


Episode 65. You’re Not Ready for Divorce Until You Hear This
Jun 14
7 min read
What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “You’re Not Ready for Divorce Until You Hear This.”
When I told my five-year-old, his mom and I were divorcing. I was practically crying, and his response was, it's okay, daddy. I don't care if you split up. If only that was true. He's seven now and struggles more deeply than ever with the fact that the two people he loves most are not together. The ramifications of divorce go beyond what I think we like to imagine.
Sometimes over 50% of marriages today are expected to fail. Maybe it's just easier to divorce or maybe the social stigma is less, or possibly we've simply lost our ability to be content with whoever we happen to be with. But regardless, I don't think people fully comprehend the true cost. To the best of my ability, I'm going to outline more or less what I think you can expect to happen to you if you choose to go through with a divorce.
If you happen to be cheating, this may or may not apply to you in exactly the same way, but I. We all know there is a very serious and long-lasting price to be paid for doing that for everyone else. I think this is what you can expect. Divorce begins with a kind of quiet collapse. It's almost like a mushroom.
By the time you actually see a mushroom popping out, it's already completely infiltrated. Whatever it happens to have been growing on. At the beginning of a divorce typically happens a very long time before the actual divorce happens. If you're lucky, maybe you can actually manage to turn things around before it's over.
I read once in a Gottman book that one of the biggest tells as to whether or not a couple gets divorced is when one of them no longer takes any interest in the other's observations. Like, for example, if one of 'em were to point out a pretty bird, the other might just shrug it off and say, very nice deer without ever looking up.
As things get a little worse, the cracks become more visible, and you or your spouse may begin to question if you should actually stay together. You may or may not take it seriously or you may try to do something about it. Maybe you make excuses for the things that they're doing that you don't like, or maybe you make excuses for yourself.
The next part is when things get very real. It's when you finally decide that you cannot continue. Or you finally come to believe that your spouse is actually committed to following through with the divorce. This is the point where you now know that this is going to happen. You're going to have a breakdown, and the world you had is now falling apart.
Your ideas about the future begin to burn away. You will collapse. Having a mountain fall on you will sometimes sound preferable to your existence during this time. For me, this lasted about a month. Next is the point at which you're going to decide how to react to this. You may go into full scale recovery mode and try to win her or him back.
You may despise them for the rejection of you and start taking the scorched earth approach to the divorce or. Maybe you'll simply cut them off. Maybe you frantically go and look for a new person in your life to Band-Aid over the hurt. It's also possible that you simply accept your new reality and try to work through the process causing the least amount of damage.
Once you pass that initial reaction, you're going to settle into a new kind of normal. Now, this could be post-divorce, or it could be pre-divorce, depending on how long the legalities happen to take. But this is a time when you are going to go through withdrawals. No matter how terrible they were to you, you are going to have intense moments of missing them.
That empty bed is going to mess with your head. There will be moments you can hardly breathe. You will be desperate for human connection, and this is the time you'll be the most vulnerable to making bad decisions because you are so desperate for the pain to go away. There might be days you find a reason to go to the store, simply to exist around other people, and honestly, that will be a good move for you.
No matter how introverted you are, you will need other people to help you get through this. The human soul can only bear so much without others coming to take on even the smallest part of that burden. Other people are going to be healing for you. Not only that, but they may be the only way for you to heal completely.
So, once you make it past this most intense period of mourning, this is the point that you're going to start putting the pieces back together. When a person has been so bound with another person like you are in a marriage, who you are is tied up into your marriage and who you were when you were married.
It is not going to be the same as who you are when you are not married, and it certainly will not be the same as who you were before you were married. You are likely to question everything about yourself. You may go and get a bunch of tattoos, or you may go and get some removed. When something so significant as a marriage breaks apart, it doesn't break clean, it shatters.
And when you put yourself back together again, you simply will never be the same again. Finally, you will settle into your new reality. Life will begin to feel somewhat normal again, and hopefully you've figured out by now who this new version of yourself is, the new version of you may be more afraid and may be braver.
It might be more needy, or it might be less needy. You'll either come to regret ever having married that person, or you may feel like you gained something from it. I hope in some way you're able to find a way to profit from your experience, even if it was terrible. Once you are firmly back into the world as a single person, you are probably going to hate it.
The dating landscape is wildly different now from when you were last single. And you're going to have to relearn how it all works, and it isn't even a generational shift. That is the main problem here. It's that you're probably older now, and everyone around you that's available to date now has serious baggage and issues, not to mention your own baggage that you will now be carrying.
As you start meeting new potential romantic partners, know that the primary question they will be trying to answer is whether or not you were the problem in your previous marriage. So now that the dust has settled and you're somewhat put together, again, you're going to see that the real victim of your divorce was neither you nor your former spouse.
It was your children. And if you happen to have any. At the end of the day, hearts can mend well enough, but for children, this is an event that will shape their world even more deeply than it has shaped yours. The fallout for your kids as a result of your divorce, whether it was amicable or not, is going to come over the course of years, not months.
People will tell you that kids are resilient and they aren't wrong. But who actually cares about that when it's really just an excuse to make us feel better about the truly deep pain we are inflicting on children that did nothing wrong. If you happen to make the mistake of saying something negative about the other parent in front of your child, you'll never win.
You might persuade them that the other parent is worse. But you will never win anything because saying something bad about the other parent to them is nearly as bad as accusing them of those things. You break down their little souls when you attack their other parent partially because when you do that, you're saying they cannot have both since you're basically asking them to make a judgment of what you just told them, which means they have to rule against one of you.
There is no silver lining to divorce. It is certainly possible that being divorced will be a better life than what you had when you were married. So maybe it is for the best, but regardless, it is never a thing worth celebrating. It is a tragedy. It is the loss of a dream in addition to losing another person.
I hope if you choose to go down this path, at the very least, you do it with your eyes wide open. At the end of the day, divorce is going to destroy you one way or another, but I suppose if there's even a ghost of a silver lining to it, it would be the fact that you now have a choice as to whether or not you want to rebuild.
When you build a thing a second time, you will be armed with the knowledge, with the mistakes you made from the first time. This is Skipping Stones - “You’re Not Ready for Divorce Until Hear This.” You can find this podcast anywhere you choose to listen to podcasts. For more information about me, feel free to visit skippingstonessr.com. And if you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe.
If there is a topic you would like me to speak on, please feel free to email me at info@skippingstonessr.com. New episodes will be released weekly every Monday.