‘There’s an awful lot of pressure to get over divorce swiftly,’ says author, counsellor and psychotherapist Ann Hogan. Photo / 123rf
Moving on from one of the most stressful times in your life can seem overwhelming. Expert Ann Hogan offers four key strategies that can help.
Most relationship counsellors are in the business of keeping people together. Ann Hogan is more interested in what drives them apart. As a counsellor and psychotherapist with 25 years of experience, Hogan has seen hundreds of unhappy couples and lovelorn individuals sit on her couch. The times have changed, but heartbreak hasn’t.
“We all go through the same things, perhaps just in different ways,” Hogan says. “There’s always loss, grief, anger, a change in your sense of self.” What is different when it comes to parting ways today is that “there’s an awful lot of pressure to get over it and move on swiftly”, says Hogan. “Twenty years ago there was more understanding that divorce is a really hard, life-changing experience, even if there was also more stigma back then.”
Another big shift: breakups are no longer consigned to our teenage years or 20s. Though divorce rates have risen, there are far fewer divorces taking place within the first decade of marriages, in England and Wales. A quarter of couples who married in 1995 were divorced by 2000, but of those who married in 2012, just 17% had split by 2017. It’s midlife where many of us now have our toughest breakups “but there’s little said about how this is different and sometimes much harder than a relationship ending earlier in life, because of a longer shared history”, Hogan says.
The end of a relationship is painful, Hogan believes, but it needn’t be painful forever. Her new book, The Way Up After Your Breakup, is meant as a guide for people in the midst of heartbreak, to help them make sense of what has happened and put the past behind them, “as life moves on whether you want it to or not”, Hogan says. Here is what you need to know to move on with it.
Sometimes the toughest breakups are the ones we don’t expect, says Hogan. Not only do we need to deal with the shock of the sudden loss – the “weeks spent sobbing into your pillow”, as Hogan puts it – we are also left with many more questions than answers.
“Making sense of what happened is an important part of recovering,” she says, “but at some point you just have to accept that things are how they are, even if you were happy once.”
You can also “use this period to try to understand more about the other person, and yourself”, says Hogan. That means going through all of the confusing and troubling thoughts that crop up, without getting stuck in them. Hogan suggests journaling, “writing it all down but never sending it”. The beauty of this is that “you can look back in six months’ time and see how much you have really moved on, even if it still feels fresh”.
It’s essential to grieve, but it needn’t take up your whole day, says Hogan. It’s easy to spend all of your time in a spiral of questions. “Try saying to yourself, yes I’ll cry and I’ll worry, but I’m only going to do that between seven and eight o’clock,” she suggests. This way “you can process the feelings without letting them consume your whole life”.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in guilt, whether you were the one to end the relationship or the one left regretting going out with your friends that Saturday instead of staying at home with your spouse. There might also be huge guilt over how your split could affect any children that you share. “Hurting someone that you love is a very hard thing to come to terms with,” Hogan says.
For that reason “people really need to have self-compassion”, says Hogan. “You need to hold onto the fact that you did this because you think it’s the best thing for yourself, and probably for everyone else, too.”
It’s crucial not to get trapped in regret, either. “No relationship is completely good or bad – even if you really do think it was 90% bad by the end, there will still be happy shared memories and good times to look back on, so there will probably be some regret.”
To counter either, “make a list of all the reasons why you know that the breakup is right, and look at it every day if you need to”, Hogan advises. “This will help you to stick to your guns and not get carried away with guilt.”
It’s more socially acceptable to break up these days, which comes with its own challenges as well as freedoms. “Where people might have stayed together because it was ‘good enough’ in the past, they often end relationships now, as they realise that they’ve grown apart from their partner and that they’re no longer as compatible as they once were,” says Hogan.
This is a common scenario in midlife, she adds, where no one is at fault, but the relationship simply isn’t making one or both people happy. If you’re the one calling time on a partnership like this, then know that it’s perfectly okay to do so, but it can also be helpful to acknowledge that our expectations from relationships these days have made the game much harder.
“When I look at my parents’ marriage, for instance, I don’t think my father ever expected my mother to bring up the children and keep a nice house, and go to work, and at the same time look perfect and be a thousand per cent in bed,” says Hogan. “Similarly, my father went to work and made money, and he wasn’t expected to change nappies or do the shopping.”
The majority of couples expect more from each other now, so if you’re in this boat, remind yourself that “there is more pressure these days to do it all”, and that love sometimes just won’t be enough to keep a partnership together.
We’re often told that it’s the mature thing to stay friends with our exes, to chat properly if we bump into them in Sainsbury’s and always have a date in the diary for a catch-up lunch. Usually this does more harm than good, Hogan believes. “If you don’t really want to be friends, then stop maintaining the relationship,” she says.
When it comes to tricky midlife breakups, where finances are inevitably involved, few people end their partnerships on a whim. “Chances are that you found your partner too unreasonable to live with, and they’re very unlikely to become more reasonable once you’ve broken up,” Hogan points out.
Managing a relationship where you have shared children is different, but in that case “it’s all about having firm boundaries and respect for each other”, says Hogan. And while she “would never judge” someone who has sex with their ex, she does steer against it.
“Breakups usually aren’t cut and dried things, so having sex with your former partner, even if it’s tempting, will complicate things further,” Hogan explains. “There needs to be a period of reflection where you come to terms with your part in the end of the relationship, and theirs. It has to come sooner or later and by keeping that door open, you’re prolonging your own heartache.”