Your Divorce, Your Friendships, and Your Part-Time Life in Mexico
Updated January 2023
A change in scenery after a divorce
For good or ill, marriage does a good deal toward defining your life; influencing the neighborhood you live in, when you go to bed and wake up, how you spend your holidays, and how far you can go in looking your worst at home. After years of colonization, with a divorce suddenly you are charged with setting up an independent government. It’s exhilarating and a bit out of control (but only if you do it right.)
Counselors often advise a change of scenery after a divorce. It can be as simple as changing a room or as complicated as moving to a new city. Many women relocate after a divorce. I don’t have any statistics, but I am willing to bet women do it more often than men. In all the divorces I know, if a spouse moved, it was the wife doing the moving.
Understandably, many emerge from a divorce or the death of a spouse with a fierce desire to at live life on their own terms after many years of compromise or taking care of a partner. “Now, it’s my turn”….(or WTF). One of the best things about divorce is that freedom it gives you in deciding on your backdrop, whether its pink walls in the living room, a different city or a different country like Mexico.
Getting used to more alone time
Life after divorce shifts your focus to friends. The quality of your friendships becomes more crucial than ever. You need more people in general in your life to take up the space than had been taken by one person. But even ten new friends can't take the place of living with someone and having companionship every day. You have to learn how to make the unavoidable extra time alone work for you.
Living in another country is a great framework for learning to be quiet in a room. Most expats report that living in another country has put them more at peace with themselves and comfortable being alone. There’s so much to learn and explore living in another country, it takes your mind off the past very quickly.
Maintaining friendships at home
I had spent five years after my divorce building a new social network in Denver before deciding to move to Mexico part-time. The big question was how was I going maintain those new-ish friendships at home while I was in Mexico. How was I going to keep having people to come home to? Would they feel abandoned each time I left for Mexico?
As it happened, I needed not to have worried. The thing that your friends want for you, expect from you actually if they are truly friends, is that you take charge of your life, not cower or cling to what's not working. Living a meager of fearful life will put more pressure on friendships than any absence will.
Part-time expat life has kept me from developing a dependence on friends for every holiday. My friends in the US have active lives and are often gone themselves, traveling or visiting their families and children, especially on the big holidays.
Over the years, I saw the folly in basing decisions on where to live on others. Friends can surprise you by re-locating themselves - people you’d never dream would move. Since I started living in Mexico part-time, several friends of mine who loved Denver and said they’d never leave moved to other cities. I know of a number of parents who uprooted lives they enjoyed to be near their grandchildren only to have their children move to other cities for career reasons. Nothing ever stays the same no matter how much we may want it to.
Making the most of the when you are at home
During my months at home in the US, I’m not shy about insisting on getting together a little more often than I did when I lived there full time. My friendships in the United States remain, I believe, just as close as they were when I lived in the U.S. full time. If I had to count our hours together, I would venture to bet that the number of hours spent together are roughly the same as they were before I started coming to Mexico, just in periods more compressed.
Part-time expat lives are always made up of joyous reunions and bittersweet partings. Now that I have departure deadlines, my friends and I put more effort into making plans in the time we have. (A friend of mine wrote a poem about that phenomenon once, how everyone wants to see you...especially when you’re leaving. )
Making friends in Mexico
Making friends in Mexico might be easier that you expect. Expats seek each other out and are more accepting of differences than they might be at home. I’ve found it even easier to make Mexican friends, whom I’ve found to have much less “fear of the stranger” than we do.
Changes in scenery and context, the periods of settling in and then pulling away shakes up your complacency. Finally, after a great deal of anxiety and trial, I woke up one day realizing how lucky I was to be eating at the table of this crazy, two culture feast.
Related Links:
"Beating Loneliness as An Expat" - by Expat Arrivals is a little pessimistic but makes great points.
"Why I'm Thankful to Be An Expat" - from the Wall Street Journal.
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Learning the hard way: What not to say to a Mexican.
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About the author:
Kerry Baker is a partner with Ventanas Mexico which provides insight and resources to people considering full or part-time expat life in Mexico, including "If Only I Had a Place," on renting the smart way in Mexico. The book is a practical guide to expat life by building a strong foundation through where you live. “The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico” is a guide and story of moving to Mexico. Most recently, with food blogger Fabiola Licona Rodriguez, I released a cookbook, The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico.