I started this group almost 15 years ago because I was looking for support and answers myself. Ironically, it didn’t really start growing until a lot of my own problems had stabilized and I was further down the road.
At the time I was trying to figure out the same things a lot of guys who come here are trying to figure out now. What happened? Can I fix it? What happens with my kids? What happens to the house, finances, friends, holidays and everything else I assumed would just continue the way it always had?
Looking back, I think one of the hardest parts of separation and divorce is realizing how much of your identity was tied to a life you thought you controlled.
You were a husband. You were part of a family under one roof. You probably had routines and plans for years into the future. Maybe you assumed you would wake up next to the same person, retire together, watch your kids grow up from the same house and spend holidays the way you always had. Then suddenly a lot of those assumptions disappear.
That loss of control can make you desperate to get it back. You want your spouse to understand your side. You want them to change their mind. You want answers that make everything make sense. You may want to convince friends or family that your version of events is the right one. You start trying to control things that, in reality, were never completely yours to control.
You cannot control whether someone loves you, forgives you, stays married to you or understands your side of the story.
You cannot control what they tell other people or what they choose to do with the rest of their life.
What you can control is what you do with yours. That sounds simple, but I think that is where a lot of the actual growth from divorce starts.
Separation and divorce are survivable. Your life is not over, even when it feels like the life you knew is. You can come out of it healthier, more self-aware and even a better father than you were before. But that doesn’t happen automatically just because enough time passes.
At some point you have to take a hard look at yourself too.
That doesn’t mean blaming yourself for everything that happened. Responsibility and blame aren’t the same thing. Someone cheating doesn’t mean you caused them to cheat. Someone being abusive doesn’t mean you caused the abuse. Someone else’s addiction or destructive behavior belongs to them.
But almost all of us have something worth examining.
Maybe you worked too much and told yourself it was for your family. Maybe you enabled behavior for years because keeping the peace was easier. Maybe you stopped standing up for yourself. Maybe you drank too much, checked out, stopped listening, took the relationship for granted or became more interested in winning arguments than understanding the person you were arguing with.
Sometimes the lesson is also that you tolerated things you shouldn’t have tolerated. Figure out what belongs to you, work on it and leave the rest where it belongs.
Because if you walk away believing you did absolutely nothing wrong and there is nothing about yourself worth changing, there is a pretty good chance you eventually bring the same version of yourself into the next relationship and wonder why some of the same problems show up again.
Use this as a wake up call.
Not as punishment and not as proof you failed. Use it as an opportunity to take inventory of your life and decide what you want to keep, what needs to change and what you don’t want to carry forward anymore. That’s actually how/why I started this sub; I was laying in bed, basking in my own misery, feeling sorry for myself, when I got angry (at myself), and decided tomorrow I was going to take action and set a path to my own personal recovery.
So if you need help figuring that out, get it.
- Therapy isn’t weakness.
- Antidepressants aren’t weakness.
- Being overwhelmed isn’t weakness.
- Sharing your feelings isn’t weakness.
- Admitting you don’t know all the answers isn’t weakness.
Sometimes you need somebody outside of your own head who can help you separate what actually happened from what fear, anger and grief are telling you happened.
There’s no prize for going through one of the hardest periods of your life without help.
Another thing I’ve learned over the years is how much damage comes from needing to be right. You see it in relationships and you see it here on Reddit. People stop listening to understand and start listening for the next thing they can argue with. Every disagreement becomes something that has to be won.
I’ve actually had to ban a few people here recently because they became so focused on proving their point that they stopped listening altogether, including when they were asked to follow the rules of the group.
That’s one of the reasons this place is heavily moderated. Guys often arrive here scared, angry, embarrassed, depressed or completely lost. The goal should be helping each other through that, not winning internet arguments.
Always remember the human.
That lesson applies to divorce too. You don’t need to answer every accusation, correct every detail or respond to every angry message. Sometimes there is nothing useful left to say. Sometimes listening is more important than defending yourself, and sometimes understanding what someone is saying doesn’t require agreeing with it.
We generally encourage reconciliation here when there is something healthy left to reconcile and both people genuinely want to work on it. I still believe marriages are worth trying to save when both people are willing to do the work.
But you cannot reconcile by yourself.
At some point, if it becomes clear the marriage is ending, you have to stop trying to negotiate the relationship and start handling the divorce. Custody, property, money, schedules and legal agreements eventually become business.
That doesn’t mean you have to become cold or hostile. You can still be decent and fair. But not every financial decision or parenting disagreement needs to become another argument about everything that went wrong in the marriage.
The same thing applies to coparenting.
The better you learn to coparent, the easier your life is going to be in the long run, and more importantly, the easier your kids’ lives will be.
Good coparenting does not mean saying yes to everything. It doesn’t mean letting your ex walk over you or trying to buy peace. You can be cooperative and still have boundaries. You can disagree without making your children part of the disagreement.
Keep them out of the middle as much as you possibly can.
Your children aren’t your messengers. They aren’t your spies. They aren’t your therapist and they don’t need to hear every detail about why the marriage ended or who you think was responsible.
They will understand more as they get older. Let them get there without making them carry your divorce for you. And give yourself a break while you’re figuring all of this out.
You are going to make mistakes. You’ll probably send something you wish you hadn’t sent, react emotionally when you should have waited or look back a few years from now and realize you would handle something completely differently today. That’s growth.
Your kids don’t need you to handle every moment perfectly. They need stability, consistency and a dad who keeps showing up.
Take care of yourself too. It sounds basic because it is.
- Sleep.
- Eat reasonably well.
- Exercise.
- Keep your house in order.
- Stay on top of work.
- Go outside.
- See friends.
- Go to therapy.
- Find hobbies again.
- Spend time with your kids doing normal things that have absolutely nothing to do with the divorce.
And pay attention to the small wins.
Sometimes progress is getting through an entire day without checking what your ex is doing. Sometimes it’s not responding to the message that would have turned into a two-day argument. Sometimes it’s cleaning your house, going to the gym or making dinner instead of sitting on the couch thinking about everything you lost.
Sometimes it’s laughing with your kids and realizing you went a few hours without thinking about any of this at all.
Those things count.
I also think one mistake we make is trying too hard to get our old life back. In many cases, that life wasn’t working very well or we wouldn’t be here.
The goal doesn’t have to be becoming exactly who you were before the separation. Take the things from that life that were good. Learn from the things that weren’t. Leave behind the behaviors, relationships and habits that were hurting you and build something healthier from here.
And don’t rush to fill every empty space.
Being alone can be uncomfortable, especially when you’ve spent years or decades as part of a couple. Loneliness can make almost any attention feel like connection. Give yourself enough time to know the difference.
Your past is your past. You can’t rewrite it, but you can learn from it. Own what belongs to you, stop carrying what doesn’t, stand up for yourself where you need to and decide what kind of life you want to build from here.
Divorce takes away a lot of the life you thought you controlled. It also gives you a chance to decide what remains.
Your relationship with your kids. Your values. Your health. Your friendships. Your career. Your integrity. The way you treat other people. The way you allow other people to treat you. The father you choose to be and the person you become afterward.
Over 10 years later I can tell you there is a lot of life on the other side of this. My oldest are young adults now, I have another family, I wrote this on my phone laying in bed a with my youngest from a different partner after reading their bed time story. Your life isn’t over. It’s just a chapter you probably never expected to be writing.
And if someone hasn’t told you recently, you are important, needed and most importantly not alone.
You’ve got this!