My divorce and life after divorce success story – A male’s perspective 

I am happy to take questions. Here is my divorce tale and advice to my younger self.

TLDR :

• Know that life after divorce will be much much better if you let it be. I wish someone would have told me this.

• First few years are very very tough. Find your support, seek positive help! Avoid negative help (substance abuse), negative people (could be your friends or family).

• Forgive yourself, your ex and move on. Take more losses than you need to just so you can move on. That’s what I did. Give the other person more property and more money, just for your peace of mind. Don’t lose yourself. Money can be made. Time will heal you. You are not losing anything if you have yourself.

• Time heals all the wounds. This is what I experienced. 1-year max to get over it, I think for me. And 5-years to the start of a completely different life. In 10 years, you will see your previous life like someone else’s. My father told me after rebuilding my life is that he had never seen anything like this. You have rebuilt your life twice from rock bottom. It’s impressive.

• And finally, divorce is an opportunity to be the person you always wanted to be.

I want to tell you my divorce story, in case it helps any males. I got divorced circa 2008-2009. It was a very tough time to get divorced because I came from a conservative family and the real world was also crashing due to the financial crisis at the time. My ex and I began dating when we were 19. It was a college love story. We got married very young around 23 years of age. We got divorced at 26. We were together for seven years. We owned a property together. We had a dog. I was blindsided and devastated by divorce. I felt depressed, sad and suicidal at the onset of the divorce. The latter is why I am sharing this story.

I really didn’t know how to be single as I had never been. Marriage/wedding felt scary for me personally to be honest because I can already see that I was still a kid and was struggling with what I wanted to be in life. My wife and I talked to each other like high schoolers. We were doing well but I started to really focus on my career and chasing money as I grew up poor. I think my wife was unhappy because of it. But I really think now that people should not get married in their 20s.

1-year before divorce: I think this was perhaps the most painful part of the divorce. My Ex agreed to buy a house with me. And one-month later after the house purchase (circa 2007), she was telling me that maybe we should get divorced. Everyone was buying houses on leverage around this time. It was a thing to do… This was basically a purgatory year for me and I would say the toughest year of my life. We were struggling to connect. I was busy with my job and increasingly becoming wary about my marriage. Six months after the house purchase my wife asked for a divorce. I tried to convince her to think it through and made many Hail Mary attempts to win her back. She was talking to her friends the whole time about it. She didn’t agree. Sometimes I wonder if she was cheating on me. I am not an insecure type and I didn’t really care to know if that was going on. I knew divorces were expensive and I didn’t want to spend money on lawyers. So, I told her I want her happiness. And if she wants a divorce, I will sign the papers right away. Our divorce papers cost $300 to fill out and we went to court ourselves to get it done. We didn’t have much money so there was not much to split. We owned a house, which was basically 40% underwater due to the financial crisis. I gave her whatever money I had in my account and she walked away from the house with the dog. I grew up poor but never had negative equity/debt in life. But now I was saddled with very high debt in mortgage, a house which had lost 50% of its value, divorced and no savings in my account. Effectively I had a large paper loss from divorce and so the divorce was very expensive when accounted for that. I wasn’t sure if my job will continue as I could be laid off anytime due to the financial crisis. On top of that my conservative parents made me feel very guilty for being divorced at such a young age and embarrassing our family. How I felt during this stage? I felt angry, betrayed, depressed (suicidal at one point) and just embarrassed. I felt so numb walking around everywhere. I had an anxiety attack. I felt chest pains at times. I cried a lot. This was the lowest point in my life up until then. When I went out with friends, I felt lost like I was missing something and I kept thinking about the life I had.

1-year after divorce: processing the divorce: Because I grew up in a conservative family and I had never been single in my life, divorce was extremely hard on me. It is during this time that my sister took me under. My sister told me to leave the house and move in with her young family. I left the house (still paid the mortgage) but moved into her small apartment with her family. Here is the advice part from my divorce. Find any support that you can to help you get through the 1st year after divorce. Seek positive help! I still felt like a zombie every day for a year. I made some desperate attempts to get my ex-wife back. She didn’t care. It hurt and it hurt a lot. I didn’t know how to be single. I thought about my past life every single moment and every single day. I felt extremely depressed and sad. In my friends and family circle, every single male that I knew that had gotten divorced was a complete loser. They couldn’t get their life back together. One of them became bankrupt and went crazy. I had not known any successful divorce stories. I spoke with an online therapist/coach in 2009 to help me get through divorce. I told them what had happened and how I felt. On top of that I told them this view that every single divorced male that I know is a complete loser and I am scared that I am going to be that person. This coach/therapist managed to break my thinking with one snippy rhetorical question. She said: Why don’t you change that and become a successful divorcee? I never had a moment like this in my life where one question changed my entire thinking. I thanked her and immediately started reprocessing my thoughts. What if divorce doesn’t have to be this loser thing all my life. What if it’s the start of a new awesome life? This was the turning point in me processing my grief and divorce. At this point, I changed from a teenage attitude 27-year-old man to a real man. I started thinking about what I wanted in my life and started being open to learning/experiencing new things. I started reading cheesy self-help books such as Success principles by Jack canfield. Cheesy self-help books are very useful when you are going through a low in life, particularly if you don’t have a good role model or success stories that you know of personally. This particular book – I can't remember what it said – but it really opened my mind to try new things and imagine a new life for yourself.

2nd year after divorce: I began being interested. Into the 2nd year of divorce, I had made up my mind that I was not going to be a loser divorce story. I am going to make everyone wish they were divorced because it turned out so good for me. I started working hard at my job. And I started being more ballsy. I asked out a coworker at work. She promptly rejected me. And I was so happy. Not because I was rejected but because I knew I had gotten over my ex. Next day at work, I was smiling and very happy and this coworker must have thought I was a weirdo. It didn’t matter and I knew I was on some next level stuff that I had never known before. I started reading more and going out more. I worked in Chicago. I started hanging out with coworkers and my college friends going to bars, meeting new people. I tried new things: new workout routines, learning to play guitar, and reading many books. Attempted a start-up. Dated many women. Just experienced many new things. In this stage of my post-divorce life: I really learned that life and your reactions to life are what you make it. You can be happy if you let yourself be happy.

3-5 years after divorce: At this point after divorce, I really didn’t think about my ex at all. She would still call me at times while being drunk. I felt sorry for her. I advised her to start dating new people and get her life together. The lesson here for me is that do not turn to substance abuse during divorce. I didn’t, I had done that in college and I never wanted to go back to that sort of a low. And also, it would cement me in a male loser divorcee path, which I abhorred. Experience the pain and let it pass through. You will be stronger for it. During this 3–5-year post divorce period, I continued to date. I learned new things like card counting/blackjack. I was on the recreational minigolf team and recreational basketball team. I was happy but I started noticing that I was becoming sad at times for not being in a relationship or being with somebody. Some of my best friends were now either married for the first time or were in a serious relationship. I have been to a few friends’ weddings now. It felt weird to me that I was single now while my friends are married. It was the reverse before. My dating and short relationships were starting to make me insecure. I started to wonder if maybe there is something wrong with me and that women don’t like me because I had been divorced. The initial high of post-divorce life had gone and now I was faced with the reality of being single. I still felt happy because I had a job and I was enjoying life. I felt that I hadn’t become a loser.

5-years after divorce: I met my future wife. I continue to meet people through various online dating sites. Here is when I met my future wife. When I met her immediately there was a connection. She was very different from my ex. She wanted to build her life on her own. She was working and going to school at night to better herself. We started dating exclusively and went through a girlfriend/boyfriend phase. And two years later, I proposed to her. And she said yes and we got married. 10-years later, we are happily married. My prior after divorce was that I would become a loser after divorce. I didn’t imagine the life I have now.

I think my advice for people going through divorce and my younger self is this…

• Know that life after divorce will be much much better if you let it be. I wish someone would have told me this.

• Find your support, seek help! Avoid negative help (substance abuse), negative people (could be your friends or family).

• Forgive your ex and move on. Take more losses than you need to just so you can move on. That’s what I did. Give the other person more property and more money, just for your peace of mind. Don’t lose yourself. Money can be made. Time will heal you. You are not losing anything if you have yourself.

• Time heals all the wounds. This is what I experienced. 1-year max to get over it, I think. And 5-years to the start of a completely different life. In 10 years, you will see your previous life like someone else’s. My father told me after rebuilding my life is that he had never seen anything like this. You have rebuilt your life twice from rock bottom. It’s impressive.

• And finally, divorce is an opportunity to be the person you always wanted to be.