Gabe: But you still want to be with somebody. So you cuff them just for like a few months.
Lisa: Cuff them?
Gabe: And then you break up. It’s called cuffing season.
Lisa: Oh, so cuff is a synonym for s*x?
Gabe: I think it’s like handcuffs.
Lisa: That doesn’t make sense.
Gabe: Look, I don’t I don’t design millennial words, I don’t know what you want.
Lisa: Ok, all right, it’s a millennial thing, OK. Yes,
Gabe: It’s just.
Lisa: I do not understand their ways, their ways are mysterious to me.
Gabe: Cuffing season is when it’s cold outside, so you don’t want to put on the short skirt and the high heels and go out to the clubs to meet people. So you stay in a relationship for a few months until it warms up outside and then, boom, you’re back. And it’s called cuffing season.
Lisa: I’m going to Google that.
Gabe: It’s UrbanDictionary.com. I highly recommend it. That’s where I learn everything that my nieces and nephews say. Otherwise we’d be having two different conversations,
Lisa: Yeah,
Gabe: Much like now.
Lisa: That thirsty thing.
Gabe: Yeah, I had no idea.
Lisa: I know, right, it’s so weird and the whole swoll, I don’t get that one at all.
Gabe: Well, I mean, I’m swoll. I’m swoll A.F.
Lisa: Oh, it took me a second,
Gabe: Yeah, yeah.
Lisa: Because I’m not one of them.
Gabe: Yeah. Laugh at me all you want. I just want people to understand that this was not a short relationship, this
Lisa: No, no.
Gabe: Was a long relationship.
Lisa: We were together for years.
Gabe: We owned a home together, we bought a house, we bought cars, we went on vacations. We.
Lisa: We had pets.
Gabe: We had pets, everything. And now I can’t see it. At one point, Lisa, I called you Dear Honey Pookie. We held hands, we cuddled. We did everything that a married couple did and behaved. I mean, we were a married couple. We behaved and acted.
Lisa: Right.
Gabe: Like a married couple. And now all these years later, if somebody says, hey, Gabe, do you miss making out with Lisa? I think, eww, eww.
Lisa: Oh, yeah, eww
Gabe: Right.
Lisa: Wow, I’ve never noticed that before.
Gabe: I get this, like, visceral reaction and that’s perfectly normal. Nobody wants to make out with their best friend.
Lisa: I’ve never noticed
Gabe: Right. It would be like
Lisa: Ick.
Gabe: If somebody said, hey, Gabe, you want to make out with your sister? No, that’s disgusting. I don’t want to make out with my friends. That’s it’s a different relationship. But what makes this interesting
Lisa: I’ve never noticed that.
Gabe: Is how did we go from, you know, hey, at one point we made out all the time and now we’re like uck. That’s gross.
Lisa: I never noticed that. That’s interesting.
Gabe: Where did that turn, because we were very stereotypically married, right?
Lisa: Of course, we were a married couple like any other.
Gabe: We are very stereotypically best friends with maybe like a dash of codependency.
Lisa: A dash?
Gabe: A dash.
Lisa: A small dash,
Gabe: A small like like a cup.
Lisa: Maybe several cups, yeah,
Gabe: Like a
Lisa: A pound and a half, maybe.
Gabe: A Sam’s Club bag of codependency,
Lisa: Right. Right.
Gabe: But it’s not romantic in nature, is my point.
Lisa: No, it hasn’t been for a long time.
Gabe: It’s a 180.
Lisa: Is that true, is it a 180?
Gabe: I don’t know? What’s the opposite of marriage?
Lisa: So well see exactly I don’t know that that is the opposite of marriage.
Gabe: It’s interesting, and I think this is where the maturity part of your quote comes in, a lot of people think that the opposite of a romantic relationship is a hate filled one.
Lisa: Exactly, which it is not.
Gabe: It’s certainly not in our case. I think the opposite of a romantic relationship is probably nothing.
Lisa: Well, yeah, exactly the opposite of love is not hate, it’s apathy.
Gabe: Well, I don’t even think it’s apathy, I think it’s non-existent, I think it’s oh, yeah, I remember dating him.
Lisa: Like I said, apathy. That’s what apathy is,
Gabe: Is that apathy?
Lisa: I think so, yeah.
Gabe: It’s just, it’s just nothing.
Lisa: And we’ve talked about this before, the oh, you know, the opposite of love is hate. No, it’s not. You used to love your ex-husband. Now you hate him. No, that’s still that strong emotion. That’s not good.
Gabe: I agree with that, and but whatever the opposite of a marriage or romance or love or romantic love is, it’s not best friends forever.
Lisa: Probably not, no.
Gabe: Do you know anybody else, literally anybody else that is best friends with their spouse?
Lisa: No.
Gabe: Lisa, obviously, I think everybody is aware of exes who are not enemies. I think that everybody is aware of exes who get along. Co parent, for example, there’s a lot of divorced couples who raise children together. They maintain a semblance of a relationship. But that’s not our relationship.
Lisa: No, and we get comments on that all the time,
Gabe: Constantly
Lisa: All the time,
Gabe: Constantly.
Lisa: It’s interesting.
Gabe: Yes.
Lisa: Usually negative, but sometimes positive.
Gabe: Can you believe that, I mean, what? What a crazy world do we live in where somebody’s like, oh, Lisa’s your ex-wife? Yes. And you don’t hate her and want her to die? No, I think very highly of her. Oh, what’s wrong with you?
Lisa: I know it’s a little bit creepy.
Gabe: They’re like angry at me, they think I’ve done something wrong. I don’t know about Viroj, but Kendall, my wife, gets pulled aside all the time. It’s like you can’t tell me there’s not something going on there.
Lisa: Yeah, it doesn’t happen as much for Viroj because it’s a genderized thing,
Gabe: Yeah.
Lisa: But yeah, it’s a thing.
Gabe: You know what I love about that happening? It’s Kendall’s response.
Lisa: Oh, what is it?
Gabe: Yeah, she says well, if Gabe and Lisa run off together, that’s the punishment they deserve
Lisa: Yeah,
Gabe: Because I’d kill you
Lisa: Yeah.
Gabe: Easily. We just we would kill each other within a month of us running away. One of us would try to take out the other. Would be we’d both be in prison, like, could you imagine the fight? It always makes me laugh when she says that because I do think she’s right. We are on the right level. If you and I, for whatever reason, tried to get married again, this I want to be very, very clear. This is very hypothetical. Nobody is discussing this.
Lisa: That’s not happening, yeah.
Gabe: But it would be a train wreck, we would both be miserable and it would cost us the good thing that we have. I think that’s what a lot of people don’t understand. They’re like, why are you friends with your ex? And the answer is because we never should have gotten married. We overshot.
Lisa: More than anything else, we’re usually mistaken for siblings.
Gabe: Yes, which is creepy because, of course, we have this romantic past, right?
Lisa: Right, right.
Gabe: That clearly people can recognize that we have a close relationship. And they don’t want to just say, oh, well, these two are friends or coworkers, et cetera, because they feel that it’s another step. But whenever we correct them and say, yes, you are right, you have picked up. We are very, very close. Lisa used to be my ex-wife. We’re now just best friends. That’s where the questions come in. Now,
Lisa: Yeah, that confuses people.
Gabe: We’ve already discussed the negatives. The negatives are a bummer. I’m sorry that people react that way, but we get a lot of people who are naturally curious. They’re like, well, how did you do it?
Lisa: I also get a lot of people who it’s almost a confessional. Where they’ll go, well, you know, I’m actually friends with my ex, too, but they take you aside and tell you it like it’s a secret. They don’t just say it like, oh, yeah. Oh, that’s interesting. You know, or even. Oh, that’s unusual. You know, my ex-husband and I are very you know, they’re like, well, you know, or the number one thing that happens is people will tell me, well, you know, I guess that makes sense after all. I know so and so. And even after they were divorced, she helped him through cancer. It’s always that way. It’s always she helped him. And it’s always cancer. It’s never a man helping a woman do something. It’s always a woman helping a man through cancer. That is the number one thing people say to me. It’s weird. So just letting you know you’re about to get cancer.
Gabe: I’ve, great. Great.
Lisa: I’m just telling you.
Gabe: I like, I don’t have enough problems, I,
Lisa: Number one thing is. Oh, yes, I knew a couple who cared for him through cancer and number two thing is, oh, I also share this deep secret. Let me share it with you now.
Gabe: It really is reminiscent of when I give a speech, and then when I get off the stage, people pull me aside and they say, you know, I have bipolar too, or I have mental illness as well. And they want to tell me their story.
Lisa: Right, yes, it reminds me of that exactly. Because they feel like only you can understand, because they feel the story is so incredibly unique that they can’t just share it on a regular day to day basis that they found this kindred spirit.
Gabe: Agreed, agreed with all of that, but I still feel like you’re kind of ditching the question, Lisa. How did we get here?
Lisa: You know, I’ve been trying to think about that.
Gabe: How did we go from a married couple to a divorced couple to BFFs? That is a weird journey.
Lisa: I don’t think it is that weird, part of it is on TV, people have been married for years and they get a divorce and then they never speak to each other again. In real life, you don’t just cut off a long term relationship and have no contact forever. Your lives are intertwined with one another. You have the same friend group. Perhaps you work together, you have children, you own property together. You live in the same town. In real life it’s not that easy to just cut it off cold turkey.
Gabe: Ok, but it’s not that hard and look, we don’t have children and we did not have an intertwined friend group.
Lisa: We did live in the same town.
Gabe: Well, sure, a town with 1.2 million people. Did you think we were going to run into each other at the Tastee-Freez or the McDonald’s? You always say the McDonald’s in small towns. Did you think we were going to go get fish? I really feel bad now because all of our listeners in small towns are going to send us hate mail. I apologize.
Lisa: No, because they’ll know that I’m one of you and Gabe is city he doesn’t understand.
Gabe: That’s not true. I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania.
Lisa: No, you didn’t You’re second generation city, anyway.
Gabe: That is, one that’s just offensive.
Lisa: It’s true.
Gabe: My graduating class had 29 kids. How many did your graduating class have? Miss you’re from a small town and I’m not.
Lisa: Gabe grew up in Columbus, but did move to a small town to finish high school.
Gabe: Yeah,
Lisa: I’m just saying.
Gabe: My mother was raised in that town where she got pregnant after a football game on Valentine’s Day in the backseat of a car. How much more small town country can you get than my conception? It was a Dodge Charger, people. It was so stereotypical back in 1996. I’m pretty sure that Foreigner was on the radio.
Lisa: You mean 1976.
Gabe: What did I say?
Lisa: 1996.
Gabe: I’m old, that’s
Lisa: Yeah,
Gabe: When I graduated high school.
Lisa: I know.
Gabe: In a small town
Lisa: Uh-huh.
Gabe: Where I lived.
Lisa: Yeah, yeah. First off, no, you’re city people, you’ve always been city people, we all know you’re city people. You do things like cross the street without looking both ways. It’s ridiculous. Also, you don’t check both ways before railroad tracks. Yes, it’s true. Sometimes Gabe drives directly over railroad tracks. He calls pop soda. There you go, that’s all that needs to be said.
Gabe: Lisa.
Lisa: If he wants a Diet Coke, he says he’s going to go buy soda, not pop, soda. Yeah, city. City all the way.
Gabe: I understand why you want to change the subject, because you’re uncomfortable to admit that you just have no idea, you’re uncomfortable to admit that this was an accident. Our salvaging the relationship, it was an accident. I think you’re very uncomfortable with that. I don’t think you like the idea,
Lisa: Why would I be uncomfortable with it?
Gabe: Because I’ve asked you now for the third time, how did we go from a married couple to BFFs?
Lisa: Oh, well, I was answering that.
Gabe: No, you weren’t. You said it’s not that unusual, it happens all the time. Really?
Lisa: No, no.
Gabe: Name one other person.
Lisa: What I said is that in real life, you can’t just cut off cold turkey because your lives are intertwined.
Gabe: But just because you can’t cut off cold turkey doesn’t mean that you become BFFs, everybody goes through the same divorce process.
Lisa: I’m getting there,
Gabe: Are you?
Lisa: Everybody does not go through the same divorce process. What makes you think that?
Gabe: Yes, some people have children.
Lisa: Exactly? Every situation is unique. Nobody goes through the same process.
Gabe: Making us even weirder, that binds them and they don’t become BFFs.
Lisa: I think part of it was, like I said, we did have intertwined lives, etc., and then the next thing would be, frankly, it’s because we kind of had to stay together because of the house and because of the health insurance. That gave us a window.
Gabe: On one hand, it gave us a window, but I don’t think that it did. I really don’t. A lot of people have houses to sell. A lot of people in America have health insurance issues with their divorcing spouses and they don’t become friends. I just.
Lisa: It gave us a longer period of time than it would have otherwise, and that gave us time for some of the hurt feelings to recede.
Gabe: That is what I keep trying to explain to you, though, that is not abnormal. This was not something that happened to us that doesn’t happen to other people yet. Our outcome is different. Every single divorcing couple in America has issues with selling the house, with splitting the money, with going through the court process, with health insurance. This is, you haven’t brought up anything that is uncommon or unusual for a divorcing couple in America, but their stories do not turn out with them being best friends. Their stories turn out very stereotypically with them becoming nothing, not enemies, just nothing. They just move on. For example, everything that you just listed happened between my first wife and I. We had health insurance problems. We had to sell our house. We had to go through the court process. How come we’re not best friends forever?
Lisa: Ok, how come? What’s the answer?
Gabe: Because we.
Lisa: You’re asking me how I think this happened, how do you? What do you think the answer is?
Gabe: I really do think that part of it was that we got married for the wrong reasons, yet the reason that we got married was a very compelling reason that is difficult to ignore. You saved my life. You literally saved my life. That really does create a bond.
Lisa: That’s why we got married?
Gabe: I think so, yeah. Don’t you?
Lisa: See, I never really thought of it that way until after we were divorced and then I started listening to your speeches and you started, not started, but you were saying that all the time. I was a little surprised by that. I never particularly saw it that way. And I was surprised at how much emphasis or value you put on that.
Gabe: My theory has always been that the reason that we got married is because we were bonded by this amazing thing. For good or bad, it was a very traumatizing thing. You know, it’s just it’s not every day that you find yourself a suicidal guy and, you know, help them.
Lisa: But that was a different experience for you than for me, though.
Gabe: Right, but it was still an experience that we uniquely shared together, just because we experienced it very differently doesn’t also mean that there wasn’t overlap that we experienced at the same time. I am sure that you felt very protective of me..
How did Gabe and Lisa go from being spouses to divorcees to best friends? Transcript included.
