Sometimes you just get a feeling

This morning I had a sad conversation with a cherished friend. This is a woman with whom I work periodically (she’s a filmmaker) and she is somebody I’ve known since she was just past being a slip-of-a-girl in the later 1980s. We worked next door to each other (I at a newspaper, and she at a TV studio), and we ended up becoming friends. Not ‘that’ sort of friend; though I confess the idea did cross my mind a few times. Nothing happened in that regard, but we remained pretty steadfast in our friendship.

Later, when she moved away, and after our respective marriages had dissolved, we would visit each other and stay at each other’s places – in an entirely respectable manner. It was one of those opposite sex friendships in which no boundaries can be pushed, just so the friendship can remain intact.

Anyway, as my life was a little fractured on the domestic front for a number of years, it was less so than hers. By the time she was 30 she had two failed marriages behind her, and two children from each of the marriages. Then, as years passed, she met somebody else and embarked on a third marriage, and had another child. I was happy for her this time around, because he seemed like a great guy and also appeared comfortable in taking on the two children, who came as a package with the pretty mommy.

Anyway, this morning I phoned her because I am back in my ‘alternate’ community, which is where she lives. She told me she had some good news for me, and that is that a film-project in which I am to be involved with her, has been accepted by the principals in the story, so that will throw some fairly lucrative work my way.

And then she told me that she had some “bad news” and that was that she and husband Number Three had split over the weekend! I was quite flabbergasted by her news and, of course, felt immediate sympathy for her after having received a message I wasn’t anticipating.

Or was I?

There was something. Women are supposed to have intuition about such matters, but theoretically men do not. Yet, for some reason, right from the time I first met her husband – one of those guys who falls easily into that “prince of a fellow” category, whom I liked immediately – there was, as I say, ‘something.’

As I say, I’ve known her for a long time and we were always quite ‘non-intimate’ close – probably a bit more like simpatico siblings than anything else – so maybe I have instincts I didn’t realize I had. I said to Wendy when I told her (and she was almost more flabbergasted than I) that I’d always had the uneasy feeling about the marriage that it would eventually be a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if’ it would come to an end.

She’d never told me there were problems, other than the normal stuff. But I somehow read that the ‘problems’ were deeper than anybody was verbally letting on.

So, there she is, this bright, creative, striking, witty female who just turned 40 with three kids from her three marriages, adrift once more. That part I don’t understand. And my instincts about my dear friend don’t tell me for a second why her relationships don’t work. To me she'd be a prize at all levels.

Maybe they’ll work it out. My gut tells me they won’t. Sometimes you just get a feeling.