The gang — three couples made up of middle-aged friends from college plus long-term partners — reunites every year at a rented lakeside cottage to drink wine, cook huge meals and reflect smugly on how brilliantly their lives have turned out. Except this year, the vibe is unsettlingly different. Nick is confiding in the others that he’s miserable in his 25-year marriage to Anne. Fast-forward to later in the year. The group is still holidaying together, this time in a frill-free eco-resort, but Anne is nowhere to be seen, while Nick is with his much younger new girlfriend, Ginny, who had found the “zero-waste hotel” on Instagram, provoking Nick’s old friend Kate to exclaim: “Why does he have to bring his midlife crisis on my vacation?”
Such is the premise of Netflix’s new drama The Four Seasons — an eight-parter starting on Thursday, starring Tina Fey and Steve Carell, about the repercussions of Anne and Nick’s break-up for the wider group. The show is a comedy but many watching might wish it had come with a trigger warning, so painful are the memories it evokes.
Most friends find they have to “choose” a side in a divorce, even if they’re fond of both halves of the couple, meaning one person is almost inevitably rejected. “My ex-wife and I went on holiday every year with the same group of friends,” says Jack, 59, who divorced acrimoniously eight years ago after almost two decades of marriage and four children. “I actually paid for them all to come away for my 50th. But after the divorce, the following year I heard nothing from any of them and I certainly wasn’t invited on another holiday. My wife — like most wives — had been the one to organise our social life and so the other wives took her side and the husbands took the cue from them.”
Meanwhile, Michelle, 52, has almost completely cut ties with Jamie, one of her oldest friends from school, after he announced he was leaving his wife, Nicola, because he’d got his mistress pregnant. Even though the friendship group had only known Nicola for five years, they decided to keep inviting her to camping weekends away and excluded him. “We’d secretly miss Jamie because he was the life and soul, and Nicola’s new boyfriend was the silent type, but we felt guilty on Jamie’s behalf about the way he’d treated her,” she explains. “In any case, Jamie’s new partner didn’t want to know us, so he rapidly vanished from our lives. It was incredibly sad and painful.”
According to the love coach and counsellor Lucy Cavendish, such situations are inevitable for the 42 per cent of us whose marriages end with a decree absolute. “When I got divorced, all the friends I’d known as a couple fell by the wayside,” she says. “Many people have been in a couple for a very long time and don’t have their own friends, so it’s a big shock when they find out how much of their value rested on them being in one half of a couple. A lot of people end up feeling quite lonely and scared at having to start again and make new friends. It’s one of the many ways in which divorce leads to loss of status.”
Just as in The Four Seasons, many friendship groups are unsettled by having to allow a new partner into the circle. For more than 30 years, Susan, 60, has travelled to the same villa in Italy for one long weekend every September with a group of friends, dating back to university days. “Then, three years ago, Ali, who was a key member of the group, died,” she recalls. “We’d all tolerated her wet-wipe husband, Simon, for decades, but then Simon announced he’d still be coming the next year, but with his new partner. She was much younger than us and a loud-mouthed tinfoil-hatter who Ali would have hated more than anyone. She spent the entire weekend scanning the horizon for 5G masts and asking us in a pitying voice if we’d ever had any vaccinations and did we not see the connection between those and our current sciatica or migraines. This year we’re having to pretend to Simon that the holiday’s not happening because we can’t face that again. We’ve had to set up a separate WhatsApp group and enforce a social media blackout.”
• I’m splitting up with my husband — who gets the friends and the cats?
Emily, 33, experienced the situation the other way round when her boyfriend Jacob invited her on holiday with friends last summer. “They kept praising Rachel, his ex — wasn’t she great at paddleboarding, didn’t she do a fabulous Dolly Parton at karaoke? I couldn’t work out if they deliberately wanted to exclude me, but I felt awkward. I refuse to do it again. Jacob thinks I’m overreacting.”
At the same time, being around someone who has survived divorce can make us question our own relationship. Research shows divorce is contagious in friendship groups, with one study by Brown University revealing that the break-up of a close friend’s or family member’s marriage increases the likelihood of your divorcing by 75 per cent.
The Four Seasons shows the remaining smug-marrieds growing increasingly tetchy with each other after the seemingly perfect couple they thought they knew is revealed as miserable. “We all play a game of being happy couples — some have done the work and actually are happy, but others are just fooling themselves. They reassure themselves that no relationship is perfect and we all hobble on. But when another couple in the group splits, those beliefs go out of the window,” Cavendish says.
Other friendship groups simply refuse to acknowledge that one couple has moved on. Friends of Susanna, 44, insisted both she and her ex, Chris, join them on their villa holiday as they had for the previous 20 years. “It had been a civilised divorce, our kids were great friends with their kids, and one friend in particular kept moaning, ‘It’ll be weird if you don’t both come.’ Luckily, Chris didn’t go — he found the idea ridiculous — so I went with the kids, but everyone kept harping on about, ‘Oh, remember how great Chris is at windsurfing. Isn’t it a shame he’s not here to teach the kids?’ I won’t join them next year.”
Names and some details have been changed
