Let me know if this sounds familiar:
You are in a romantic relationship. Your partner announces that he/she/they want to end the relationship. You may have even been aware of some problems, but you did not know things were that bad. Things progress. Your partner is quickly moving on; getting their own place, being social, going out, possibly even forming new relationships.
You feel left behind. You feel like bloody, raw meat. You struggle to deal with your own feelings.
On the off chance you have to interact with your former partner, you are a mess. They are calm and cool, which makes it that much worse for you, feeling like you are somehow weak or defective for not handling things well.
Anyone?
Most likely, just about everyone. This is an awful experience in virtually any break-up, but can be an absolute hammer blow in a divorce, where the joint journey might span years or decades.
Why does this happen? Well, there are actually some very practical human reasons for it. I'll do my best to lay them out here, in hopes this can offer you some comfort, understanding, and self-kindness.
Research reflects that spouses who elect to end a marriage have often been contemplating doing so for a period of 2-5 years. Years. In this sense, by the time they reach out to a divorce attorney, they are well along the "arc" of the grief process, having transcended denial, guilt, anxiety, fear, and stress. They have already envisioned what their new life looks like, and they are moving towards it. (Even for much shorter relationships, research still shows a significant period of contemplation before a party expresses a desire to end the relationship.)
The party that "gets the news second" is right at the beginning (apex) of the grief arc right when life changes start happening. It is not that they are necessarily taking the news bad; it is that they are simply having to handle grief and practical issues of separating at the same time. This is extraordinarily hard to do. At the risk of sounding somewhat unprofessional, I'd say that anyone that claims to be good at this is probably full of it.
This gets compounded by the gestalt that the other person is "stronger" because they do not have the same visceral emotional reaction. People do not understand that they are in different parts of the grief arc, so that other person's less visible reaction or their prompt re-partnering gives the illusion that their loss was not "big deal" to the other partner, or that they are easily "replaced."
One of the reasons I strongly encourage parties not to date other people during a divorce is because it gives the impression to the grieving party that their worst nightmare is coming true: not only was he/she/they inadequate; he/she/they is literally replaceable. The type of crushing blow this deals to self worth does not make all the grief and practical adjustments any easier.
Being cognizant of where you are in the grief process is critical in a divorce. I talk to clients about it quite a bit because it is important. If you have children together during a divorce, the fact that you are utterly devastated does not mean you get to quit parenting or paying the bills. You will have to figure out a survival strategy. The purpose of sharing this information is to make sure you know it is OK to be a mess.
That is where the lawyer comes in to help.
For example, if I have a client who just learned about an affair two months ago, we might work together to find a way to virtually eliminate contact with her cheating spouse because we see where she is in the grief process. We understand that hand-offs with the kids need to be super brief and virtually all communication needs to be through a lawyer or through an email she doesn't send for 24 hours (and maybe have someone else look at for tone).
Grief is a totally normal, natural, and necessary part of "de-coupling" (which is the clinical term for what people do when they end their intimate partnerships and have to develop separate lives).
If you are going through this (or know someone else who is), I hope you share this. If your experience is like a lot of my client's, finding out where you are in the grief process makes it way easier to be kind to yourself because you learn that nothing is wrong with you: you are a human being dealing with loss, and there is no need to make it any harder for yourself.
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