Divorce Diaries: Three Months In

They say that divorce is much like a death. There are stages of divorce grief. I recently left my husband and I’ve been going through these stages of grief after divorce. Unlike what they tell you, these stages don’t all come at once. The four stages of divorce mourning, according to Marriage.com, are denial, conflict, ambivalence, and acceptance. Another website, Mediate.com, lists the psychological stages of divorce as blaming, mourning, anger, being single, and re-entry. I’ve been through some variation of these stages of divorce in my first three months.

When I first decided to leave my marriage, I went through a stage of blaming my soon to be ex husband for everything. I blamed him for the loss of affection I’d experienced in the marriage. Somehow, it was his fault, I reasoned, that I’d fallen out of love with him.

When I left my marital home, I was elated. Maybe this was ambivalence. Or maybe it was denial. I was excited to be in my own place and my face radiated with joy. I decorated my place with female empowerment mantras and I bought new furniture. I had a bold new out look on life and I couldn’t wait to get on with my new life.

I’m still in the early stages of divorce, but that feeling was fleeting and lasted only a month. Shortly thereafter, I began to flip flop. I had this searing sensation in my chest and wished for the life I had left behind. It had been an idyllic life, full of dinner parties and friends, a huge house, and two happy kids.

But I hadn’t been happy. I wasn’t in love. And no, I don’t mean movie love with the butterflies and the heart skipping a beat. That kind of love stops after the honeymoon phase. I meant any semblance of love that didn’t make me feel like we were brother and sister, because that’s what I felt like with him.

At this early stage of divorce, once could say I’m in a mourning pattern where I idealize the life I left behind and I long for it. It feels a lot like a death, when you wish that the deceased person were back again and things could be normal.

But that’s the thing with divorce. There’s no normal anymore. It’s a new normal. And adjusting to a new normal takes a toll. It also takes time.