"There was a woman who loved her husband, but she could not live with him. The husband, on his side, was sincerely attached to his wife, yet he could not live with her. ... They had the most sincere regard for one another, and felt, in some odd way, eternally married to one another. They knew each other more intimately than they knew anybody else, they felt more known to one another than to any other person.
Yet they could not live together. Usually, they kept a thousand miles apart, geographically. But when he sat in the greyness of England, at the back of his mind, with a certain grim fidelity, he was aware of his wife ... away in the sun, in the south. ...
So they remained friends, in the awful unspoken intimacy of the once married."
- D. H. Lawrence, 'Two Blue Birds', in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, (CUP, 1995), p. 5.
As a matter of fact, this is probably quite common - or at least more common than many might imagine. And I have a good deal of sympathy for Compton Mackenzie and his wife, Faith, whom Lawrence is sardonically taking a pop at here, having personally experienced (and survived) a relationship very similar to this one.
It's not easy, but, if you can avoid the fall into private bitterness and secret resentment, you can, I'm very happy to say, eventually find a resolution to what sometimes seems an impossible situation: one that leaves you both free to move on and build new lives, but in which you continue to regard your ex with affection.
Doubtless, it's sometimes necessary to make a clean break with the past and discard those who have at one time or another been nearest and dearest. But as Christopher Hitchens points out, one of the melancholy lessons of advancing years is the realization that you can't make old friends.
