Like everyone else who has lived as long as I have, I have lost many friends. It occurred to me this morning that among the strangest ways to lose friends is as a consequence of two friends losing each other.
What I mean by this is the odd phenomenon that when you have known a couple who break up, you invariably loses the friendship of at least one of the people involved when they split up. Often, you lose the friendship of both.
At least, this has been my experience. If yours has been any different, I'm delighted to hear it. Here are some examples from my past:
* David and Carol were close friends of several years' standing. When - quite unexpectedly for their many friends - they suddenly split up, they completely disappeared from view. This happened perhaps 25 years ago, and I have never heard a word about either of these lovely people ever again. They could have been abducted by aliens, for all I know of the matter.
* Helen and Craig had been going out together since high school. When they split up after a decade living together, including a short-lived marriage, Helen disappeared completely from her former friends' lives. I did manage to track her down, but she was already living in another city, 600 miles distant. When I contacted her she was polite but emphatically wished to have nothing more to do with me or anyone else from "the world of Craig".
* When another long-standing couple split up, their friends were separated not just from them but from all of the members of the two close families, who had always been involved with them in virtually everything they did, and who had become friends with the friends in their own right. But the connection with the estranged couple was a bond which, once broken, broke all the other bonds as well, and dozens of friendships died.
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