What It's REALLY Like To Get Divorced In Your 20s: Challenges, Growth, and New Beginnings | Ep 103

Buckle up, because today's episode of Single Girls Guide to Life lays out the complex jounrey of getting divorced in your 20s, with a deep dive into the emotional, legal, and personal growth aspects of navigating through a divorce at this age. I tackle the unique challenges it presents, and the need for the divorcing couple's cooperation for their well-being, whilst sharing the brighter side of divorce that exists.

I dissect the intricate process of leaving a marriage, the emotional turmoil that accompanies it, and how to navigate the maze of financial ties. Struggles are part and parcel of this path, but you're not alone. We're here to help you understand these challenges, whether emotional or legal, and navigate through them one step at a time.

Above all else, getting divorce in your 20s might be a challenge, but it could also be a period of self-discovery and personal growth, and I discuss how a divorce can redefine your views on marriage and relationships, and help you prioritise your own needs. So, whether you're single by choice or circumstance, join us as we explore the less-discussed side of going through a divorce in your 20s. It's not necessarily an ending, but perhaps a new beginning.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Single Girls Guide to Life. This week, we are delving into the topic of divorce. This is something that I've always felt like I wanted to bring up on the podcast. Whilst it's for single women, there is a tendency to talk as if those single women haven't necessarily had many experiences in their life, and I, for one, found myself in a long-term relationship for over seven years, and that included marriage and thus divorce as well, and I wanted to share with you what it's really like to go through a divorce in your 20s. You may not know, but you're actually more likely to go through a divorce in your 20s than you are at other stages. I imagine that that's down to a number of factors, such as the simplicity of the experience I kind of have, which is realizing that maybe you want something different to what you thought you wanted and you haven't had that full discovery and it's easier to leave.

Speaker 1: 0:58

Is the second part that in your 20s, I think you can still have that realization. Your 30s, that you want something different, but your commitments are higher. In your 30s, the chances that you've potentially built a family with children are higher, and even though I had elements, such as buying a house together and we shared pets. Those are easier to break down and to reset than it is when you have children. That is an added layer of divorce. So when I talk about getting divorced in my 20s, I'm talking from a perspective that chances are you didn't have children as well, because the minute children are involved, it is more complex to leave and your decision-making process is different, although I still stand by that. You can't stay together for the children if you are not functioning as a couple, even as best friends, if you can't respect one another, if you are not being treated correctly or you're not treating the other person correctly, then you can't stay. You can't use the benefit of having that other person to care for the children, to provide financial support, etc. You have to do what's best for you in that moment and whilst two parent families are, through the research, better for children, that can only be true if the two parents cooperate. If it creates a toxic environment, then it's not. But today's episode is not focused on that. It's focused on telling you and sharing what it's really like to go through a divorce in your 20s, how it compares to going through a divorce in your other decades and that's not from my own personal experience. It's through observation and looking at this difference of what's the difference when you have kids or not, but ultimately also what it's really like to get married, which most people do in the name of love but then have to deal with the legalities of getting divorced.

Speaker 1: 2:47

Because we seem to forget, we seem to not realise necessarily, that marriage is a contract. It is illegally, binding very much the interest of the government and they're in charge of it. You can't break that contract easily. You have to ask for permission to leave and whilst they've brought in the no fault divorce, which does make that easier to at least begin the process, you still just can't leave without there being some tie, whether that's financial tie, that needs settling first. We've got all of the responsibilities. If you have tied in together in some way. If you've got children, it becomes even more complex in that sense. But you can't just easily leave. You have a duty to leave the contract according to the terms that are available. It's unlike, therefore, a long-term relationship where maybe you did cohabit but the house was in the name of one person and you can talk about the pros and cons to that and how that gets even more complex when you were contributing to the house. But your name's not on it and you can follow the advice on the legal queen. If you look her up, she'll tell you all about how that's a bad situation to be in. But ultimately, when you deal with marriage, you're dealing with a legal contract and you can't just exit it when you want and there are every kind of repercussion, as it were, or in some ways it's protection.

Speaker 1: 4:13

There are advantages to tying the knot if you're then planning to build a future. But I'm going to talk about some of those realities. Some of them are great things about getting divorced in your 20s and some of them are not so great things about getting divorced in your 20s. But that is what I'm going to talk about today the reality of it, and I've gone in quite heavy to begin with, and that's because, no matter when you get divorced, it's never an easy process. I've already mentioned that you've got to deal with the legalities.

Speaker 1: 4:43

I mean, the last thing that you want to be doing most often when you've decided to split up with someone is to have to talk to them, and when you're in a dating stage where I say it's six months, nine months a year in, maybe, and your life's haven't crossed over enough to have that commitment level, that crossover and therefore that challenge of not just being able to walk away. It is infuriating and it has to be done because you've got things to work out. But the last thing that you want to do in most situations, unless you've ended amicably, you don't want to have to deal with this person, and that's hard because it also used to be a person that you were planning a future with, a person that you felt that you trusted, that you had a good relationship with. But for some reason that has changed and the relationships come to an end, whether it was you or them that ended it or you came to a mutual agreement. Even then, whatever's happened could have been traumatic. So you've got the emotional distress to have to deal with.

Speaker 1: 5:49

You've also got the grief element. Even if something tragic did happen, some of us feel the need to try again. You know we don't want to throw this away, but even so, that person's made the decision to leave. So then your heart broken, potentially, and you've got all of the grief, the grief of all of the things that you were thought you were going to do, that you didn't get to do and on top of that, you've now got to try and communicate with someone who often is going through emotional turmoil too. Even if they are the person that left, doesn't matter. This is a stressful situation. It's one of the top situations that they talk about causing you stress in your life divorces up there. It can make it very difficult to communicate with that person. If you end up with a situation where you don't have any conflict in some way in your communication after a divorce, then you're golden, and my own situation wasn't that bad really.

Speaker 1: 6:41

There were a few pushbacks. That was to be expected. Every divorce is going to have discussions of what we think is right or wrong, about who's going to get what and how it's going to be split up and who should be doing what bit, because there's a bitterness at that stage. Of course, breakups are rubbish anyway. Therefore, people are going to have that negative thing and then pushing that way gets your back up a little bit. Whoever started, just it's not cooperative and it's not something that you work together on anymore, but you have to do it. It's annoying and that doesn't change, no matter what stage you're at. It can be more difficult if you have a person that pushes back extensively, that purposefully makes things difficult ie not engaging with lawyers, for example, going through every different type of a mediation or alternative to lawyers or court in fact and then chooses not to do it in the end anyway. Things like that are always going to delay the process, which is another frustration for anybody going through a divorce. But that doesn't change, no matter what level you're at divorce. So, first off, bloody hard work. That's just as simple as it is. The second part is that it is the legalities. I've touched on that in the little introduction there. But you cannot just leave when you want to and that adds that extra level of difficulty on. You have to have it signed off.

Speaker 1: 7:58

My ex and I managed it quite easily. Divvy all of this up. It was 50, 50 of the house. Our pensions were fine for us, the cars pretty much worked out. There was a point of contention over the dog and who was going to pay for the order. We had an order put in place, even though we got divorced in theory, where we didn't have something sealed officially by court. There is technically a loophole, I believe, to my understanding, where one of us either of us could come back and claim against the other if we found ourselves coming into financial wealth of some description and I didn't have a plan for a business at that time, but we had both dabbled with business ideas then and to me I didn't love there being any background tie to anybody. As far as I was concerned, we had agreed this was gonna be clean cut. We were just moving on, that's fine. So I said we needed that.

Speaker 1: 8:54

But that came at an additional cost. It required a lawyer and we had to declare some bits and pieces a bit like a Form E, if you've ever done it, but not as intense, where you just give kind of details of what you have in terms of assets and someone just verifies that that's been done fairly and that you both agree not to make any claim toward the other in the future. Now this often happens. I believe in divorces with children as part of that process, because you're always dealing with the finances there anyway, you don't have to think about it individually and separately. But we didn't have that element. So it was something I'd read was best practice, and it's little things like this that, because there's a legal side to it, your best bet is to consult a solicitor.

Speaker 1: 9:40

Solicitors cost money and it's not cheap by any means. It racks up quite quickly if you do have to keep using a lawyer, and luckily in our case, other than one extra letter that had to be sent to my ex because he hadn't filled in something properly, which was annoying because then it added more onto our cost, a cost that we were kind of half sharing. Otherwise, we managed to keep our costs quite minimal. We applied for it ourselves and we didn't involve lawyers, apart from that one thing to verify, and we only had one lawyer technically it was my lawyer, but we split the cost because it was beneficial to both of us Whereas when you're dealing with lawyers, dealing with your communications, going back and forth to sort stuff out, the costs can rack up and I'm talking quite quickly and that's before you even get yourself in a courtroom.

Speaker 1: 10:23

Now, courts, hopefully you stay out of. That's the ultimate aim any time you're getting divorced, because that's the one that's gonna cost you the most, probably over time also takes a lot of time. It's not fun. I imagine that that side of things is more nerve-wracking. But in your 20s, where you don't have that tie, hopefully the legal process much like-minded goes a bit quicker because you don't have children to deal with. Assets, hopefully, are divided in a way that you are both two working people, you are able to support yourself, and a court will look at that and expect unless you've managed to be together and married for something like 10 years, you got married at like oh, you can't get married down to 18, so maybe you got married at 18, you've been together till 25, and maybe for some reason one of you didn't work as much and was being supported by the other. They would expect the other person to go back to work. So in your 20s that's a much more viable option, whereas, again, when there's children, it's more difficult to get to that stage. But the legal process means it all takes longer than you think. It's more expensive than you probably imagine it to be, and our total was around a couple of grand altogether because you have to apply to court after apply for certain a couple of things. But then we had the legal thing and I can't remember exactly how much that cost. But that was a thing that really sent us into the thousands rather than it just being like a couple of hundred. But that was for peace of mind more than anything.

Speaker 1: 11:45

Now, another element to getting divorced is often the way that we think we are going to be judged for being divorced. It's the taboo around the fact that we got divorced and our relationship ended. Now I have found that if you get divorced in your 20s, people don't tend to assume that you had any relationship or anything like that in existence in your world. People don't seem to. The reality is make up stories about you unless you imply it or bring it up Now. If you have children, then, regardless of whether you're married or not, they're going to have An idea that somebody was in your life at some point. They have no idea what that experience was, whether it was and A long-term relationship ended, someone passed away. I want to send anything like that. They don't know, and the same goes for when you present as a late 20 year old, early 30 year old or anything beyond that, where maybe a marriage has occurred somewhere in your time before that and they never knew you. But they're meeting you now and they will take you as you are and you get a little bit of an advantage in that sense when you meet new people, of being able to tell your story and Share who you are on your terms.

Speaker 1: 13:10

Now it's a little bit different when you have to explain how things have gone over the last six months to a year to somebody that you knew, that knew that you got married and Might inevitably put their foot in it. Now it's not common for us to announce a divorce. You might do a sneaky let's change the status on Facebook, or you know you you private it then change the status so it doesn't let everybody know that your relationship is over. We've all been there and done that one, and so when it comes to people that you wouldn't have Messaged or been in contact with to update on your relationship status, you will find that people, by no intention, put their foot in it. They'll ask you how someone's doing or how was it? It looked like an amazing wedding. In my case, it was less than a year, just under a year, when we decided to separate.

Speaker 1: 14:00

So there are some people in my small contact world that I wouldn't see Bar once a year, something like a friend of my mums, for example. I wouldn't necessarily see them all the time, and so, even down to maybe a year or 18 months after we separated that I went and helped with a show and someone made a comment About my ex and I was like, oh, I'm not with them anymore. That was how infrequently I'd seen them. They are not an internet user. I think I'm one of those people that is a quite observant online and can Read into what's going on, from changes in behavior, of posting patterns, and where's that person gone or why is this other friend involved? A lot more you know, you can spot if there's a change in something. Sometimes Maybe that's just the observant side of me coming out.

Speaker 1: 14:53

The advantage of getting divorced in your 20s is that no one knows or no one makes that assumption, bar if you have an obvious trait that gives that away. And Because of the other advantage of getting divorced in your 20s, which is you go through the kind of tragic elements of Ending, of grief, of loss. That leads to a whole ton of self-discovery, of learning about yourself, finding out what you really want, because Someone brought something to an end, whether that was you or them, and that was for a reason. Maybe you didn't show up in the relationship the way that you could have, maybe you Did allow some red flags to go under the radar and ultimately they become Big red flags later down the line, or you were just doing what you thought best and through doing that experience you realized it wasn't Quite right for you, which is where I sit. I thought I was doing the right thing and it turned out and I wasn't. I didn't feel the way that I thought you were meant to feel after you got married and so even like seven years into the relationship, I was like I think I just need to be on my own for a bit and work out what I really want and who I am and how all of this whole life and world stuff works.

Speaker 1: 16:18

And to me it's that classic viewpoint you can have of being in your twenties, which is that your twenties are your years for becoming an adult. Legally in the UK, you become an adult at 18. And many of us at this stage have been and gone to uni for three years as a minimum, so you don't really start living in the real world until 21. Some of you will have at 16, 18, and possibly later than 21. But let's just give a rough point to it. So when you're 25, I'm only four years into being an adult.

Speaker 1: 16:54

Really, that's fending for themselves in the real world, getting used to the world of work and what that looks like for me. And you change and you don't fully necessarily know who you are. And some people are quite happy to also go with the traditional view of the world, that staircase life where you do one thing after the other and it does work for a lot of people. That's why it's so popular, but it isn't for everybody. It's becoming less and less the norm and your own kind of squiggly path of life not just career is becoming very normal. We have so many split families in some sense that are changing and developing a little bit further. So everybody's worlds are becoming very far away from the previously traditional versions and what's becoming the norm is probably less the traditional versions and how common it is to have single parent families or families that live between two homes. Particularly when I'm a teacher and I literally teach this topic, it's in the Friends of Family topic that we do and we talk about what it means to have family and we talk about all those different setups and it's becoming the norm actually over time.

Speaker 1: 18:11

That's the beautiful version of the fact that you get to reintroduce yourself as whoever you are now that you're divorced and tell your story, because chances are that setback, that challenging time made you reconsider a number of things that allowed you to work out a little bit more accurately who you really were. Now, that does take time. Just because you go through a divorce doesn't mean it happens. Other people just go through the divorce and do exactly the same again. It is a point at which, though, you have an opportunity to break the cycle of repeating the pattern that you did before, and my pattern was that I definitely was working for my Anxious Detachment style and went with someone that was very safe and a fine person to be with, but, ultimately, we had a level of compatibility, but it wasn't quite right, and now that I experience a relationship where that compatibility is higher, that the gaps that my ex and I had are not so apparent in this relationship. It just feels so much easier to work with, and that comes down to me, too, knowing what I want from a relationship as well. I'm much clearer, I'm much more intentional about what I'm going to be putting into a relationship and what I expect to be happening as part of that relationship.

Speaker 1: 19:26

I have monthly relationship meetings with my current partner. We have them generally scheduled, and we have created an agenda ongoing that we address the same points each time, the headings of time spent together, et cetera, and then within each of those there's finer details, like you don't find people to do that all the time, but to me that was important. It feels like it means I can keep anything that I know I want to talk about but doesn't need talking about right now till then, and then that person gets a chance to see what I've put on the agenda, and I too get to see what they've put on the agenda and you can kind of start thinking about it because you kind of know what it's going to be about. You might have had smaller conversation, but this is kind of a bit of a point and you make action plans out of it and it keeps people a little bit like oh, this is what we're doing because there's so much within a relationship. My partner has children too, so that's a complexity we always have to deal with in terms of childcare, making sure that they're thought of as part of the whole process, et cetera, and so I love that, and I didn't know that I needed that before I got divorced in my previous relationship, and I couldn't have ever learned that probably, or easily learned that whilst I had another influence around me that I didn't know whether they were going to want that or not, and all of this teaches you to grow up quickly. So I've already spoken about the sort of serious side of the divorce.

Speaker 1: 20:55

You are dealing with lawyers when you're dealing with a divorce, and whilst I dealt with lawyers when buying a house, it's not quite the same and, as I mentioned, it is expensive. You know you're looking at something like 180 pound per hour, sometimes 250 per hour and, yes, they itemize by minutes, including sending you a message back reading something over. So you have to, when you go for a divorce, grow up quickly. If you haven't already, it is then time to go. Oh God, like I actually need to respond to all this stuff. I need to know what I'm doing. We need to get stuff done and it does need to get pushed forward, and it is easy, I think, to bury your head in the sand because it feels a bit scary.

Speaker 1: 21:34

Who do you know at the age of 25 that went through a divorce? Whilst you're more likely to get divorced in your 20s, that doesn't mean you all know somebody that's getting divorced or has been divorced in their 20s. I, to my knowledge, was the only one at that point in time that had experienced that and the way that my friendships are going in terms of ages, I'm gonna have been the only one that that happened to, and so it's a very unique experience and I had to learn to grow up and deal with those things that many of my friends couldn't say they had ever experienced themselves. They may have had a friend that did it and have gone through it or had bad breakups, but you don't know what it's like to have to deal with lawyers. You don't know what it's like having to apply for decree nissees and I don't even know if I've said that right, decree absolutes, et cetera. And you're like, oh my God, I just want this thing to be over. I wish it was done with three months ago, but it's still getting sorted because it's just the way that the court system works and the backlogs, et cetera. But fine, and you learn to let go as well. There's a lot of learning that you can't control what goes on and all of the work that just in the end you realize allows you to see that you can always come out the other side.

Speaker 1: 22:49

Divorce is one of the most challenging things, but it offers this whole opportunity for growth, for building strength, because in my case it was a court life crisis, that decision to leave. I didn't know what else to do, so just went. It was easier, and that forced me to confront and overcome challenges that many don't face until later life. Some people don't realise that they want something different or that they're going to have to do this really difficult thing of leaving someone until maybe they're in their 40s or 50s, once they've gone through a chapter of children and decide that that's fine, they've done that, but now they need to focus on themselves and you become the priority.

Speaker 1: 23:26

Then I was able to channel that. Now I became the priority in my life at the age of 25, 26. And I got to work on myself deep dive down. I was sticking with the 5am club. I was getting up early, I was going to bed early, I was winding down, I was off my phone, apart from if it was intentional, I was increasing in emotional intelligence.

Speaker 1: 23:48

As difficult as that was and that was why I sought a relationship too is because I knew there was a layer of emotional intelligence and work to be done in a relationship. But the self-awareness that I have and the resilience that I showed myself was key. And all of this acted as a fresh start to really give myself some attention, work out what I really wanted and become so determined that, whatever I was going to do with my life, it was going to be fun and I was going to enjoy it. And if I ever got married again, I was never going to let it be something that wasn't right for me, because there was no way I was going to let myself go through a divorce again. And I still question whether I'm going to get married again in the future. That's still a question mark. I mean it doesn't drive my actions. It's not a priority to me anymore, because I did all of that self-confidence and work on being single, that I'm not phased by that. If my relationship ended, I'd be upset, but it would not be the end of the world.

Speaker 1: 24:44

So divorcing your twenties is not a shame for the occurrence. It's actually more common than you think in terms of marriages, and you do have the opportunity to use it as a catalyst for growth, for change. It changes you as a person, usually for the better, as long as you don't become bitter, and whilst it is going to be such a difficult challenge, one in which you have to go out very quickly, if you haven't already, so early on in your life. It then leads to having an advantage later on that, if you can use it to really explore yourself and know what you want, then you go through the rest of your life with your eyes open and knowing what it is that you're looking to do and fulfill, rather than getting divorced later down the line and only having 20 to 30 years to apply that, hopefully, with average age span, you've got 50, 60 years to really live out what it is that you truly want.

Speaker 1: 25:47

Divorce is not fun for anybody, but it's sometimes necessary and the right thing to do.

Speaker 1: 25:52

I stand by my decision every single day, both for myself, for my ex, and I know that it was the right thing to do.

Speaker 1: 26:02

And so getting divorced in your 20s might not be the favorable move, it might not be something you want to put on your CV, as it were, but it isn't the end of the world and you will grow from it and there is another side to it, and I am always content and pleased with how my life is now, which means I have no regrets, because I could never know what the alternative might have been, and I do worry about that lockdown and the likelihood of maybe having had a child, and that would have made things 10 times more challenging if I then still decided that this wasn't the right thing for me.

Speaker 1: 26:40

I would love to know your thoughts on this. I know a contingent of you have been divorced before, and I know that sometimes that brings some of you into the realm of the single girls club and the single girls guide to life, of knowing that there's a place for you here. It's not just for long-term singles, it's for those that have been in relationships and that have gone through that challenging part there. Until next time, though, everybody keep celebrating single life together.