What I did well and what I screwed up with my unexpected divorce
Originally drafted February 2 and 5, 2026
A quick note from Eira:
Thank you so much for subscribing to A Vast, Unregulated Medium! It means a lot to me to know how many people are engaged with my very personal chaotic midlife semi-public processing. I want to give everyone a heads up that after this week, the next three weeks will be semi-paywalled for a series about the life choices I made many years before I got married (about money, keeping my family name, and not having children) that made my unexpected divorce easier to handle.
The more I write about what I’m going through, the more I need to put in some gentle boundaries around what is hanging out for anyone to read on Al Gore’s internet. Right now the best way to do that is with a paywall. Not everything moving forward will be paywalled, but I plan to use it anytime I write about topics that are either particularly vulnerable or likely to provoke internet trolls. The current upgraded subscription rate is $25 annually, a bargain compared to most newsletters out there! Think of it as either paying my cat’s portion of the rent (my landlord charges a cat fee), or the price of a nice cocktail over which I’d share all of this with you in-person anyway. You can upgrade below, or at the end of this full-access edition.
I never expected to get a divorce but now that I am on the other side, I am slowly becoming the person that other people reach out to when they are either thinking of divorce, or if they have someone close to them suddenly going through a divorce and need some advice to pass along. I think everyone’s divorce is unique and there isn’t a universal set of advice that would work for everyone. But I also found it really helpful in the early days to hear from others who had been through it about any advice they could offer me.
So in that spirit, here is a non-comprehensive list of things that I think I did pretty well, and things that I totally screwed up, over the first few months after my ex-husband left me.
Here are the things that I did well:
I immediately sent out a text blast to my closest friends (and my therapist) to let them know what was going on and that I would need their support in the coming weeks. The same night that my ex-husband dropped the bomb I drove over to my mom’s house and shared the news with her and my stepdad. I asked my ex to immediately plan to sleep in the guest room for the foreseeable future and to avoid me as much as possible.
Within the first couple of days I asked my attorney friends for referrals to family law attorneys and began scheduling consultations. I’ll talk more about that in a future newsletter because having my own well-padded emergency fund I built up for years was critical to securing good legal representation as quickly as possible.
I began saving as many documents as possible, especially related to our finances, that I suspected might be useful to my legal negotiations. Remember the digital archivist acronym, LOCKSS = Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe. This turned out to be a big help, since I had to upload hundreds of pages of documents eventually to my attorney through OneDrive.
I created a “one page” overview document of the basic facts of our marriage, income, finances, assets, and my top priorities (i.e. not getting completely financially screwed as the self-employed much lower income earner) that I took with me to every initial legal consultation I had while determining which lawyer I wanted to represent me.
I had a few conversations with people who had recently been through divorces in Ohio, and decided on a legal strategy I was comfortable with (pursuing dissolution with negotiations using our attorneys). I avoided a collaborative agreement style approach after hearing some horror stories from other women.
The first couple of months were extremely rocky emotionally in general and it was very hard when my ex and I had to be in the same space. After some initial messy conversations, I made my emotional boundaries clear that I would not be discussing anything about my personal or working life except for matters directly related to divorce and disentangling our lives.
I spent a lot of time seeking out supportive media and online content. These were some of the best resources I found:
r/Divorce_Women subreddit (there is also an r/Divorce subreddit, but I advise browsing it with caution - there is a lot of misogyny that shows up from extremely entitled men)
Redacted is a substack of women who submit anonymous divorce stories
Dire Straights podcast/substack, especially the episode "What is Couples Therapy For?" I am a paid subscriber and have a few free gift links for their podcast/newsletter if anyone wants one.
I don’t feel great admitting this, but I think it’s important to share: For several months I fell down a somewhat misandrist YouTube rabbit hole of supercuts of women talking about the most diabolical shit their boyfriends/husbands/children’s father had ever done to them and how men cannot be trusted under any circumstances. As someone who has been repeatedly traumatized by boys and men since childhood, it was actually pretty healing to consume content that didn’t try to make excuses for men or engage in heteroexceptionalism, but I can’t say I recommend a long-term diet of this stuff.
Finally, I did not say anything publicly online about my divorce until I had the decree from the courts. When you are going through some legal stuff, you should STFU about it while things are playing out behind the scenes, because you never know what someone could use against you during legal negotiations.
Things that I didn’t do well:
I wish I had said less at the time about my emotional state and what I was going through to people who haven’t experienced a divorce, particularly other women married to/long-term partnered with men who hadn’t gone through a divorce themselves. Some people, including people I had considered close friends, said some outrageously inappropriate things to me that reflected more of their own relationship anxieties around divorce contagion than any kind of support I could have used at the time.
Developing some go-to scripts when people wanted to speculate around the causes of my divorce or my ex-husband’s real motivations for leaving me. I am mostly inoculated against this speculation now because I’ve actually moved into the “living well is the best revenge” stage of life after divorce. I no longer care about what my ex was thinking or is up to as long as he continues to uphold his part of the separation agreement. But early on it really rubbed salt in the wounds to continually hear people say things like “Men never leave unless they are cheating or if there is something else he isn’t telling you.” My ex was always a brick wall for trying to get information out of during our marriage anyway. Other people going Nancy Drew/Encyclopedia Brown on me just compounded my humiliation and feelings of what a naïve loser I must have been and that somehow the marriage blowing up was entirely my fault. Again, I think it goes back to other people’s own feelings about their own relationship insecurities. Many people unconsciously cling to the idea that surely there must be a sign that I had missed or ignored, because otherwise it’s frightening for people to think that something like what happened to me could happen to them.
I wish I had found a support group in the first few months, but I tend to shy away from talking about my feelings in a setting where I have to give up control or be around people who continually self-sabotage (my cross to bear as a Capricorn Sun/Cancer Moon). Most of what I could find online was for women choosing to initiate their own divorces (which has a very different emotional trajectory in the early stages of divorce compared to a blindsided partner), was not affordable, or gave some super cringey/religious vibes.
I wish I had asked more of my friends to quietly spread the word (i.e. gossip) about how I was going through an unexpected divorce to our mutual acquaintances, especially in my profession. It is exhausting to have to tell the same story over and over about why your life is suddenly upside down.
I wish I had gone to a rage room or something on a regular basis where I could get out my anger in a safe physical manner. I was seething with rage for months and probably could have used this as an outlet.
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