A couple of my friends like to throw dinner parties and invite single people who do not know each other. At one of these a few months ago, I performed my normal maneuver of grabbing a beer and finding a safe orbit on the periphery of several groups so I could listen in on a few conversations at once, but commit to none.

One group was skimming the surface, talking business. After a minute or two, I began circling a second cluster that was discussing the hazards of travel to Mexico. My sights began to wander over to a man and a woman in the corner. The guy was talking passionately and shaking his head in a forlorn way that I recognized. The woman struck an empathetic pose. I strained to tune into their frequency, taking tiny steps in their direction.

He was recently divorced. He missed his kids. More than anything, he feared another man replacing him in what used to be his household. The pain was palpable, as if a leg had recently been severed in an accident.
When I wandered onto their radar, they only gave me momentary clearance. But I lingered anyway and he continued cautiously. He was going to miss the little moments at the breakfast table, he wasn’t going to meet his daughter’s dates. His position would ultimately shrink to being an asterisk on his children’s résumés.

“It won’t be that way, unless you give up,” I said during a pause. “I felt that way years ago, but it has turned out to be just the opposite.” They looked at me quizzically.

When children are toddlers, parenting is all about being in the household to see the first steps, to hear the first words, to comfort them when they fall. But when children grow into teen-agers, they become focused on getting out:. Parenting at this stage is all about saying “no,” about wrapping fences around teenagers’ quests for freedom. The children are caught in a battle between their friends, who want them to go somewhere new and exciting, and their parents – who aren’t sure they want their child to go anywhere with some of these friends.

To the teen-agers, their parents and stepparents have become wardens. Amidst all this pressure, what the teen-agers need most is something the “wardens” cannot provide: perspective on their situation.
Here is what I think a noncustodial parent or a family friend or a big brother or sister can do to help the teen-agers in their lives:

• Ask questions about how the parents-versus-friends battle is going.
• Listen without giving advice or solutions.
• Offer positive theories about why you think others said or did something.
• Promise confidentiality about sensitive subjects for which they might be punished if they told their parents.
• Underreact when you hear about the bad stuff. This will reassure them that it is okay to talk more.
• Tell stories about how you or your friends went through similar stuff. Don’t sugarcoat it.
• Say, “It must be really frustrating,” more times than your think humanly possible.
• Remind them their job is to get to the other side. They are almost there.

Over time, if you’ve consistently stayed in the teen-agers’ orbit – even during the times you weren’t sure you were making a difference – they will learn to trust you and call you as the really bad stuff is happening. And you could be closer to your kids than if you did live in the same household.

I’m not sure the guy at the party believed me. But I think he wanted to.

Every few weeks, I tear a three- or four-paragraph story out of the daily newspaper and toss it in a box in my closet. The stories have datelines from towns all over America, each having its own tragic ending. Inevitably, it involves police surrounding somebody who recently broke up with a spouse or significant other and who, a few months later, gotten frustrated beyond control and decided to take the whole matter into their own hands.

The sad incidents usually involve a gun or a knife. They occurs at either the victim’s place of work or, worse yet, at home in front of their kids. It rarely ends well. I’ve been reading the paper all my life, but I don’t ever remember seeing a story in which the person who has gone mad and performs these crimes of jealous rage on their own family is anything other than a man.

If I ever take a break from the newspaper business, I hope to gather all these yellowed clippings and write a book or organize seminars for men who don’t know how to separate well. Then I would host groups where men would discuss – hold on here, I know this sounds revolutionary – our feelings. Men are not always comfortable doing that. It’s really not in our nature: our heritage is as hunters and gatherers, not as nurturers. Our modern childhood sport and games and adult career goals are all about winning, achieving, conquering, taking – and, yes, possessing. We don’t spend any time teaching or encouraging our boys and men about the proper way to lose. About admitting failure, apologizing, accepting our just punishment for our own misdeeds. We haven’t explained to men what to do when something that we think once belonged to us is now somebody else’s. Nevermind trying to make us understand that it never “belonged” to us in the first place.

Not that I’m any great example. I’ve done my share of stupid things. I’ve just had the good fortune of never doing anything stupid enough to generate a news story. And I spent a good amount of time exploring the separation process. And now, thanks to friends, family and to God, I have learned my lessons and been healed.

The problem occurs when men don’t understand that there even is a process. Women generally do. They retreat, cloister themselves, grieve, get depressed, angry and seek support in other women. Men usually don’t allow themselves to ever enter the grieving process. They just stuff those strange things called emotions. They just pass by grieving, avoid depression and go right to anger. The anger takes over and gets mixed up with those other emotions and men don’t know how to deal with it. So they drink too much or begin to date with a frenzy or they overindulge in work. Eventually, the distractions don’t work anymore and the anger returns and this time it’s not controllable.

That’s when men do stupid things. They begin to focus on the person who made them feel these emotions in the first place. They stalk, they threaten, they go into jealous rages. The men behave badly. And when they do this in front of their children, the very precious creatures they’ve helped to create, the very ones that are looking to their parents or step-parents for modeling on how to act when things go wrong, then their bad actions become bad examples and poison the psyche of another generation.

So that’s how it happens, or so I think. Hope to break the cycle? Understand that the men don’t understand and step in to help earlier in the process. Encourage them to read or talk about it. Tell them what the process is like and that they will come out on the other side intact. And pray that their loved ones do to.

Five years ago this month, a Fulton County Superior Court judge I never met signed a document hurriedly thrust before him and, with a stroke of his pen, dissolved my marriage. It was a relationship that had consumed half my life. I’m only now getting my bearings back.

Since then, I’ve watched other friends and relatives marry and divorce. I’ve witnessed the “blending,” of any number of combinations of family units. My children’s friends talk of ex-step-brothers or previous step-parents. They witness all sorts of creative couple alternatives.

I’ve always thought it ironic that society prepares us least for the two most important roles we will ever play: that of parent and that of partner.

If I were asked to teach a college course on the realities of those two life paths, I would include the following lessons about relationships with a partner and with kids that I’ve learned the hard way:

What you see is what you get. A friend of mine likes to comment that people don’t change that much over a lifetime, they just become more and more like themselves. Entering into relationships thinking others will change is fatal. Learning to accept others just as they are is vital.

Expect to be disappointed. At some point in your relationships, you will be greatly disappointed. Probably hurt in a way you never thought possible. It hurts a lot less if you anticipate it. The chances of your relationships with your partners or your kids surviving the injury greatly increase if you prepare ahead of time a coupon entitling them to at least one “free forgiving.” We all make stupid mistakes at some point. There was only one person who was perfect and He begged the rest of us to learn to forgive.

Just get through the bad times. A couple of times each decade, people enter what author Gail Sheehy called a “passage.” Passage means a way through to the other side. Let them get there on their own. If you think your partner or kids are all of a sudden acting crazy, focus on something else. Take long walks. Increase your exercise regimen. Join a class or a support group. At some point, they will return to the path. It may take months or even years, but the wait will be worth it.

Give up control. You cannot control anyone except yourself – and that is enough of a challenge. Let your partner or your kids (above age 14) do what they have to do to learn their own lessons. Trying to prevent others from pursuing their own friends or hobbies or bad habits will only make the pursuit seem more enticing. Let them go. Try to control them and they will quickly forget why they loved you in the first place.

Silence is golden, listening is divine. So much of the bad stuff that goes on in today’s households is the result of not paying attention. We don’t listen but want others to listen to us! They won’t – until you’ve demonstrated that you really understand them. Then, they will signal you when they are ready to listen to you. Usually by asking for your opinion. Until then, they are not ready. Be patient.

One of my favorite lines about life or relationships is from “A Song for Life,” by singer Rodney Crowell: “I’ve learned how to listen to a sound like the sun going down.” If you can do that, you’ll be the best parent or best partner you can be – until you mess up. And that leads to the final lesson I’m still learning five years later:

Forgive yourself, learn the lessons and move on.

Every couple of weeks, I meet a friend named Mike in the back corner of a Bojangle’s restaurant in Greenville, S.C. I don’t know his last name, but I recognized him the first time I met him. I knew him all too well.

He and I are on the same schedule. Like migrating birds on a biweekly season, we instinctively jump in our cars, drive up Interstate 85, take the curve on Exit 45 and pull into our adjacent concrete nests along Highway 25 and wait for our kids to dash in from the north.

We were both married a long time. Things went well. Then, suddenly, they didn’t. Our partners left to find new direction in life. That direction turned out to be north. North to new marriages, new houses and new challenges. Stunned, we agreed to what was left: a legal state of limbo called visitation.

As a defense technique, men talk on the surface. If we lock in on sports, weather, business or sex, we can kill a couple of hours without effort. Our mouths run on automatic pilot. Our minds can retreat to other places. But if a man is in pain and he sees another in the same circumstance, we can cut to the core immediately.

Mike’s first words to me were: “It’s hard, isn’t it?” He was sitting in his car with his three kids. I was there with my two. We were meeting our ex-wives halfway to exchange our precious cargo.

“I’ve tried dating,” Mike said. “I dated one woman for more than a year. Then one night she walked out. I haven’t seen her since. What is it with women?” he asked. “How do you make them happy? I don’t know anymore.”

He talked about his depression, attempts to cope, the lack of answers. We found we’re both confused about marriage. Neither wants to stare that pain of divorce in the face again. It can be deadly. We barely survived it once.

Yet others move on, marry again and again and don’t seem to look back. Mike and I aren’t so lucky. We try, but find ourselves returning to analyze what a friend called “the detritus of divorce.”

When my married friends talk of problems, I urge them to work through them. That’s the challenge. Quitting is too easy. And too difficult.

Mike and I stood there in the parking lot, watching as our kids drove off into the dark and windy Carolina night. Back to new stepfathers we don’t know, to blended families we’re not a part of, to schoolteachers we’ll never meet and soccer games we’ll never see.

We shook our heads, then shook hands. “Hang in there,” I said. “See you in two weeks,” he said. Somehow, just knowing there’s a buddy carrying the same burdens makes them a little lighter.

Then we got in our cars and drove south along the lonely highway home, tears in our eyes and holes in our hearts.