The grief that rarely comes with a casserole

If your spouse passes away, everyone takes notice and it becomes a community project. Meals are made, prayers and condolences are sent and support is at the ready. You are allowed to be a mess and you are allowed to lose it openly and unashamedly. Your loss is felt and understood far and wide.

But what does it feel like when infidelity or divorce hit?

It feels like someone died, but they are still walking around in the world. But you also feel like you have had a knife to the heart, so is the death yours?

If you decide to try and save your marriage, you grieve in silence. You slap on a smile and you face the world each day, while your insides crumble to dust. You protect the relationship fiercely, make excuses and pretend that everything is ok. You walk around questioning yourself on who knows the dirty secret in your marriage, and who doesn’t. The shame that should belong to the infidel feels transferred onto you. Life as you knew it will never be the same again. I don’t think that anything cuts deeper than betrayal from the person who made a covenant to love, honor and forever be faithful to you. I have heard it likened to someone that you trust pushing you out of a plane knowing that you don’t have a parachute. It takes years to recover, but you do it largely alone. Often the infidel has no real understanding of what they did and the impact of it and will expect you to get over it as fast as possible. And so, you do your best, for the sake of saving the relationship, but it’s a lonely road.

If they decide to leave you as a result of the infidelity, the shame of divorce descends. While they move on to a ‘better life’, openly celebrating their new-found love, you are left alone and in pieces. They expect you to just get over it and be ok ‘for the sake of the children’. You are expected to support their new relationship, embrace their new partner and ignore the hurt and the fact that your family has been destroyed. If you don’t, you are labeled bitter and pathetic.

In divorce you grieve not only the loss of the person and the relationship, but also the life you thought you had. It brings into question and tarnishes every memory, every major life event and everything that you once held dear. Feelings of regret, failure and self-doubt take over.

Unlike death, divorce is not a single defined event and irreversibly changes the landscape of your life. It can take months if not years just to finalize the process. Depending on your circumstances, co-parenting can feel like a group project with your least favorite person in class – forever. You will likely lose friendships and find your social circles shrink and change. Your kids are taken away at least every other weekend, and you are left with a life that feels impossible to balance.

After divorce, society expects you to have a glow up. If instead you look a mess, you feel judgement and pity. There seems to be a pressure (real or perceived) to emerge from divorce strong and independent, embracing life and living it to the full, when often you just want to crawl beneath the covers and hide from the world.

Yes, there is a huge amount of growth that can come after being subjected to infidelity and divorce and that growth does need to be celebrated. But let’s not disregard the trauma of it all. It needs to be supported in a similar way to death. Not hidden behind shame-filled closed doors or ignored, and also not presented as a pressure-filled ‘come-back’ moment.