Originally drafted January 23, 2026. 
Revised March 4-6, 2026.

One of the ugly truths about navigating an unexpected divorce (or really any kind of life-changing trauma) is that sometimes the people you hope will come through for you are nowhere to be seen or aren’t up to the task. But sometimes people who you least expect or have been on the margins of your life show up in ways that you might not expect. 

In labor and movement organizing spaces, one major tactic for building momentum and buy-in is visualizing people in a workplace or community along a spectrum of support. Often there is a bullseye diagram used to identify the larger group of people who are casual supporters at the peripheries, going inwards towards the center that represents the inner core of strongest supporters. For example, there might be people who are willing to sign a union card but unwilling to do a picket. There might be other people who are wiling to picket, but might be unwilling to serve as a union steward, and so on. The idea for organizers is that you wouldn’t expect someone who is on the outer rings of support to suddenly get to the inner core immediately, but over time you can move them further inside towards stronger levels of support. 

The bullseye diagram in organizing spaces makes intuitive sense to a lot of people because it also reflects how many of us think about our own personal lives, with the smaller group at the core constituting our closest inner circle. Meanwhile those at the outer edges are less involved in our life, and perhaps then less supportive or less able to bear witness to what we’re going through. But one of the challenges about perceiving your personal life along the bullseye diagram is that if someone in the inner circle of closest supporters, such as your spouse, decides to overturn the proverbial table and ask for a divorce, it inevitably shakes up the rest of the inner circles of close and extended support.

Getting a divorce is such a transformative life change that the people you may have thought were also with you in the inner circles that could provide you support are unable to do so. Sometimes it’s because they simply don’t have the life experience to know how best to provide support, sometimes it’s because they themselves don’t have the bandwidth because of the other challenges coming up in their life, and sometimes it’s because your divorce holds up a mirror to things that make them extremely uncomfortable about their own life and relationships.

The most fucked up shit anyone said to me about my divorce mostly came from one demographic: people who had never been through a divorce themselves. Especially women married or partnered to men who have never been through a divorce. These people, many of whom I adore, absolutely projected back their own insecurities and fears when they learned my husband suddenly left me.

Having my appendix burst and my dad die at the same time a year before my unexpected divorce prepared me for the sad truth that a lot of people truly have no idea how to respond or show up during a traumatic period. They have an inclination to downplay the pain, or to make it about themselves, or to suddenly tell you about how unhappy they are in their own marriages and how they’re thinking about divorcing their spouse. 

When you are going through a divorce, you will inevitably feel lonely and isolated regardless if you initiated it, it was a mutual decision, or you were blindsided. You need a lot of support, but there are other things you probably need in addition to support. 

I’ve recently started to distinguish the concepts of support and advice, and camaraderie and solidarity. Most people might only hit one or two of these categories, and that’s okay because they are all different ways of relating. I wish I had figured this out much earlier in my divorce so I could manage my expectations of what others could provide to me, and it’s still a lesson that I’m learning the hard way. 

Support

Support is something that anyone can provide if they put aside their ego (or main character syndrome). Right now in your life there is someone who probably would benefit from your support, and you are in a position to provide it to them. In the aftermath of my burst appendix and dad dying, I learned that the best forms of support are typically ones where someone simply offers whatever they have capacity to do, rather than asking you what you need (since that puts more labor on the person in crisis).

I will always be grateful to people who didn’t bother to ask me what would help or what I needed (news flash: someone who is in crisis often has no idea WTF they need at that moment!) but simply either sent me a thoughtful text acknowledging what I was going through and saying how I was in their thoughts, or sent me a DoorDash gift certificate, or said “Are you free Friday? Drinks on me.”

For ages I wanted to write an entire guide about how alienated I felt by well meaning people’s attempts to support me over recent years, and what actually turned out to be supportive acts from thoughtful people that helped my healing process. I never got around to writing this, but then thankfully Jamila Reddy went ahead and wrote this brilliant and comprehensive guide to support titled "Let me know if you need anything," and other things you should stop saying to someone who's grieving. Literally stop what you’re doing, go read it, bookmark it, refer to it often, and then you can come back to finish reading this.

Support is very different from advice. Support should be doled out by as many of us as possible without waiting to be asked. Advice should only be offered when expressly asked for or if you think you can offer good advice, then only with your intended recipient’s informed consent. The problem is that a lot of would-be supporters seem to think that providing support gives them permission or positioning to also be advice-givers, or even more sneakily, making your divorce about their own hypothetical reactions which comes awfully close to sounding like unsolicited advice. I cannot tell you how often I heard a version of “If my husband left me, I would run him over with my car/immediately go out and sleep with someone else/call his mother to turn his entire family against him/have to be bailed out of jail because I committed murder.” Yikes! Don’t do this. It makes it about you, and that is not supportive. 

Advice

What I’ve learned is that unless someone has a particularly skillful blend of education and practice (e.g., experienced therapists, clergy, chaplains, counselors), the best advice comes from those who have similar and recent lived experience to your own. The absolute best advice I got for handling my divorce came from either friends and acquaintances who had either very recently gone through their own divorce or had a similar experience of a massive blindside from a partner, or were paid professionals (my therapist and my divorce attorney). Just like parents are understandably skeptical and annoyed by non-parents who try to give parenting advice, in my experience people who have not been divorced (or been through whatever trauma you’re going through) simply cannot offer advice that is useful or emotionally resonant.     

Camaraderie

I think of camaraderie as similar to support, in that it’s more easily accessible and should be freely given when possible. What I think distinguishes camaraderie from support is that support can often be a one-way situation (the support giver doesn’t need to have experienced the same challenges as the support recipient), whereas I think camaraderie is a reciprocal exchange of energy and sharing space with people who have similar lived experiences.

For example, over the last year I have found deep camaraderie with my divorced friends and single friends. They may not be providing me specific support and we may not even talk about our shared lived experiences, but just hanging out with someone who knows what it’s like to deal with all the nonsense that single people go through, or have been through a divorce, feels like we have an unspoken mutual understanding. I have been very pleasantly surprised by how sometimes friendships can deepen from unexpected sources of those you may have previously considered to be acquaintances or less close friends when you are open to this kind of camaraderie. There’s a reason that the word “comrade” is related to the word camaraderie. 

Solidarity

Solidarity feels a little nebulous to define in the context of interpersonal relationships, but to me it involves some degree of naming and recognizing the political and material circumstances of life-changing events. If the Bechdel test is whether two women can have a conversation about anything besides a man, then the solidarity test of friendship is whether two friends can give “the personal is political” treatment to personal matters. I do not think that solidarity is a universal need among everyone, but I am an intensely political person. I look at virtually every aspect of my life through a political lens, and it is important for the way I wish to be witnessed in the world that I can share that personal/political filter with others.

I think solidarity often comes out of camaraderie, but not necessarily. I feel like during my divorce the glimpses I’ve had of solidarity have most often come from women who have a very sharp analysis of the ways in which the institution of marriage repeatedly fails women, by design. Sometimes this analysis comes from their lived experiences of going through divorce, sometimes it's because they have never gotten married (outsiders often have clearer understandings of communities than their insiders), sometimes it's because they have read plenty of feminist works regardless of their own relationship status or structure. 

In other words, what happened to me was not just an individual situation or an outlier of bad luck (a shocking number of women still believe that because they are with a Good Man their relationship is insulated from patriarchy; I too believed in that fairy tale until my divorce), but part of a larger system that deserves analysis and critique.

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