Finding Yourself After Divorce: Our Stories of Starting Over

Divorce was never something either of us expected to have in common. Paige married for the first time at 19 and divorced four years later. Jenna married at 24, and her marriage ended after 10 years. Our relationships were different, but when we sat down to talk about them, we realized there were parts of our stories that sounded surprisingly familiar.

We both remember having doubts before our weddings and moving forward anyway. We both found ourselves becoming smaller inside relationships that weren’t working. And eventually, in very different ways, we both reached a point when we knew something had to change. For Paige, discovering her husband’s infidelity became the permission slip she needed to leave. For Jenna, that clarity came much more slowly, after years of feeling lonely and disconnected in her marriage.

Neither of us sees divorce only as an ending now. In very different ways and on very different timelines, finding yourself after divorce became part of both of our stories.

We Both Thought Marriage Was What Came Next

When Paige looks back at getting married at 19, she can see how much her idea of marriage had been shaped by the world we grew up in. We were raised in a conservative Christian family where sex before marriage and living together before marriage weren’t part of the picture. Her parents were also high school sweethearts who married at 19, so somewhere along the way, that timeline became normal to her. Meet someone in high school, fall in love, get married, start your life.

Nobody was standing over Paige telling her she had to get married young. The pressure was more internal than that. Even when she dated in high school, she remembers thinking that if she couldn’t see herself marrying someone, there wasn’t much reason to keep dating them. When she did meet someone she really liked, marriage felt like the next logical step.

Jenna was a little older when she got married, but she recognizes some of the same thinking in her own story. She started dating her ex-husband in college, and he was her first significant relationship. By 24, friends around them were getting married, Jenna was beginning her career, and marriage seemed like the next thing adults did. Looking back now, she can see how much she was checking the boxes of the life she thought she was supposed to build.

What makes that harder to look back on is that both of us remember having doubts before our weddings.

The Doubts We Had Before We Got Married

Paige remembers wondering if getting married was actually the right decision. At the time, it was easy to call those feelings cold feet. The wedding was already planned, the venue was paid for, and friends and family were traveling to be there. Calling it off felt almost impossible, so she kept going.

Jenna had doubts too. She and her ex-husband had broken up several times before they married, often because she felt like he wasn’t as invested in the relationship as she was. When they got back together, she would find herself trying harder, hoping that if she could somehow be better or more lovable, the relationship would feel more secure.

She has language for that dynamic now that she didn’t have then. After years of therapy and learning more about attachment, Jenna can see how deeply she was trying to prove her worth inside the relationship. At the time, though, it didn’t look that clear. There was love, history, community, and a shared picture of what their lives could become, so they kept moving forward.

That is one of the strange things about looking back at a former version of yourself. Things that feel obvious now weren’t necessarily obvious when you were standing inside them.

How Paige Slowly Stopped Speaking Up

For Paige, the changes in her marriage happened gradually. Early arguments could start over something seemingly insignificant and turn into situations where she felt there was no way for her perspective to be right. Over time, she started deciding which things were worth arguing about, and eventually it became easier to say nothing at all.

That pattern started showing up in her friendships too. Paige had close male friends from high school, but questions about why she talked to them created enough tension that she slowly stopped. It wasn’t an explicit demand. Instead, she found herself justifying the distance: they weren’t her husband, so did she really need to talk to them anyway?

The same thing happened with her friend Stephi, someone Paige had known and loved for years. Stephi was outspoken and willing to ask questions, which created friction in Paige’s marriage. When Stephi asked Paige to be in her wedding, Paige said no because she knew how much conflict participating would create at home. She still attended and did Stephi’s hair and makeup, but looking back, she knows she should have been standing beside her friend.

At the same time, Paige’s cheerleading gym was thriving. She loved the people there, they loved her, and the business kept growing. She poured more and more of herself into it. Only later could she recognize that work had also become a really good reason not to be home.

Jenna Had a Life That Looked Good on Paper

Jenna’s marriage looked different from Paige’s, but she recognizes the same shrinking in her own story. From the outside, she had so many of the things she thought a successful adult life was supposed to include: a beautiful home, amazing vacations, a close community of friends, a growing career, and a marriage that had lasted for years. On paper, it checked all the boxes.

Inside the relationship, however, Jenna felt increasingly lonely. There were subtle criticisms, tension around spending time with her family, and a feeling that she was constantly managing the relationship and trying to earn connection. Over time, she became less connected to her family and less confident in herself.

One memory stands out to her now. Her dad had a stroke, and when Jenna found out he was in the hospital, she assumed her husband would want to travel with her to see him. His response was to question why she had assumed he would go without first considering what he had happening in his own life. What Jenna remembers most isn’t even his response. It’s hers.

Instead of thinking, my dad is in the hospital, I really need my husband to be with me, she immediately wondered if he was right and she had been inconsiderate.

Looking back, that moment says a lot to her about where she was at the time. She had lost confidence in herself and was spending so much energy trying to keep the relationship together that she barely recognized how small she had become.

Eventually, Jenna’s husband was unfaithful. But she doesn’t see the cheating as the simple answer to why their marriage ended. The disconnection had existed for years before that, and the infidelity was one part of a much bigger story. The deeper realization for Jenna was understanding how long she had believed she needed to earn love and how lonely she had become trying to do it.

The Moments That Made Leaving Feel Possible

For Paige, infidelity was the moment that finally made leaving feel possible. She came home from a cheer competition and learned that her husband had been with another woman in their home. Paige describes that discovery as almost giving her a permission slip. She had already been unhappy and had already stopped speaking up for herself, but now there was something concrete she could point to and say, Okay. This is enough.

What followed only made the decision clearer. Her husband eventually disclosed multiple instances of infidelity beginning before their marriage. Their lease was almost over, they didn’t have children together, and within weeks Paige began figuring out what life apart would look like. She moved into an apartment and filed for divorce.

Jenna’s breaking point was much less immediate. Her husband had first brought up divorce before COVID, but the possibility terrified her at the time. She describes carrying a deep fear of abandonment, so even in a marriage where she felt lonely, the idea of actually being left felt almost unbearable. They continued therapy, but then COVID disrupted everything and Jenna’s dad died.

His death brought a kind of clarity she hadn’t expected. Jenna traveled to Northern California for his memorial service, and while she was there with her mom, brother, sister, and sister’s boyfriend, she remembers looking around and thinking, This is my family; my husband doesn’t belong here. She could suddenly feel how disconnected her husband had become from that part of her life.

Her dad’s service was in January 2021. Less than two months later, Jenna and her husband decided in therapy that they were getting divorced. She was still afraid of being alone, but by then, the loneliness she felt inside the marriage had become harder than the possibility of being on her own.

What Happened When the Marriage Was Actually Over

Because divorce hadn’t really existed in our family, there was another layer to ending a marriage: we were doing something people in our family simply didn’t do. Paige remembers wondering if being the first meant she had failed or disappointed people. But those feelings weren’t enough to change her decision, and when she finally told her family, the reaction was largely relief.

Her divorce became something she was ready to move through. Paige and her friend Sarah even made a paper chain to count down the waiting period until it could be finalized, cutting off another link as each day passed. She divorced in 2009, and today that chapter feels so far removed from her current life that she rarely thinks about it.

For Jenna, the end of the marriage brought relief too, but what came afterward was more disorienting than she expected. She had spent so much of her energy trying to maintain the relationship that when it was gone, she suddenly had a lot of empty space. There was no marriage to focus on anymore, which meant she had to start looking at herself.

That was when finding herself after divorce really began.

Finding Yourself After Divorce: What Comes After the Wake Up Call

Jenna describes divorce as a wake-up moment, but not because everything instantly got better once the marriage ended. In some ways, that was when the deeper work started. She had to ask herself what she wanted her life to look like when she wasn’t organizing it around another person.

Therapy, both individual and group, has been a meaningful part of that process for her. She has also been intentional about not making healing entirely about what her ex-husband did or didn’t do.

For Jenna, there was more to understand about herself: why she stayed in a relationship where she felt so alone, why she believed she needed to earn love, and why she had made herself smaller in an attempt to keep the relationship together.

There was grief in looking at those questions. She mourned the time she felt she had lost and the version of herself who had become so disconnected. But there were also pieces of her life beginning to grow in ways that felt completely different.

Jenna had launched her own family law practice shortly before the divorce, and at the time she wasn’t sure whether she could support herself with it. Building the practice into a successful business became an important part of discovering that she could take care of herself. After feeling so dependent in her marriage, that independence was very empowering.

She also started investing more intentionally in friendships, experiences, and things that genuinely made her happy. Before the divorce, Jenna had spent years thinking about whether her life looked successful from the outside. When that version of her life fell apart, she decided she didn’t want to rebuild it around the same goal.

“I don’t want to chase a life that looks good anymore,” she says. “I need to be in a life that feels good.”

Dating Again Became Part of the Learning Too

Dating after divorce brought its own surprises for Jenna. Because she had met her ex-husband so young and hadn’t had many significant relationships before him, she sometimes felt like her dating experience had been frozen at the age she was when they met.

At first, she noticed herself falling into familiar patterns. Some of the men she dated brought up dynamics that felt a lot like the ones she had experienced in her marriage, which gave her another opportunity to notice what felt familiar and what she was still working through.

Over time, that began to change. Jenna has dated men who showed her what consistency, stability, security, healthy communication, and what she describes as healthy masculinity could feel like. Those relationships didn’t ultimately become the partnership she’s looking for, but they still mattered. They gave her new experiences to compare against old patterns.

She is single now, and she doesn’t describe herself as arriving at some final, healed version of herself. As she says in the episode, knowing yourself is a lifelong journey. For her, this is still unfolding.

Paige Made Herself a Different Kind of Promise

Paige’s life after divorce took a different path. One of the clearest things she carried out of her first marriage was a promise to herself: she would never keep her mouth shut just to avoid conflict again.

That feels almost funny to Jenna now because anyone who knows Paige knows how direct and outspoken she is. The idea that Paige could have found herself in a relationship where she stopped expressing what she thought seems almost impossible, and that is part of what stays with Paige about the experience. “If it could happen to me,” she says, “it could literally happen to anybody.”

When Paige eventually began her relationship with Alex, now her husband, she was clear from the beginning about how important communication was to her. She wanted him to tell her when something bothered him, and she was going to do the same. That didn’t mean they would never disagree. It meant she didn’t want keeping the peace to require either of them to disappear inside the relationship.

That was a meaningful shift for Paige because we grew up hearing about the importance of being a peacemaker. For a long time, keeping the peace sounded inherently good. Her first marriage complicated that idea. She learned what could happen when peace came at the expense of saying what she actually felt.

Divorce Was an Ending, but That Isn’t the Whole Story

When people learned Jenna was divorced, one of the most common responses was, “I’m so sorry.” She understands why people say it. Divorce can be painful, destabilizing, lonely, and incredibly hard. There were parts of hers that were all of those things. But “I’m sorry” has never quite captured the whole story for her.

Jenna is happier now. She feels more whole. She has built a successful practice, reconnected with herself and the people she loves, dated, traveled, tried new things, and continued figuring out what kind of life actually feels like hers. Paige’s divorce happened much longer ago, but she can trace pieces of the marriage she has today back to what she learned about losing and reclaiming her voice in the one that came before it.

Neither of us would reduce divorce to some simple story about everything happening for the best. There were painful parts of these marriages and painful parts of leaving them. But there were also things we discovered about ourselves afterward that we might not have found otherwise. Turns out finding yourself after divorce can teach you a thing or two about yourself.

That’s why, when Jenna talks about her divorce now, she doesn’t describe herself as sorry that it happened. It became a huge transition in her life and one of the experiences that pushed her to ask who she was outside of a marriage, what love felt like to her, and what she actually wanted.

For both of us, divorce was the end of something. Finding ourselves after divorce was everything that came next.

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