Whether it's young divorce generally, or Gen Z divorce specifically, in 2025, splits often feel less scandalous and more like rebrands. Photo / 123rf
For one thing, speed is of the essence.
In 2021, Kira Benson, a violinist living in Seattle, knew it was time to get a divorce. Ending their two-year “lavender marriage” wasn’t an easy decision, but the musician had a supportive ally. “If you have to dump your ex-husband,” Benson said, “co-dump him with his mistress.”
Before the breakup, Benson, 27, who uses the pronoun they, checked in with their therapist, who said a divorce would be a “good choice”. Out of queer solidarity, they informed their husband’s “mistress” – this was kosher in Benson’s arrangement, which was not a legal marriage, but a domestic partnership – about their shared partner’s troubling behaviour. The night of the breakup, Benson and the mistress spent a cosy evening together: “We were eating a lot of comfort food, playing a lot of Animal Crossing.”
The senior-most members of Generation Z are in their late 20s: old enough to have got married, but also old enough to regret it. As this generation enters divorcing age, it’s finding little shame in the act – especially when a split, like Benson’s, is motivated by prioritising one’s mental health. And rather than quietly moving on, younger divorcees are often highlighting this facet of their story, even after they’re in new relationships.
Michel Janse, a 28-year-old content creator in Oceanside, California, is particularly vocal about being vocal about her divorce. When she needs to prepare a synopsis of her videos for a channel description – a task that demands a squirm-inducing combination of self-reflection and brevity – Janse often goes with “I found love after divorce”.
“It’s one of the sentences that just summarises the whole picture of what I’ve vlogged over the years,” she said. Janse said that even after she remarried last year, the identity of divorcee felt like an important part of who she is.
Whether it’s young divorce generally, or Gen Z divorce specifically, in 2025, splits often feel less like scandals and more like rebrands. Megan Wallace, a 29-year-old sex writer in London who reports on the mating rituals of Gen Z, cites two divorce inspiration figures for this generation: actor Sophie Turner and model Emily Ratajkowski, who created “divorce rings” out of her engagement ring. According to Wallace, both Turner and Ratajkowski emerged from their divorces as people newly and entirely themselves.
Jackie Combs, a family law and divorce lawyer who worked with Ratajkowski, maintains that “the taboo of getting divorced is long gone”. “Individuals are more willing to consider this as just a transition in their relationship and a new chapter, rather than feel the guilt and shame,” she said.
Combs, 37, has found that Gen Z tends to act with decisiveness about ending relationships. “They’re so much more transparent,” she said. “They live in the world of social media, and everything is about storytelling. And so I think individuals are more willing to be open and honest about their lives than prior generations were.”
This is a generation that can walk away quite easily – a function, Janse speculates, of young people’s general sense of having endless options. How realistic those options are is another question.
“I feel like with social media at our fingertips, we are just so much more aware of all the lives we could be living,” Janse said. “We’re scrolling through our feed and we see this girl lives on a sailboat in Maine, and then this girl lives in a high-rise in New York. You can just see firsthand what all these different lives look like, and that makes it easier to visualise a change or shift.”
Wallace said that young people today, who came of age during the dislocations of the Covid pandemic and amid an uncertain economic landscape, are inured to upheaval. “Gen Z just imagines they will have three marriages because life is prolonged, they’ve seen so much rapid social change, and it’s not realistic to be with one person for the whole thing,” Wallace said.
If the stereotypical divorce of yesteryear was caused by infidelity, the impetus for a Gen Z divorce tends to be more subtle.
“I’ve heard about people having different ‘love languages,’ which isn’t something I think I’ve heard other than in the last few years,” said Grant Moher, 50, a lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia, who has written about Gen Z divorce trends for his firm’s blog. Moher said he had seen infidelity cited as the reason for a divorce much less frequently among Gen Z couples, compared with older married people. (He noted that this might be because affairs tend to start further into a marriage.) Rather, emotional wellbeing is many a young petitioner’s North Star.
“I definitely have seen people divorcing for reasons that are more mental-health-focused,” he said, adding that pop psychology terms of art have a way of creeping in. “I hear ‘gaslighting’ a lot. I also hear ‘narcissist’ to describe behaviours that are probably just garden-variety selfish.”
When it comes to the division of assets, Moher pointed out that there is often little property to split – again, even the oldest Gen Z divorcees are only in their late 20s – though there’s a good deal of student debt and more digital currencies like bitcoin to contend with. He added that most of his Gen Z clients come to him before they have children. And both Moher and Combs were quick to note that Gen Z prioritises fast, efficient divorces: they do not want to drag things out.
Nicole Mitchell, a 26-year-old podcaster in Nashville, Tennessee, who married at 18 and divorced about a year and a half later, objected to the idea that if a relationship isn’t serving you – if it isn’t perfect – just leave.
“That I don’t necessarily agree with,” she said. “I just look at the generation on social media and that narrative that’s pushed. It’s gotten a little bit sad, that it’s all about just feeling good. I don’t think you find the most meaningful things by just doing what feels good.”
Mitchell is committed to retaining her divorcee identity, but she says it’s not one to seek lightly. “It would be more comfortable for me to pretend like it didn’t exist,” she said of her divorce, “but I choose to continue to be open about it, because I want people to see and I want people to know that they’re not alone in it”.
According to Wallace, many members of Gen Z, even the newly married, see marriage as a commitment that is neither final nor exclusive. The rise of nontraditional relationship models reshaped expectations of married life and, when nonmonogamous options are on the table, some of marriage’s stricter requirements are defanged.
“To be able to explore your personal autonomy through sexual experiences, solo or as a couple, I do think that makes it much less frightening,” Wallace said.
While members of Gen Z aren’t universally opposed to marriage, of course, many simply refuse to be trapped by it. It’s a generation accustomed to all sorts of relationship structures, and divorce can be presented as an option like any other.
Jamie Spiker, 25, of Harrisonburg, Virginia, who works in marketing and admissions for a cosmetology school, divorced a few years ago, after five years of marriage. She also baulks at any suggestion that divorce is the easy way out. “I think people are just really quick to say, ‘Oh, this is going to make me a better version. I don’t want to put in the work to try to make this marriage work.’”
To the young divorcees themselves, it can feel as if there’s an impression from the outside that if marriage isn’t as big a deal anymore, then neither is divorce. But even for those who aren’t ashamed of their divorces, they don’t make light of the process. “Because it is a huge, huge deal to go through,” Janse said. “It is irreversible, so expensive. It’s messy. Everything about your life will change. Give or take.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Maggie Lange
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