Ex-tended clans: Divorce often leaves some family ties intact

These days, with divorce about as accepted as remarriage, being exes with your spouse doesn't mean exile from him or his family.

Consider those pictures of Bruce Willis popping up with ex Demi Moore and their brood -- and Moore's current husband, Ashton Kutcher. Or the reports of Jennifer Aniston spending quality time with her former in-laws, the Pitts. Christie Brinkley attended the wedding of her most famous former husband, Billy Joel.

"It's part of our life now that all major celebrations that one attends tend to involve people who used to be married or intimate and no longer are," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project.

Laurel Hageseth's relationship with her ex-husband is nonexistent. But 19 years after their divorce, his parents, Norma and Cotton Conrad, remain among the top five most important people in her life.

They visit her in Fort Collins, Colo. She visits them in nearby Golden -- and brings her current husband. They send her birthday cards and homemade Christmas jelly. She pulls their weeds and they display pictures of her at home. And they chat on the phone about Jason, her son and their grandson, and her husband -- but never about the ugliness of the past.

"They just didn't pick a side; that was the most beautiful thing about them," says Hageseth, 50. "They just haven't let me go."

Sometimes it's the husband and wife who don't want to cut all ties. When Deb Cooperman and David Bausman split up in 1997 after seven years, they knew that they wanted "to hang onto the fact that we care about each other," says Cooperman, 46, a marketing director who lives in Millburn, N.J.

Since then, "the depth of our friendship and trust has deepened," Cooperman says. She is actually Bausman's second ex: His first marriage produced a son, and the boy, now in college, still calls Cooperman his stepmother. "I call us a blended, extended, upended family," she says. "Good divorces aren't just for Bruce and Demi."

Fraternizing with former relatives works when a few prerequisites are met, experts say:

Moving on mutually: "Ex-families don't remain, or become, amicable unless the overall feeling is that everybody's better off," says Johanna Tabin, a psychologist in Glencoe, Ill.

Keeping things cozy for the kids: Witness the two-decade rise of joint custody. "Parents are stepping up to the plate a little bit more: 'Whatever our differences, we need to bury the hatchet when it comes to the kids,' " says Sarasota, Fla., psychologist Peter Wish.

Staying securely single: It's all well and good when you've gone separate but equal ways. Bitterness can bite back, however, when one ex remarries, tipping the balance. "If you're both partnered off, that makes it a lot easier," Wish says.

From IndyStar.