by Don Hall

DIVORCE: A Survivor's Guide: Part One
DIVORCE: A Survivor's Guide: Part Two

There’s a moment in every man’s life when the walls close in, and he’s forced to face the howling abyss of his failures. For some, this reckoning comes in the form of a hangover at the bottom of a hotel minibar, surrounded by empty bottles and bad decisions. For others, it arrives with a neatly folded document served with a smirk by a dead-eyed clerk in a courthouse. This is divorce: the flaming wreckage of your once-glorious marriage, a catastrophe you can neither outrun nor ignore.

Yes. You are now divorced. Stew on the reality for a moment.

It isn’t the divorce itself, but the fact that you didn’t see it coming. The signs were always there—cold shoulders, hollow conversations, and a sex life deader than James Earl Jones. But denial is a powerful drug, and so you go about your days pretending nothing is wrong until the bomb drops.

Now, you sit in your room, looking at what went wrong and how you didn't see it coming and, wait, I can't feel my legs!

There will come a point in the divorce process where you think you’re winning. You get the sense that you’ve got the upper hand, and maybe you’ve even managed to secure some small victory in the melee, shared custody of the kids, or maybe you’ve just managed to walk away with your record collection intact. It’s a hollow victory, but in the fog of war, it will feel like conquering Rome.

Don’t be fooled. This is the calm before the storm, the eye of the hurricane. Just when you think you’ve made it through the worst of it, life will deliver another punch to the gut. Maybe it’s the realization that your ex is already dating some smug, half-wit yoga instructor. Or perhaps it’s the first time you come home to your empty apartment, where the silence is so thick you could cut it with a knife.

You'll be so filled with that distrust of the opposite sex you might sequester yourself, like a monk terrified of the locals, and hide from any possible interaction with them. Or you’ll try to fill the void with distractions—new hobbies, new women, anything to keep from staring into the abyss. But deep down, you’ll know that none of it really matters. The game is over, and you’ve lost. You’re still just another shell-shocked casualty of love’s great con.

Eventually, the dust will settle. The divorce decree will be signed, sealed, and delivered. What happens next is up to you. There are two paths you can take: one leads to bitter isolation, and the other to reckless hedonism. Choose wisely.

The bitter path is tempting. It offers the comfort of self-righteous anger, a kind of martyrdom where you get to play the victim for the rest of your life. You can sit in your darkened apartment, drinking yourself into oblivion, cursing your ex and the universe for all your misfortunes. But that’s a sucker’s game. Bitterness will rot your soul from the inside out, turning you into the very thing you despise.

The other path is more dangerous, but infinitely more rewarding. This is the path of embracing the chaos. You’ve already lost everything, so why not go out in a blaze of glory? Travel to exotic locales, chase after wild experiences, and live like you’ve got nothing to lose—because you don’t. Divorce is the end of one chapter, but it’s also the beginning of something else, something raw and untamed.

In the end, divorce isn’t something you survive. It’s something you endure. It’s a crucible that burns away the illusions of who you thought you were, leaving behind only the bare bones of your true self. And once you’ve stared into that void and come out the other side, you’ll be stronger, stranger, and a hell of a lot more dangerous than you were before.