You can call me Wes. It's easier than the screen name. Although you aren't divorced yet, our situations are disturbingly too familiar. The friendship part...the getting together for dinners..family time. Like you, I was never sure if it was good or bad to spend so much time together. It appears that time together and our budding friendship did nothing to delay or prevent divorce. Will it in your case? Who knows. Will suddenly going dark help her realize that she misses you? I don't know. What has been her behavior to no contact in the past?
I worry that we are being used. We make ourselves accessible as a source of adult companionship instead of them always being alone with children. It isn't easy for a single mom to have stress free time out to dinner with her children and a date. Maybe we provide the date without the stress. They get to have the happy family together again for a little family time. Plus, in our new found DB way, we listen to what they have to say and obligingly nod our heads and validate.
So it's very difficult. Do we accept the invitations and enjoy time with our spouses/ex-spouses and hope that the friendship will blossom into more or do we avoid time together and hope that "distance makes the heart grow fonder"? The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. I always think that she will miss me more if she remembers the recent positive interactions with me rather than the years of resentments from the marriage.
In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years. Abraham Lincoln
It is hard to fail, but it is worse never to have tried to succeed. Theodore Roosevelt
