Men’s Challenges with Separation and Divorce

Sometimes one partner has been considering the end of a marriage for months or even years before saying it out loud. The other may have been unhappy too, but hasn’t seriously imagined the marriage ending.

For that person, separation can arrive as a shock.

Many of the men I’ve worked with initially scramble to save the marriage. They promise changes. They bargain. They suddenly become willing to address problems they’d previously minimized or learned to live with.

Some genuinely want the relationship back. But they’re also beginning to understand what else they’re about to lose.

Divorce isn’t simply the loss of a spouse. It may mean less time with your children, financial uncertainty, the loss of your home, mutual friends, familiar routines, family traditions, and the person you once turned to when life went badly.

Even an unhappy marriage can provide an enormous amount of structure.

When it ends, you don’t just have to grieve it.

You have to figure out how to live without it.

And for a while, you may have absolutely no idea how.

When the Life Around the Marriage Disappears Too

For some men, work has occupied much of their adult development while their spouse became the center of their emotional and domestic life.

Then suddenly they’re maintaining a career while grieving a marriage, learning the logistics of shared custody, taking care of a household alone, and spending stretches of time without their children.

Things that sound simple—cooking, shopping, cleaning, making plans for the weekend—can begin emphasizing just how much has changed.

And the person you once turned to when you were overwhelmed may now be the person you’re angry with for being overwhelmed in the first place.

It’s a pretty well-engineered cluster fuck.

It’s understandable to interpret all of this difficulty as evidence that the divorce was a mistake.

Sometimes it was.

But sometimes harder gets mistaken for worse.

Of course your old life was easier in certain ways. You knew how to live it. You’d had years of practice.

You haven’t had much practice at this one yet.

Action Isn’t Always the Same as Moving Forward

Most people don’t enjoy feeling helpless, and many men are particularly uncomfortable with it.

So we do things.

Work more. Exercise more. Date. Drink. Have sex. Remodel something. Buy something. Spend six hours on GarageBand. Watch television. Watch porn. Get furious at the ex. Start another project.

Some of those things may be perfectly healthy.

But there’s an important difference between action and distraction.

Distraction helps you not feel something.

Action gradually gives you something else to live in.

You probably need some of both. Nobody needs to spend every free Saturday experiencing his feelings.

And some days, getting through the day is sufficient. Not every weekend after a divorce has to contribute to your personal growth.

But over time, you want to begin noticing whether all that activity is slowly enlarging your life—or simply helping you avoid the parts that hurt.

Learn What Sets You Off

Divorce has a peculiar ability to turn otherwise ordinary moments into emotionally loaded ones.

You arrive to pick up your children and your ex hugs them goodbye.

Your child mentions something your ex did over the weekend.

A financial issue comes up.

A text arrives with just the wrong tone.

Suddenly you’re not responding only to what’s happening now. You’re responding to betrayal, rejection, money, the breakup, an old argument, what you think your ex tells other people about you, and six other things that joined the meeting without being invited.

It helps to begin noticing this.

Ask yourself: What just happened, and what did my mind attach to it?

You don’t have to talk yourself out of being angry or hurt. Some of what you’re angry or hurt about may be entirely legitimate.

The task is simply to begin separating what belongs to this moment from everything this moment woke up.

You’ll be better at this sometimes than others.

That’s especially worth remembering when your children are standing there.

Becoming a Parent in Your Own Right

Parenting after separation can initially feel surprisingly awkward.

Maybe your spouse previously handled more of the scheduling, meals, school communication or activities. Maybe you parented as a team and suddenly you’re doing alone what two people used to do together.

You may feel incompetent.

Your children may also remind you—with the tact children are famous for—that Mom doesn’t do it that way.

That’s okay.

You don’t need to become their mother.

You need to find out how to be their father under circumstances neither you nor they chose.

That takes some time.

You’ll develop your own routines, solve problems differently, learn what works and what doesn’t, and gradually build a relationship with your children that doesn’t require another parent standing beside you.

There will also be moments when doing this alone reminds you painfully that you’re divorced.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it badly.

Sometimes it just means you’re doing something difficult while grieving the circumstances that made it necessary.

Don’t Turn Co-Parenting Into the Marriage After the Marriage

Early on, communication with an ex can be extraordinarily charged.

You may be discussing Tuesday’s pickup while simultaneously having an argument in your head about something that happened seven years ago.

For a while, it may help to keep co-parenting communication boring.

Schedules. School. Health. Activities. Logistics. The children.

You don’t have to resolve the marriage in order to coordinate Tuesday’s pickup.

Nor does every provocation require a response. You can dislike what your ex says, disagree with how she sees you, and believe she’s completely wrong without correcting the record every time.

This can be enormously difficult.

One of the strange tasks of divorce is learning that you can be right without getting the other person to agree that you’re right.

That’s part of becoming separate.

Don’t Live in a Waiting Room

One mistake newly separated men sometimes make is maintaining only the bare essentials of their new life.

There’s a bed. A television. Something resembling a chair.

Boxes remain unpacked because, consciously or not, the new place feels temporary. Maybe you’ll reconcile. Maybe you’ll move again. Maybe this isn’t really your life.

It can take a while before you’re willing to admit that, at least for now, it is.

When you’re ready, make the place a little more yours.

Arrange it the way you like. Buy dishes. Put something on the walls. Invite somebody over. Discover whether you actually have taste when nobody else is supervising.

Put a pinball machine in the kitchen if that’s what you’ve always wanted.

This isn’t really about decorating.

It’s about slowly allowing yourself to occupy your own life again.

Even if reconciliation remains possible, becoming more capable of living your own life won’t hurt it.

Don’t Disappear

For some married men, their spouse gradually became their primary—and sometimes nearly their only—close relationship.

You don’t necessarily notice this happening while you’re married.

You certainly notice it afterward.

Isolation can intensify everything divorce already produces. There’s more time to replay what happened, idealize the marriage, rehearse grievances, and imagine what your ex is doing while you’re sitting alone thinking about what your ex is doing.

You don’t suddenly need a bustling social life.

Just don’t disappear.

Have coffee with a friend. Go somewhere people gather. Call the guy you’ve been meaning to call for six months. Accept an invitation you don’t particularly feel like accepting.

More specific support can help too. A therapist, divorce group, or friend who’s been through a separation gives you somewhere to tell the story.

And you’ll probably need to tell it more than once.

That’s okay.

For a while, telling the story is partly how we understand what happened.

Eventually you may notice the story changing. You’re no longer telling only the story of what happened to you.

Somewhere along the way, you’ve begun including what you’re doing next.

Find Out What You Like

One of the odder experiences after a long marriage is suddenly having time you’ve spent years wishing you had—and having absolutely no idea what to do with it.

You may discover that you don’t know what you like anymore.

That’s not necessarily a crisis.

It’s a question.

Return to something you abandoned. Try something you’ve been curious about. Make something. Learn something. Ride a motorcycle. Play music. Join a team. Exercise. Take a class. Go somewhere.

You don’t have to discover your passion.

You might just find something you enjoy doing on Thursday nights.

Interests do more than fill time. Gradually, they can become pieces of an identity that isn’t organized around the marriage or its ending.

And frequently they reconnect you with other people.

Be Careful About Replacing What You Lost

Eventually you may begin dating.

And after spending months feeling rejected, criticized, unattractive, or simply invisible, discovering that another woman actually likes you can be startling.

Maybe even intoxicating.

Enjoy it.

Just don’t ask it to prove too much.

A new relationship can provide sex, affection, companionship, reassurance and a very welcome vacation from thinking about your divorce. None of that necessarily makes it a bad relationship.

But it’s easy to ask another person to restore a sense of yourself you’re still trying to recover.

The first relationships after divorce may be important without necessarily being permanent. You may still be learning who you are outside the marriage and what you actually want from another one.

What did you contribute to your marriage?

What do you wish you’d done differently?

What did you need from your partner that you weren’t getting?

What would you like to bring to another relationship?

And what do you now know you need from someone else?

One is generally better off wanting a relationship than needing one.

Getting there can take a while.

Better Isn’t the Same as Easier

At some point, particularly when you’re lonely, you may become convinced that you could make the marriage work now.

Maybe you could.

But be careful of comparing the reality of your present life with an edited version of your former one.

Walk yourself through it.

Imagine actually being back together—not the family photo, the holidays, or waking up knowing your children are down the hall.

Imagine Tuesday.

You’re both tired. You’re in the kitchen. The subject you could never discuss comes up again.

How does that conversation go?

How did you actually feel in the marriage?

How did you treat one another?

What would genuinely be different?

It’s natural to miss what you’ve lost.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you want all of it back.

Sometimes hindsight provides insight.

Sometimes it provides really good editing.

Resentment Keeps the Marriage Alive Too

Forgiveness after divorce is difficult, and I’m not sure it’s particularly useful to demand it of yourself on a schedule.

Acceptance may be a better place to start.

You cannot control what your ex says about you, what she thinks happened in the marriage, how she lives now, or whether she ever understands your side of things.

You can gradually become more responsible for what you do with all of that.

A divorced man once told me that for years he’d considered himself the reasonable one. His ex remained hostile and suspicious; he remained calm and didn’t provoke.

Then one day she mentioned that their children needed some new clothes.

He replied, “I’m planning on taking care of it.”

Perfectly reasonable words.

Except he heard his own tone.

What he’d actually communicated was: I’ll take care of it because you can’t.

And behind that was five years of resentment about the divorce, her choices, money, and everything he believed she’d failed to understand.

The children needed clothes.

That was all.

He realized that while he’d spent years noticing the ways his ex kept their old conflict alive, he’d missed some of the ways he was doing it too.

Divorce has an irritating habit of continuing to offer opportunities for growth.

This Is Your Life Now

That sentence can initially sound brutal.

It isn’t intended to mean: Get over it.

It means that, little by little, this life deserves your attention too.

You don’t have to like everything that happened. You don’t have to decide the divorce was good for you. You don’t have to forgive everyone involved, achieve enlightenment, or become delighted about paying an attorney.

And you don’t have to turn the worst period of your life into a triumphant journey of self-discovery.

Some of it is simply loss.

You grieve what you’ve lost while slowly becoming more capable of living with what remains.

You learn how to parent under different circumstances.

You see friends.

You make somewhere feel like home.

You figure out what to do with a Saturday.

You discover things that still interest you.

You become a little less consumed by what your ex is doing.

And perhaps eventually you enter another relationship—not because someone needs to restore your old life, but because you’ve begun inhabiting this one.

None of that makes the marriage unimportant.

None of it means the divorce didn’t hurt.

It means your life continued.

And, gradually, you did too.