Friend from high school

It's late so I'll keep this short.

As part of Working Out Loud, I joined Twitter. When I joined Twitter, I had to follow somebody. One of the people I chose was a fellow who works in tech now (in a whole different city from me) but who was my best friend in high school. I have mentioned him briefly in passing twice before: here and here. I'll call him Dale. Since I haven't been in touch with Dale much lately, I snooped around on Google to find out what's going on with him. And I found out he's divorced.

Now, I would never have expected Dale to divorce. He's a born-again Christian, and I always assumed that he would consider divorce unthinkable. But then, once upon a time I considered it unthinkable. You folks remember that from the earliest posts in this blog. Opinions change.

So I wrote him an e-mail to ask about it. And I got a reply in which he said that the marriage had been dead for a long time but he finally last year took the steps to end it for good. (Dale got married the year after I did. When he said "It's been dead since ..." the year he mentioned was the year before Son 1 was born. That's a long time.)

It actually looks like there are a lot of similarities between his story and mine. We've been married about the same length of time. We began to end it around similar times. Each marriage generated two sons. And ... this is what really struck me ... Dale's wife suffers from fibromyalgia and depression, just like Wife does. When I joked to Dale that Wife and I had picked "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" as "our play" he answered that the similarities between my marriage and his were so significant they were creepy. He couldn't stay to discuss it any more because he was about to leave on a trip to take one of his sons to Japan for a week. But I hope to talk to him more later.

I wonder if he ever had an affair? Or if she did?