Valentine’s Day can be a minefield of expectations and disappointments for even the most happily coupled. And it’s often even harder for those who are recently single. Read here for some great Valentine’s Day (and any day, really) inspiration from those who have been there, survived that. It gives you some great ideas along with some good perspective.
And then take your pick from the two Valentine’s below – one sweet, one sour:)
When I first read this piece by Matt on why he declined to participate in Huffington Post’s collection on when divorce is the only option, my knee-jerk response was that sometimes divorce is the only option.
When I filed for divorce, my husband was MIA, married to another woman and still actively funneling my credit and paycheck towards his new life.
I certainly didn’t see any other option other than cutting those legal ties as quickly as possible.
But what if I had discovered the infidelities (financial and relational) months before? The decision to divorce at that point would not have been so clear. Perhaps he could have received intensive treatment for addiction. Maybe trust could be rebuilt along with the finances, a team approach towards mending a broken marriage.
And if I had been aware of his shame or his unhappiness or his struggles with employment years before the end (and realized my own fear of confrontation), the entire trajectory of those final years could have been altered. Tracks built together towards a different future.
What if we had made a more conscious start to our relationship rather than simply following one foot in front of the other? What if we had spent more time discussing the potential hardships that can befall a marriage and explore ways to avoid those traps?
Or, tracing that reasoning all the way back, what if I had been more aware of my own struggles with abandonment and anxiety and more attuned to his struggles with avoidance and shame when we first started dating? Maybe I would have chosen a different husband. One that wouldn’t have made divorce the only option.
Any marriage can get to a point (The “F” It Point) where divorce becomes the only option.
From ‘Til Death Do You Part?:
I see the vows as like the wheels on a bicycle. Ideally, both are fully functioning and working in concert. If one tire is a little flat, the other can help support the weight for a time until the tire is re-inflated. If one wheel is bent, the ride may not be over as long as the metal is hammered back into shape. Yet if one wheel is removed, the bicycle is useless no matter how hard the remaining wheel works. And it’s time to either find a new wheel or learn how to ride a unicycle.
But that point doesn’t spontaneously generate. And its creation is ultimately the responsibility of both partners.
Sometimes divorce is the only option.
But it doesn’t have to be that way.
If you enter marriage with your eyes open and your ego checked.
If you commit to fixing yourself rather than blaming another.
If you quiet your fears enough to face the truth and trust that you can make it through.
And if you understand that divorce is always an option and that it takes awareness, intention and effort for it to never become the only option.
Should I Divorce? 12 Questions to Consider
“I don’t get it,” one of my coworkers said to me the other day, “All of a sudden I have a bunch of kids failing that have always been A or B students!”
“That’s normal this time of year,” I explained, “As high school looms ever closer, some of them express their fear through self-sabotage. Others regress and become more immature. Some become clingy, like preschoolers holding tight to a parent’s leg. It’s a big transition and they’re scared. But only a few are ready to articulate it, face it and step up responsibility. It’s our job to help them all get there.”
Teaching 8th grade is like tending to hundreds of metamorphizing pupa. With attitude. Sometimes LOTS of attitude. It can get messy and yet the end results make it all worth it.
The year is all about transition. From child to adult. From parent’s control to self-control. From being told what to do to making decisions. From being shielded to facing consequences. From passing off liability to shouldering responsibility.
And transition is always hard.
Not just for teenagers.
For all of us.
I’ve been in a unique position to observe thousands of young people undergo transitions over my career. It allows me to interpolate trends and analyze patterns.
Patterns that hold true for anyone undergoing transition.
Transition is Messy
I used to have a snake, a small Kenyan sand boa. He was generally docile except when he was preparing to shed his skin to account for his expanding body. For several days a few time a year, he became irritable. Short-tempered. He would demand food and then turn his nose up at the offerings. Once his old skin was peeled off like a soiled tube sock left on the floor, he would again return to his amicable self. Until the next growth spurt.
Transition is messy. Dirty. Often ugly. It’s rarely a smooth process and never a linear one. The movies make it seem like it’s easy to go from ugly duckling to sensational swan in a few challenging moments and a short montage set to great music. The movies lie. The reality is much longer and more difficult than many of us realize.
And those undergoing transition can be difficult to live with (especially if it’s yourself!).
They’re irritable. Short-tempered. Demanding.
But that’s only because they’re confused. Scared. Uncomfortable.
Because transition is hard.
Self-Sabotage
It can be scary to reach for new heights. And sometimes it’s easier to act as though you couldn’t do it rather than try and risk failing. It’s common for people in transition to hamstring themselves, to make decisions and act on impulses that are in opposition to their stated goals. It’s a way of staying comfortable.
It’s the student refusing to turn in assignments. It’s the recovering alcoholic taking a job at a nightclub. The woman trying to save her marriage flirting with her coworker. The newly divorced constantly complaining about the ex. The newly dating turning all of their energy towards work and wondering why new relationships continue to falter.
Grasping
In order to make a life transition, you have to first let go of your former life. It’s an act of great courage and great faith. And before many are ready to take that leap, they respond to the idea of letting go by holding on ever-tighter.
Sometimes the grasping may latch onto something or someone in the present that is a stand-in for something or someone from the past. This can be a flash-in-the-pan rebound relationship or the sudden and overwhelming attachment to a new hobby or habit.
Regression
Periods of growth are often preceded by periods of retraction, as the increased vulnerability of change prompts a desire to be taken care of and protected. Many people who have two or children are familiar with this tendency as they watched their toddler revert to diapers or preschooler beg for the bottle upon the birth of a new baby. It’s a lot of responsibility to be the “big one” and sometimes we all just want somebody to take care of everything.
It’s okay to need and seek extra help during times of transition. In fact, that’s completely normal and healthy. Be careful not to become too dependent for too long; however, or you risk giving up control of your life.
Taking Risks
Transition is a time when you’re neither here nor there. It’s a time of changing boundaries and it’s natural to explore where those boundaries now lie. When nothing is certain, everything feels possible and it’s exciting to explore a world where limitations don’t seem to exist.
Risks still have consequences. It’s great to explore. But please, take your brain with you!
Acceptance of Past
This is one conversation I wish I never had to have with a student again. And yet, every year, I have to have it with several. Some of my kids have had the misfortune to have absent parents. Or abusive ones. Or they’ve just had way too much happen to them at a young age. And I have the frank conversation with those kids that they are coming up on the age where they have to decide if that’s going to hold them back or if they’re going to succeed in spite of it.
And that’s a huge part of transition – accepting the parts you cannot control and taking responsibility for those you can.
Confidence
Transition often starts with “I can’t.” Because you can see where you’ve been and you struggle to imagine where you’re going. But with every step taken with courage and faith, confidence is built.
My favorite part of watching people in transition is seeing the growth in confidence. I love observing “I can’t” morph into “Look what I did!” and “I got this!”
Transition is Temporary
When my former students visit or write and I get to see the results of those difficult days, it makes it all worth it. Transition is temporary. It doesn’t last. You outlast it. Emerging bruised and battered. And also better.
One of the most common refrains I hear from people, even years after their divorce, is that they are not yet where they want to be. They offer up reasons – financial, emotional, situational – that they are unable to escape the rapacious quicksand of the past.
And yet when I dig deeper, I find that they are indeed doing many of the right things.
Just not necessarily in the right order.
Because when it comes to moving on after divorce (How Do You Know When You’ve Moved On After Divorce?), you have to learn to stand before you can attempt to run from your past and into your future.
It’s easy to try to skip steps and to believe you are ready to take on the world before it’s time. Goodness knows, I did plenty of that myself. We want so badly to be done with the healing already that we often try to rush things along.
Rewriting the End of a Relationship
And if you try to tackle a phase before you’re ready, you will be left feeling frustrated and hopeless and stuck.
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Before you can say with certainty that you’ve moved on, you have to actively engage with building your new life. So much of releasing the hold that divorce, especially unwanted divorce, can have on you is found in securing a sense of purpose and control over your life. And you have to be an active participant in this process.
Before you can actively build your new life, you have to take responsibility for your well-being and release any residual victim mindset. This step perhaps takes the most amount of courage. You have to be willing to be vulnerable, to see yourself as you are and to fully shoulder the responsibility for your own choices and actions. There is a difference between what happened to you (which you cannot control) and your response (which you can).
Thriving After Divorce: From Victim to Victor
Before you can take responsibility for your well-being, you have to process the marriage, its end and your actions and emotions. If we do not understand the past, we are doomed to repeat it. Life has a sneaky way of presenting us with lessons until we have fully learned them. It’s impossible to process fully while you’re in the midst of something. Now that you’ve gained some distance and perspective, you can begin to break it apart so that you can gain wisdom.
12 Reasons to Journal After Divorce
Before you process the past, you have to shift your focus from your history to your potential. If you spend too much energy focused on the past, you will become a prisoner of the past. You may not be ready to fully move forward, but now is the time to plant the seeds of hope and promise. These are dreams, inoculations from rumination and despair.
Before you can have hope for the future, you have to fall out of love with your former partner. For some, this is easy as the love has been dying for years. For others, especially those blindsided by a sudden divorce, this is a more difficult and deliberate process.
Before you can fall out of love, you have to attend to the practical day-to-day needs. You cannot tend to your emotional wounds until your physical needs have been addressed. This can be daunting, especially if you have been left with no apparent means of income or the burden of debt. Been there. It sucks.
18 Steps to Financial Independence After Divorce
And before you can attend to the practical, you have to accept that the marriage is over. This is where it begins. An acceptance that it’s over. Even if it’s not what you wanted.
Finding Happiness After An Unwanted Divorce
“It’s too late for me.”
“I’m too damaged.”
“I won’t be able to love again. To trust again.”
“Nobody will want me with all this baggage.”
“I’m going to be alone forever.”
Those were all thoughts that cycled stubbornly through my reeling mind after I was abandoned by my first husband. I was afraid that I would never again experience that greatest feeling in the world of returning to the sanctuary of loving arms after a bad day. I grew convinced that nobody else would ever whisper, “Love you,” as he slid my glasses off of my sleeping face. My mind’s eye alternated between playing slideshows of the happy moments of my now-defunct marriage and scenes from an imagined future where I grew ever-older and ever-lonelier.
It seems almost laughable to me now as I look back at that early end-of-the-world mindset that turned out not to have any prophetic powers.
It was anything but laughable at the time.
Those fears, sensing a new and fragile void, rushed in and filled every crevice with doubt about hope and conviction about despair. And I was a captive listener.
Understanding and Addressing Loneliness After Divorce
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There are five lies that those fears are telling you. Falsehoods that feed on vulnerabilities and insecurities at a time when our defenses are down and we crave some certainty in our torn and tattered lives.
When you start to recognize those lies, it helps to silence the fear:
At the end of a marriage, all you feel is loss. An ever-aching wound after a tooth has been pulled from its anchor. And when you’re feeling loss, it’s practically impossible to imagine joy. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that the way it is now – hurting, lonely, scared – is the way it will always be.
Yet the one certainty in life is change. Today, whether good or bad, always morphs into tomorrow, often bringing with it unexpected visitors. Right now, you feel alone. Right now, you feel unloved. Right now, you hurt. Tomorrow? Who knows?
I was so proud of one of my students the other day. She confided, “I don’t like my life right now.” There’s wisdom for all of us in her last two words. The life you have now will not be the life you have tomorrow.
And fear possesses no special powers. It holds no crystal ball. It doesn’t try to predict the future, it simply projects the worst.
Now is not always. And now will always change.
9 Reasons You’re Struggling to Find Love Again
I was weeks shy of 32 when I was unceremoniously dumped via text message. And I thought it was too late for me to find love again. It was an absurd thought for me to have – my parents remarried after that age, I had plenty of friends who had found love well beyond their early 30s and I knew many people who were actively dating in my age range.
But none of that mattered.
Because here’s the thing with age –
The oldest you’ve ever been is the age you are at. this. moment.
You’ve experienced every age below you. And everything yet to come is merely a guess. And that fear of being alone loves to convince you that it’s all going downhill from here.
And so we remember love at our younger selves and we imagine being alone with our older self.
I have many love mentors in my life that I have looked to in times when I have been in need of hope. One couple, now happily married in their seventies, met in their sixties.
The truth is that the only time it’s too late is when you believe it’s too late.
And not a moment sooner.
My Husband Walked Into a Bar…And This is What I Learned
In the beginning, I wanted to date men like my former husband because all I could imagine loving was my former husband. If I couldn’t have the one, at least I could try to find a reasonable facsimile.
As you can imagine, that didn’t work out too well.
Much like the only ages we know are the ones we’ve lived, the only loves we know are the ones we’ve had.
So it’s easy to believe that the one slipped through the cracks beyond hope of retrieve.
I eventually realized that I didn’t want an ex-shaped new love. I had changed. I no longer wanted the same person. I opened up to the possibility of something new. Unknown.
Very few of us will move through our lives with only a single romantic love. Yet no matter how many we’ve experienced, it’s always difficult to imagine one more.
It reminds me of something I heard a pregnant friend say while rubbing her belly- “I just can’t imagine loving this one as much as I do the others.” Her three children played nearby. Even though she had felt and surpassed these doubts twice before, fear was still planting seeds in her mind. And no surprise, fear was wrong. She loved baby number four just as much as the others.
You may have lost one. You haven’t lost the only one.
How a Belief in a Soul Mate Is Holding You Back
Just as I was starting to get my dating sea legs under me, I was ghosted. Again. This time by a man that was speaking of a possible future and trying to convince me to stay in Atlanta instead of continuing with my planned escape out of the region.
Here’s how I saw it – Once was a fluke. Twice was a pattern.
I was doomed to be dumped.
As with many lies fear tells, this one has some basis in reality. If I continued to attach anxiously, I would cause the past to stutter and repeat.
But if I changed, the pattern would change as well.
We are not merely toy boats upon the stream, subject to the whims of the currents and the waves. Although we cannot control the stream, we can improve our vessel and learn how to better steer around obstacles.
It’s important to study the past. Not so that we know what to expect, but so that we can make better decisions going forward.
You’re only doomed to repeat the past if you’re stuck in the past.
11 Traps That Hold You Back After Divorce
Fear is well-practiced at slipping on the disguises of concern and pragmatism, when really it is distracting us from rational thought. It pretends that it is telling us the harsh truths we need to hear to make us better while holding us back with ties of fiction. Fear pretends to whisper the future when it is actually keeping us prisoner of the past.
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Fear makes for a poor life coach.
Time to fire your fear of being alone.
Learn to embrace this pause. This moment between. This period when you’re unmoored and unattached.
And be open to tomorrow. Be open to possibilities. Be open to love.
Lessons From the End of a Marriage 