We have come a long way - but divorce is still widely seen as a bit of a failure. Engagements and weddings are celebrated (whether the couple is a good match seems secondary, people go all out with the confetti because omg you’re being promoted to wife/husband status!!!) but the status of ‘divorcee’ still has a strange ring to it. Doesn’t sound quite so celebratory or sexy.
There are very few people who will congratulate you on getting divorced - I am one of them.
Because every divorce happens for a reason - and on the other side of it, things are better. That needs to be celebrated as much as a wedding is.
It’s seen as an achievement to stay together for decades - and don’t get me wrong, it definitely is an achievement if that relationship is marked by growth, mutual love and mutual effort.
‘They’ve been together 47 years! What an achievement!’ ‘The older generation really knew how to stick it out!’
There is a whole book to be written about why people ‘stuck it out’ back in the day, when women didn’t have their own money, little rights, when being divorced meant being unsafe, there is a lot to be said about the role religion plays in that as well - point is, there are many reasons why our grandparents never got divorced. And in a lot of cases it has nothing to do with the health of the relationship. Most of the relationships I have witnessed in my own family were trauma bonds that would have been better off not existing. They were destructive and toxic. But they stayed together for lack of other options and for the sake of longevity.
Longevity alone is no achievement. Longevity isn’t success. Growth is success.
We grow apart with childhood friends and make new connections when we grow up, because who we were at 13 is not who we are at 35.
Why is it so odd that the same inevitably can happen in any other relationship, in a marriage?
If two people recognise that they cannot grow together anymore, that they’ve grown in very different directions and are not compatible anymore like they were when they were 21 - that awareness is a success. Deciding to let each other go not because there is no love, but precisely because there is: you want what is best for the other person - is a success.
The day I moved out and separated from my Ex-husband, and the hundreds of days that followed after, were some of the darkest of my life, but he and I had a great, clean and easy divorce.
I am going to share how we did it.
This is not a guide that will work for everyone. The process of divorcing will be different depending on the reasons why you are getting divorced and who initiates it. But it’s what I believe was right for us and it was hugely important to me that I acted aligned with my values.