The Four Emotional Stages That Come Before Divorce

So you just got served a notice — your spouse intends to divorce you. That might be a complete blind-side, or it might be something you saw coming a long time ago. Either way, it’s hard not to ask yourself: how could they do this to me? We looked at the psychology behind the decision to ask for a divorce last time, but there’s almost always a period of time between the decision and the filing of the papers, and there’s quite a bit that happens to a relationship during that time — so let’s talk about that.

Stage One: Detachment
The moment a person has decided to divorce their spouse, they immediately become emotionally disengaged. This is a simple pain-avoidance mechanism: it hurts to hurt someone you’re close to, and your announcement of divorce will hurt them…so the only way to avoid getting hurt yourself is to not be close to the person you’re hurting.

Stage Two: Distance
The next logical step after detachment is for the divorcer to decrease the amount of time spent with the person they’re planning on divorcing. This is essentially an extension of the first step, but involves taking active steps rather than simply continuing the normal routine. Spending time out of the house, or at home but fully engaged in something else — a game, a new hobby, whatever… or in the extreme, suddenly becoming interested in a job, school, or family member hundreds of miles away…these are all ways of creating distance and thus making it easier to avoid the pain when you finally unleash the divorce papers.

Stage Three: Finding a Reason
Telling someone you’ve decided to divorce them is one thing, but telling them the real reason why is an entirely different thing. Quite often, because decisions are made emotionally and backed up with reason later (see our previous blog post), a divorcer has yet to actually decide “why” they’re seeking a divorce — they know just that they “have to.” So the reasons they come up with to justify it can range from the canned, blame-accepting lines like “It’s not you, it’s me…you deserve better” to the callous and guilt-inducing (and yet somehow only half-honest) reasons like “I realized I was fantasizing about my ex the last time we had sex.”

It’s important to realize that while this seems to be a moment in time (when they finally capitalize on whatever reason they find and decide to voice their complaint), the truth is that whether they realize it or not, the divorcer has been looking for “the reason” for some time. There is no such thing as a “spur-of-the-moment” breakup — if it seems that way to you, it’s because you haven’t seen the first few stages in action.

Stage Four: Seeking Vindication
Once a divorcer has found The Reason they’re going to leave, they don’t often just hit the button right then — they have to collect evidence first. So there’s almost always a period of time in which you’ll hear words like “there it is again” or “and that’s what I keep talking about.” Sometimes these are legitimate complaints! But especially if you notice them stretching to fit some incident into their narrative, you can be assured they’re firmly in this stage, building up momentum so they can finally hit the button.

In our last post, we discussed the factors that lead someone to decide to seek a divorce. It’s important to realize that the decision is rarely a single incident — all throughout this process, there will be moments when they make the same assessments again, and again. But it’s equally important to recognize that every one of these four phases is unconsciously designed to make that decision easier and easier, until finally filing the papers doesn’t seem like a frightening prospect, but rather like a natural and unavoidable consequence of how bad the relationship has become.

So how can you cut the process off before it reaches that point? We’ll be discussing that all next week.