My friend said the weekly group dinners stopped because one couple got divorced and the group dinners were collateral damage. What does he mean by this? Google answers aren’t clear.
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When a military strikes a target, any civilians or unintended infrastructure that gets destroyed is referred to as collateral damage.
In your case, the divorce is the military strike and the weekly dinner is the unintended casualty.
Collateral damage in this context means things that were unintentionally negatively affected by an unrelated incident. He likely means that group dinners won’t be a thing anymore as it’ll be very awkward or uncomfortable for many now since a couple is no longer together, as a couple in a friend group that later breaks up tends to also split up the friend group as people pick sides. They didn’t intend to cancel group dinners because of it, it was just a negative side effect caused by the divorce.
Another comment explains it perfectly but here’s my take.
Imagine you’re playing with a toy car and accidentally knock over a glass of juice. You didn’t mean to spill the juice; you were just playing with your car. The spilled juice is like collateral damage—it’s something that got messed up by accident when you were trying to do something else.
The divorced couple don’t mean to ruin the dinners, they just wanted freedom.
Collateral damage is damage that happens accidentally, or generally alongside some bigger damage.
It’s frequently used in terms of military strikes – an attack on a platoon of soldiers might cause collateral damage to a building that they holed up in. The building wasn’t the target, but it got wrecked nonetheless.
In your case, your friends got divorced and their relationship blew up. Then because of that, your social life was damaged. Weekly dinners surely weren’t part of the divorce proceedings, but they were damaged in their “fight” regardless.
“Collateral” is used a few different ways but its fundamental meaning is “together with”.
When used with “damage” it means unintended damage caused by an action intended to cause damage to something else.
Unintended losses that result from an action.
From the military. I drop a bomb on a house to kill a guy. Other people die as a result. Those other people, who weren’t my target, are “collateral damage”.
In your case, the bomb was the divorce. The target was their relationship. The collateral damage is the other things that get ruined other than the relationship.
Collateral damage is damage beyond the intended target. The divorce was the primary damage, but presumably the fracturing of friends who sided with one or the other person in the divorcing couple was collateral damage that resulted from the divorce damage.
Collateral damage is a term used so that we can kill innocent people and not feel bad about it.
Collateral damage is the death of other people, not our own. Our own are called innocent victims.
Death of a wedding party when we target a “terrorist”… Collateral damage.
Splintering of a social group after a divorce… Collateral damage.
collateral is the result of indirect conflict from an original conflict. An unrelated thing causing damage to something due to proximity or something similar.
Collateral damage, in the literal sense, is inadvertent casualties or damage to civilians due to military operations. The phrase has come to be used as an analogy for any unintended negative consequences, in a more general way.
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