I have my kids that I travel with. I have my bicycle that I tour for weeks at a time. I have my motorcycle that I plan on many long weekends with. I have and do those things because I have never had more than $10 until I got divorced. I am perfectly happy not being in any relationship. I'm too busy.
That said, I met a girl 20+ years ago. Married that girl. That girl changed into another girl. That was fine. Then another girl came along and that wasn't fine. There were a lot of problems which helped that girl to develop further into the deep end. Ended up divorced which flipped that girl upside down. Wow!
Had to stay with Mom a few years. Took her to church every Sunday. One Sunday morning, the sermon was on forgiveness which really got into my head. I was going to wait and have a quick talk with the preacher after service. How do you forgive someone who was that hurtful. As I thought that, that's exactly what he started to get into. He talked about forgiveness from afar. I walked out of church that day with Wow going through my head.
Next time I had correspondence with her, still during the divorce process, I worked into and calmed the nastiness coming at me and we had a talk. We had kids, thus had a relationship whether we liked it or not. It could be a bad relationship or a good relationship, that was up to us.
There is no getting back together as a couple, but now a few years later, we took the kids (HS teens) for a long weekend together to NYC. She works retail so works a lot of weekends which I am with the kids most weekends. When she is off, she wants to do something so we all end up going somewhere together as a family still very often. Last year we rented a boat out on Lake Erie and had a blast. As I said, we went a weekend to NYC. We all go out to dinner, I pay on one of the girl's birthday and she pays the other. I and the girls take her somewhere on her birthday, or the closest weekend of the birthday and she and the girls take me somewhere.
I even stay at the house on Christmas Eve and we have Christmas morning together. I am out at the house often and I am reminded when I am in there how she lives and how she doesn't do anything different. That will never change and that's fine, we're no longer married. That is why we are able to be friends now, we don't have that bond that we have to put up with each other's living habits. She can keep on living her self destructing chaotic life and I happily can live mine after fixing everything 17 years destroyed.
It's like we are the best friends we never were when we were married.