You’re Divorced. Congratulations.
What do you actually say when someone tells you they’ve separated? I’ve started thinking “congratulations” might be the right response, but I still haven’t managed to say it out loud. I still default to “I’m sorry.” Probably because I’ve been through it myself, and I know exactly how much it hurts.
What would I have done if someone had congratulated me? A lot of people tried some version of it, in their own way. Friends and family told me I’d be better off, happier, that things would get easier eventually. I didn’t believe a word of it. What did they know? They hadn’t lived it. They were all still tucked safely inside their own marriages, good or bad, and I mentally argued with every reassurance, twisting reality until I’d convinced myself separation really was as soul-destroying as it felt.
The people who actually were divorced looked on with more genuine commiseration. Yes, it’s hard, they’d say, and it takes at least two years, sometimes three, to really get past it. One man told me he considered himself lucky, since at least his job had stayed constant while everything else in his life fell apart around him. All I could think was: great, I’m getting divorced, and I don’t even have that. I’d been a stay-at-home mom before all this started, and now everyone was telling me I’d need to give that up entirely and go find paying work on top of everything else.
I spent well over a year in real misery. A year and two months, if we’re being precise. Then I hit a point where I finally thought: I do not want to keep feeling this way.
The thought that kept looping through my head during that stretch was: I’ve been a good person, I followed all the rules, I did everything I was supposed to, and my life is still a disaster.
Realizing that everything I’d done “right” up to that point had still led me exactly here was what finally pushed me to try something different. I felt like I had nothing left to lose. I was already in so much pain that it was hard to imagine feeling any worse, no matter what I tried next.
Oddly, that thought turned out to be motivating rather than bleak. I effectively got a blank slate. Nothing I did from that point forward could realistically make things feel worse than they already did, which meant I was suddenly free to try things I never would have risked before. There was genuinely nowhere to go from there but up.
Finding my new way forward has been real work, and genuinely hard, but it’s also been hopeful the whole way through. These days I think of my divorce as the actual beginning, the push I needed to build a life designed by me instead of dictated by everyone else’s expectations. So now, when I tell people I’m newly divorced, I remind them: congratulations is the right response.
