Ask a Divorced Person (in 2025)

"How do you jump when jumping / falling takes months?"

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Here’s what I wrote the first time we did this back in 2022, and I don’t think I can improve on it:

Divorce isn’t the solution to every relationship problem. It is, however, the solution to some. Still, for many people, noxious ideological and social forces - particularly amongst bourgeois couples - render it unimaginable. But the truth is that divorce can be liberating. It can be a way of saying no to decades of future spite and resentment. It can ultimately be great for your family as a whole and, just as importantly, for you as an individual. Divorce itself sucks; being divorced can be incredible. I know people know that. But sometimes, when they find themselves contemplating it, they need other people to help them know that — and to talk at length about what was hard, and how it became survivable.

You can read the first round of Ask a Divorced Person here — I still think about the line “leave before there’s nothing left to leave” all the time. Similar to last time, I’m struck by just how many people signed up to be a Divorced Person Question Answerer for this round. People want to talk more about this, about all of it. This is our opportunity to make these conversations more public.

If you find yourself in a relationship that’s resistant to change, if you’re continuously unhappy, and yet you’re terrified of the prospect of losing the safety net of marriage — here’s a place for you to submit questions anonymously, which will be answered by a panel of divorced people of different ages and lived experiences.

And if yourself want to be part of that panel — here’s where you can volunteer your services (you can be as anonymous as you’d like, and we especially need more men to volunteer).

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Thoughts on divorcing for boredom? My husband and I got married young and now 15 years in, I’m realizing we aren’t each others “type”. I’m ADHD; he’s cautious to the point of inaction. I’m full of ideas, hopes, dreams; I like to build things and create art. His hobbies include researching stocks and not going outside. We are good friends and have a good working relationship but we’ve been doing couples therapy for two years and still don’t have our ‘spark’ back. I feel so bored but can’t move on because it feels like a ‘meh’ reason.

CR: This feels familiar, in many ways, and the first thing that comes to mind is some of Cheryl Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” advice. When I first read it, it knocked me on my butt a bit, because it hurt me to admit it was true. What she said was, “You are not a terrible person for wanting to break up with someone you love. You don’t need a reason to leave. Wanting to leave is enough.” I was in my mid-to-late 20s when I first read that, married to my high school sweetheart who had probably never been a good match for me. I loved him, but my life felt small. (He was also not a very good husband, but I digress.) If you were satisfied with being so different, it would be one thing. But you’re clearly not, and we all deserve to eke out whatever happiness we can in this world.

MH: I did not get divorced out of boredom, but I should have. We separated in 2013 (not divorced until 2015, but that’s another infuriating story), after 22 years of marriage — I was also quite young when we got married, and I spent a lot of time in my 20s and 30s trying to be the wife I think he wanted. I felt stifled, controlled, unappreciated, like my dreams would never be as important as what he wanted. And yes, bored. We had almost no shared interests, I didn’t even really like his work friends. (And he emphatically did not like my grad school friends, when that happened.)

I knew it, but I didn’t want to admit it. I even looked up divorce law and divorce attorneys at one point at least ten years before we finally separated. But I was in grad school and had a young child and I just didn’t see how I could manage all that on my own. My affair, five years before the divorce, happened in part because I realized I could have this affair or I would have to leave, and I couldn’t see how to leave. When I reread my journals for all those years, I see a lot of self-talk about how just being unhappy for a while is no reason to dismantle a household and having responsibilities and what I owed my kid. If I’m honest, I probably would have left after my kid went off to college, but he beat me to it. I will always wonder what my son intuited about our relationship and my unhappiness and what that will mean for him as an adult.

So all of that to say, you deserve not just contentment or even happiness but joy. And those you love deserve your joy. If you can’t find that with him, then you need to find it for yourself. If that means divorce, know that it may be difficult and it will be a huge adjustment. But it may also be freeing in ways you can’t even imagine.

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If you were the one who decided to end things — how did you know when you had reached the point where your marriage was not salvageable, or not worth salvaging? My marriage is really hard (a lot of arguing, important broken promises, not a lot of shared joy) but I still deeply care about my husband and there is a part of me that wants to try to save what we once we had.

I’m afraid that, if I end it, I’ll regret not trying harder to save it. I realize this might sound completely absurd but — what if I just can’t see how good I have it?

CR: I wasn’t the one who asked to separate, but I am the one who asked for a divorce after many months of being separated and (I thought) working on our marriage with a counselor. My ex-husband could neither commit to our marriage or to fully leaving it. I did want to save our marriage and tried really hard to do so, but I reached a point where it both hurt too much and I felt that I was worth more than being someone this man could not commit to.

ZS: I was with my ex-spouse for eight years and married for three. I loved my spouse and the idea of a happily-ever-after love story, but marriage was harder than I expected. We first broached the topic of divorce around our one-year wedding anniversary. At the time, it felt like an escape hatch from recurring conflicts in our relationship. I don’t think either of us actually wanted to leave, but we also didn’t know how to get unstuck from what felt persistently hard about our relationship.

In our third year of marriage, I was the one who left. In the lead-up to leaving, I cycled between thoughts of divorce (which felt liberating, scary and shameful) and working hard at repairing our relationship. We were both trying but our efforts felt lopsided. Like many women, I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could save our marriage. Now I know that one person can’t do a whole relationship’s worth of salvage and repair work. My decision to leave was catalyzed by a fight that was like all of our other conflicts, but worse. It finally dawned on me that leaving was the only viable way for me to escape the patterns we had created. I couldn’t save our marriage but I could save myself, so I did.

I empathize with your desire to try to save what you once had. Here’s the thing: you don’t have that relationship anymore, you have the marriage it has become, in all its faults and beauties. There is good there, and lots of hard stuff, too, and only you get to decide when the ratio of good-to-hard feels untenable enough to leave. Choosing a path opens us to the possibility of regretting, or feeling grief over, paths not taken. It also opens us to possibilities we haven’t imagined yet, like finding a love that feels easy. I have had that kind of love for a decade now, and it’s taught me that every relationship takes work and tending, but it doesn’t have to feel like pushing a boulder uphill.

MH: I’m not the one who left — I was in fact entirely shocked by his demand for a divorce — but I ended up being the one who had to do the work to make the divorce happen. And I was the one who said no when he wanted to come back 6 months later. The moment I knew I’d made my peace was when he asked that question and I did not dither or hesitate over the answer, I did not feel at all conflicted. I just knew.

Here’s what I would say: First, it is possible to care about someone and not want to be married to that person anymore, for any number of reasons. And it may even be that divorce is the right answer for him, too. It’s unfair, but someone has to be brave enough to be the first one to say it. Second, you don’t say whether you’ve had a conversation with your husband about the state of your relationship — have you talked about divorce? My husband did not talk with me, he just announced his intent, but I think often about what difference that conversation might have made. Maybe it would have resulted in us recommitting or maybe it would have resulted in an agreement that divorce was the right thing. Either outcome would have been less painful and more constructive than the unilateral decision. And I think it would have been clarifying. (And in retrospect that unilateral decision was a really key indicator that the marriage was or should be over.) Maybe that conversation would help you figure it out.

Finally, divorce is like any other decision in that you can’t possibly know all the ramifications and outcomes. So yes, you may regret it. But it’s also not entirely irreversible, if the other party agrees. So there’s that. Also, it’s not divorce/don’t divorce, there are all kinds of interim steps you can try — counseling, separation both come to mind. And counseling for yourself to work out what you want.

And “how good you have it” is perilously close to a sunk cost fallacy. If you can’t shake off that thinking, at least try to imagine what would be worse about a divorce and whether you can imagine yourself surviving that, or even thriving. And what might be better! So much was better . . . in ways I never anticipated.

AS: Although I wasn’t the one who walked out the door on my 16 year marriage, I was first to file papers shortly after — so how you score that is a little murky (and apparently not an uncommon experience!)

But about six years before the divorce there was a crisis moment where I seriously considered leaving and decided to stay, and I think that’s more relevant to your situation. In the fullness of time, that didn’t prove to be a wise decision. If I’ve learned anything from sci-fi, it’s that pursuing alternate time lines leads to unintended consequences, so while I wouldn’t undo the decision if I could, I also now think it was a mistake.

I’m sharing this with you because as you well know, there is a lot of cultural pressure and inertia and also probably some good reasons to stay in a struggling marriage. (As you say you care deeply for your husband, and there are reasons for that.) And there are also a lot of heroic narratives about people “saving” it, and if you caught me at some point in those six years before the divorce I might have told you mine.

(And with that said— there are obviously people who did stay in their relationships and worked it out for the long run, however that’s defined.)

I chose to stay in that crisis moment largely because it was hard to imagine leaving. We’d been together since I was 17 and at that point I was in my early 30s. Most of our friends were just getting married and at that point I didn’t know anyone in our peer group who was divorced. I also thought that I’d invested a lot in him and us: at that time I was actually putting him through law school in Manhattan on a freelance writer’s income and it was HARD. I wanted what we’d been working towards. And — if I’m really honest— I wanted to be smart and wise and I didn’t want to have made a massive mistake.

What I didn’t do was adequately consider what I’d learned about my husband’s character from the crisis. Those issues — deceit, self-absolution, blame shifting — were deep fissures that I didn’t really want to see, and that didn’t go away. You mentioned important broken promises, and that stood out to me more than the arguing and so forth.

In disasters like airplane crashes, at some point they shift from “rescue” to “recovery” and as you say, are the moment of deciding which you’re in. I could suggest some thought experiments: if divorce was suddenly off the table as an option, like it became illegal, how would you feel? Or if he ended things tomorrow?

But really, my advice is to let yourself know what you already know. In that six year period between crisis and divorce I said to a friend many times that I thought it was not a question of not if but when my then-husband would return to his deceptive ways. There was just a gap between that knowledge and my willingness to truly believe it and act accordingly.

I would also say that even if you decide to stay for now, you aren’t making the decision forever. If you are really unsure, you could give it some amount of time with counseling and then revisit. But I would suggest that if it’s safe for you to do so, and if you haven’t shared with your husband that you’re eyeing the exits, you probably should. He does need to know that he’s on thin ice, and how he responds to that will be very informative for you.

EH: I decided I was done. Months before our 14-year anniversary in our 19-year relationship.

It was years of struggling and trying and therapy. Nothing is linear in life but overall our marriage was nose diving to a crash. And I felt the tether snap. I just said- of all the things that we tried to fix to make him happy so “we” would be happy, nothing is changing. And I couldn’t put myself last anymore. I was completely empty. I had nothing left to give. I told him I wanted him to be happy and clearly that wasn’t with me. But we both deserved the chance to be happy.

I got there after a few points. I was talking to a close friend about how things were going and she said “god, do you think in 20 years we are going to have the same complaints about them (our husbands)?”

And I said: “No.” and I meant it. Finally, I said: I cannot do this anymore. The vision of this being my stasis was unacceptable.

I also recognized that we were completely different people then when we got together almost 20 years ago. We were not on the same wave length anymore. Therefore our needs were so deeply unmet it was a void that could not be filled. So the “who we used to be” was never going to come back because those people were not coming back.

I refused to let my daughters see how I was being treated and thinking it was ok. Not the example I was willing to give them. I would show them better to be on my own.

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My ex and I have been separated for two and a half years, but because of the cost of housing, he was unable to move out until last week. We have kids that are turning 4 and 8, and they are aware that we are no longer together and have handled the change in living situations well so far. My ex and I originally agreed that they should stay in their home (my house) during the school week, and their dad would come here on his days, and they'd stay with him at his place every other weekend (he works every other weekend).

We made that decision especially because my older one has ADHD and is super sensitive to change and disruption in routine. However, once he moved out and my kids were super psyched about all the fun things at "daddy's new house," I quickly realized that his house will be the fun zone — no rushed school mornings, no homework, no necessary schedules, takeout every night because he doesn't cook, etc.

I am now worried they will see their dad's house as the fun house and mine as the house of structure and rules, and they will resent/dread coming back here (my older one in particular, who has a hard time with transitions like that, and whose preferred parent is his dad). I *swear* this doesn't come from a place of jealousy, I just want their home lives to feel balanced. I would love ANY feedback, a collection of opinions to figure this out!

EH: I have my kids five to six nights a week because of their dad’s work situation, and it made sense for their school schedule to be at my house during the week. They would go to dads Friday nights and a Saturday if I was working. From my perspective, this felt like me keeping the kids as my priority and making sure their needs were met. At the time, I very much felt that way: dad got pizza Fridays and out for breakfast on weekends. And yes, maybe it was like that temporarily, but you are the consistent parent and house and they will understand that later. You will stay their base. They need that time with their other parent and you will learn to appreciate that time away. Because it hard on your own.

I will tell you a year into our divorce, I finally had to push back hard to claim some time and space for myself. They were ALWAYS at my house. And if I was working they were waiting for me when I got home. There was a severe lack of balance in time off we have had to renegotiate.

ZS: I noticed several strands in your question: 1) A desire to create supportive rhythms and environments for both of your kids, including limiting change and disruption to routine; 2) Worrying your kids will see their dad’s house as the fun house and yours as the house of structure and rules (with the added factor of dad being your older kid’s preferred parent); and 3) A related worry that they will resent/dread coming back to your place.

Strand #1 seems to be mostly about your kids (and the things we do as parents to make our lives easier and more harmonious by making our kids’ lives easier and more harmonious). There are practical aspects to this, as reflected in your custody agreement. I’m curious whether you and your ex have articulated any shared values or other guiding principles that will help you hold a consistent enough container around this transition for your kids, and what your kids have told you they need. It’s also true that you and your ex probably won’t do a lot of stuff the same way, and while that might be frustrating, it’s mostly out of your control.

Strands #2 and #3 are more about your feelings about what your kids think of you and your home. I wonder if they carry a bigger emotional charge, and if they’re tied to how you feel about yourself as a parent. I get that this question isn’t coming from a place of jealousy, and it’s also okay to have a feeling about not being FUN! PARTY! DAD! when your family system and life rhythms are undergoing such significant changes.

I can’t help but read your question through gender-coloured classes and am making the assumption that you’re the ex-wife and mother in this scenario. (If I’m inadvertently being heterosexist, I apologize! I am in fact super gay but have been studying gender and care work for 20+ years and the gendered division of labour stats don’t lie). It’s not uncommon for women to bear a more significant burden of parenting labour, especially the kind that facilitates the cooking of dinners, the doing of homework and the establishment of predictable family rhythms that give kids the kind of structure that feels safe and developmentally necessary.

Your ex’s house might end up being dad’s playground, and you might continue holding a disproportionate but necessary amount of the structure and attendant caregiving responsibilities. What will help you stay anchored in, and continuing to nurture, your own strong relationships with your kids? What kinds of rituals will you and your kids create to infuse a spirit of fun and play into your home (without the added pressure of having to make everything a game)? What will help you show love and compassion to yourself as a parent who is doing their best for their kids during a significant transition in your lives and the life of your family?

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How do you force yourself to go through with it, knowing it’s necessary, when the backlash and the blame (“you’re the bad one”) feel huge? And your kids might believe the (false) version the other person tells. How do you jump when jumping / falling takes months?

AS: I can’t speak personally to the kids issue since I’m not a parent, but my understanding is that non-disparagement clauses in separation agreements are pretty standard, for whatever that’s worth. and that badmouthing a former spouse to kids is an extremely common and known issue, and so there is a lot of info and resources out there for it. Also, if it’s appropriate to your situation, the mediation process, and collaborative attorneys can make this a focus in a way that the court system can’t.

In terms of the reaction of adults — I think it’s natural to worry about it. A divorce does change the social fabric: there are ripple effects for sure, and they are unpredictable. Humans notoriously dislike instability and being perceived as the cause of it isn’t always a path to popularity (and I would also say gently: this isn’t a months long process you’re talking about, but years.)

The typical good advice here is not to worry about what others think since you can’t control it. And you can’t! The truth is that most of the people you know already have formed opinions of your marriage even if they haven’t shared it with you. And even if they haven’t thought about it, they are probably already pre-disposed to one of you, and there’s not much you can do about that.

But you just can’t center others’ opinions and reactions in your decision making. They aren’t the ones in your marriage! If you have decided that divorce is what you’re doing, and since you have a sense of the backlash you may face, the only thing you can control is your own behavior. If you behave honorably throughout the process (and initiating a divorce doesn’t automatically count as dishonorable) you’ve done what you can.

I was not the “bad one” in my divorce — all of our mutual friends ultimately ended their relationship with him, even some friendships that he brought into the relationship (childhood friends, work colleagues etc.) My divorce has had and has a very long litigation aftermath and this contributed to the side-taking, I’m sure.

Some things I thought helped me/hurt him in this regard: I didn’t ask anyone to take a side; in fact I encouraged them to maintain their relationship with my ex. I think that being willing to see and shoulder my less-than-good moments in the divorce, helped me with our mutuals, and conversely his insistence that he was perfect and I was terrible hurt him. Also didn’t help that he expected our friends to just seamlessly slot in his new relationship into my place and was pissed that they felt weird about it. (That new relationship also didn’t last a year, btw, which isn’t on point but I’m not above mentioning it.)

But honestly the fact that you are asking this at all tells me that you are not an asshole and will do just fine with the people who matter most. The real “bad ones” out there don’t think about this kind of thing at all.

ZS: How do you jump when jumping / falling takes months? You put on a parachute, pack what you need to sustain yourself for the journey and figure out how to soften the landing, ideally with the help of a support team. I’ve never jumped out of an airplane but I have gotten divorced, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of my friends (and my therapist). Who will you ask to be on your support team and what roles do you need them to play? How might you cultivate spaces where you feel safe to fall apart, grieve, rage and savour the pleasure of leaving?

As for fearing backlash and being scapegoated as “the bad one,” I find it helpful to remember that when relationships end, folks tend to create their own narratives about why and who to blame. You can’t control other people’s narratives, but you can ask yourself whose opinions matter the most. From the framing of your question, I’m guessing this might be your kids.

How do you want them to see you behave throughout this process, and what do you want them to feel or remember about you? What values might serve as your compass when things get hard? How will you offer compassion to the parts of yourself who most fear being labeled as bad? You can’t control what your ex, or anyone else, says or thinks about you, but you are in control of your actions, and your support team can help hold you accountable to your values if that’s a role you want them to play.

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I hear a lot about overcoming a type of sunk cost fallacy and finding empowerment via divorce (moreso if you’re the one initiating the split). I hear little about regret that comes from the choice to divorce. Have you regretted your choice to divorce? If so, why?

AS: I don’t regret it, and I also haven’t heard much about this! Although I’ve seen it in movies, and I’ve heard told that there are real life instances of former spouses remarrying each other, I personally have never met anyone who really regrets their divorce. Even though it is often so very hard.

I think by the time it is over it doesn’t seem like it was a choice as much as inevitably. Also, you get to know your former spouse in an entirely different way. I would imagine that for many, that bell doesn’t unring. (Caveat that I have had an especially difficult divorce, although I felt this way in the brief period I had before he started post divorce litigation.) You also get to know yourself in a different way. I’m struck by how several of us on this panel married young, as I did — I wonder if that is less true for people who marry older and have more of a developed sense of themselves going in.

I do know people who wish they could wave a magic wand and make it so the divorce never happened. So maybe that counts as regret? I did have moments of that in the early going, when my previous life felt more tangible, like it was something I could simply step back into. But pretty quickly I knew I wouldn’t go back if it was offered to me. My life was and is much better.

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What was the single best piece of (solicited) advice you received as you were making the daily decision to leave or to stay in your marriage?

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What question was HELPFUL that someone asked instead of being rude or intrusive? It’s hard to know what to say — I want to say something supportive or curious to be a good friend but feel like my questions might make me seem like a dick.

MH: I so wish I had an answer to this question.

Things not to say (actually from my experience):

• “You’re so calm, why aren’t you more angry/sad/whatever?”

• “I ran into [ex] the other day, and we had a chat, and I think you’re both so much better off/happier now.” (My mother, actually. I did not respond well.)

• “But did you really think about letting him come back? Divorce is so expensive.”

I think supportive and curious is the right way to come at it. Rude and intrusive happens when your reach exceeds your relationship, so gauge what makes sense in the context of your relationship with the person. The person who asked why I wasn’t more angry was not the kind of friend who had earned access to my feelings.

Ask [the person in your life who’s divorcing] what they’re going through and what they need. I needed someone I could vent my rage to safely. I needed someone who could help me see the funny side of the whole thing. I really needed someone who could just listen, with no stake and no judgment. I sometimes had those things, but not as consistently as I needed them. So maybe a simple, how are you doing? What do you need? Do we need a “wine and whine” session? Or just show up with the wine. And if there are kids, always, always be aware of where they are when these conversations happen and make sure you’re not opening a can of worms around ears that don’t need the details.

AS: Oh such a hard agree with MH about characterizing how good someone seems to be doing! I got a lot of “you’re doing so great!” in the first few months. And on one level it was nice to hear, but on another it felt like praise for not showing my messiness, which led to some extra disappointment with myself when some of it inevitably leaked out!.

I truly disliked unsolicited advice from married people who’d never divorced — since it was inevitably a barely cloaked expression of their own anxiety and/or pre-justifications about how and why what happened to me would never happen to them.

Along those lines, I also agree with asking what’s needed or desired. I actually made a document for my first friend who got divorced after me about what I’d learned: “notes for the road ahead” — and I’d offer it for friends that came after that. I think the most useful advice in it is something I was told: how you feel now isn’t how you will feel forever. You won’t “get over it” but your life will stretch to accommodate and grow around this experience.

But that was during and after the divorce. You were asking about this for someone who is in the process of deciding. I think a friend’s role here is to actively listen, pledge support however the decision goes, and to try not impose their own anxieties and preferences onto the situation. Truly I think that this kind of advice is best given in the context of therapy because it’s so tricky! Even if you think you’re being supportive of what seems clearly headed towards separation, the person could easily change their mind and that can leave a mark on a friendship.

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Our Divorced Panel (I try very hard to get an array of experiences in here; some people who would’ve added even more perspectives were too busy for this particular round but I’ll keep endeavoring to expand the experiences for future rounds)

CR: I married (23) and divorced young (31), no kids. He was my childhood sweetheart — we were very different and always had been, but I guess that matters less when you’re kids. We had a lot of ups and downs–I see now that I took the idea that marriage is hard work to justify how hard life with him was. I was also so afraid to blow my whole life up, especially in the wake of my father’s death. We separated at his request after 7 years, and then I asked for a divorce about 10 months later. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out who I was on my own and what I deserved, which I would recommend to anyone going through or considering divorce. I am remarried now to the absolute best person — he is the type of husband I dreamed of having. It was so, so hard. But my life now is so much better, and I believe it would be whether I had met my now-husband or not (but I’m glad I did).

ZS is a white queer woman in her mid 40s who got gay married and gay divorced in her early thirties, right after her mom died (see also: the portal). She and her ex don’t talk anymore. She’s been happily unmarried to her current partner for a decade.

MH: Married way too young (22), separated at 45 with one kid, divorce finally came through almost 3 years later. The year after the divorce was hard, but necessary — I learned how to be alone, what I wanted, and that I could manage things on my own. And I do think some of it was that menopause portal that’s discussed elsewhere. I am remarried now, the very last thing on my post-divorce bucket list, but the relationship is so very different and so very freeing.

AS: I met my future ex at age 17, married him at 21, we divorced at 37, I happily repartnered at 40, which was ten years ago! Less happily, the ex-husband has tirelessly challenged and defaulted on our separation agreement (all relating to money, no kids) in many courts, including his three failed attempts at bankruptcy. This has gone on for most of the 13 years we’ve been divorced. We also went through mediation so I feel like I’ve had a close look at the various ways a divorce can play out. I’m a cis straight white female.

EH: Met at age 19 then dated at age 21 married at 27, separate right before our 14th wedding anniversary (age 40). . So together 19 years. 2 girls under 10. Full time working mom in a high stress career. We did mediation and our divorce was simple. Life with children and divorce never is. In our relationship and marriage I was the default/primary everything. The mental load with kids and my career and a houshd became crushing. And he didn’t get it. Still doesn’t. I am still the default parent, primary everything and my house is the base for the kids.

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Have additional advice for any of the question-askers above? Please share in the comments below — but also try and model the same sort of non-assholeishness and generosity of the advice-givers above.

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