-You can leave someone & never once want them back. I never missed my ex-husband or secretly hoped we’d reconcile throughout our separation and divorce, but that didn’t mean divorce didn’t hurt. It still hurt and I still grieved it.
-Sometimes the grief isn’t for the person at all. It’s for the situation.
It’s for the children, the family unit that will never be, or the future you thought you’d have that now is not a possibility. It’s grieving the life you thought you were building that is no more.
-Relief can actually be the loudest feeling. I wasn’t devastated my marriage was over. I was devastated by what it took to get there. The stress, the sleepless nights, the weight gain due to how hard the divorce process was. So yes relief that it was all over was a much appreciated emotion. And there’s a difference.
-The right decision can still blow your life apart. Knowing you needed to leave doesn’t make the aftermath easy. Sometimes there’s a whole lot of chaos before the peace comes. Looking back it was the right decision for me and my daughter even as hard as it was to go through, especially since my daughter was so young. We separated in 2020 and the divorce was finalized in 2022, finally in 2026 I’m gaining my peace back through therapy and boundaries.
-Eventually, divorce makes you look at who YOU were in the marriage.
I had to look at my criticism. My defensiveness. My withdrawing. How cold I’d become. The things I’d stopped asking for because I’d already decided there was no point. Accountability doesn’t mean taking equal responsibility for everything.
I can own my behaviour without minimising someone else’s. I don’t need to make him the villain to validate leaving… or myself the villain to prove I’ve grown.
-At least I know that I knew how to love someone. I didn’t necessarily know how to be in a healthy relationship though. I didn’t understand my patterns, triggers, boundaries or how much of myself I’d learnt to abandon to keep the peace.
-You don’t just “get over” your marriage ending. You grow through it. And then you fall in love again & suddenly there are old fears, triggers, and behaviors staring you in the face. That’s when you find out what you’ve actually changed.
-You can be grateful your marriage ended without being grateful for everything that happened in it.
I don’t need to romanticise my divorce to recognise that ending my marriage opened the door to a life I couldn’t see from inside it.
-The biggest thing divorce gave me wasn’t another relationship. It was myself. I now know what I want and what I won’t accept. How I want to communicate and how I want to love. And also where I still have work to do fostering a healthy relationship going forward.
I didn’t leave my marriage because I knew exactly who I was at the time. I left because I knew I ultimately couldn’t find myself and have a healthy, happy life in the situation I found myself stuck in.
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