Why Divorce Feels Like Bereavement (And Why Nobody Talks About It)

One of the biggest misconceptions about divorce is that you're grieving the person. Of course there is sadness when a marriage ends, but looking back on my own experience, I realised that wasn't what I was grieving the most. What I was really grieving was the future I thought I was going to have.

During my marriage, I spent hours searching for a large family apartment in Lisbon. It wasn't a fantasy or a passing idea. It was something we had talked about and planned for years. I genuinely believed that was where our future was heading. I remember looking through property websites and imagining family holidays, the children coming to visit and a completely different chapter of my life unfolding there. At that point, I had absolutely no idea my marriage was about to end. None. I wasn't preparing for divorce. I was planning my future.

That is why divorce can feel so devastating. One minute you're building a life and looking ahead with excitement, and the next everything you thought was certain suddenly changes. It's not just the loss of a relationship that hurts. It's the loss of the future you had already started building in your mind.

I think this is the part that catches so many people by surprise. They assume they are struggling because they miss their husband or wife. Sometimes that is true, but often what they are really grieving is everything that came with that relationship. They are grieving the retirement they had planned, the holidays they imagined taking together, the family home they created and the life they thought they would be living ten or twenty years from now.

For a long time, I couldn't understand why I felt so lost. Deep down I knew my marriage was over and that I could no longer continue living the life I had been living, yet I still felt overwhelmed by sadness. I kept asking myself the same question. If I knew the marriage was no longer right for me, why did it hurt so much?

It was only later that I realised I wasn't dealing with a relationship problem. I was dealing with grief.

Once I understood that, everything started to make more sense. I stopped putting pressure on myself to get over it. I stopped judging myself for feeling sad and expecting myself to bounce back overnight. Instead, I gave myself permission to grieve. I accepted that what I was feeling was normal and that healing wasn't something that could be rushed.

The reality is that grief isn't always about losing a person. Sometimes it's about losing a dream. Sometimes it's about letting go of a future that felt so real you could almost touch it. That future may never have existed anywhere other than in your mind, but the emotions attached to it were very real. The hopes, the plans and the expectations were real, which is why losing them can feel so painful.

What makes divorce even harder is that society often doesn't recognise that grief. When someone dies, people know what to do. They send flowers, cards and messages of support. They understand that healing takes time. Divorce is different. People often expect you to move on quickly. They assume that because nobody has died, the pain should somehow be easier to deal with. Anyone who has been through divorce knows that simply isn't true.

When a marriage ends, an entire chapter of your life closes. Your identity changes. Your routines change. Your friendships sometimes change. Your finances may change. Your confidence can take a huge knock. Suddenly you find yourself standing in the middle of a life you never expected to be living, trying to work out what comes next.

Looking back now, I can see that some of the hardest moments of my divorce were also the beginning of the life I have today. At the time, I couldn't see that. All I could see was what I had lost. What I couldn't see was everything that was still waiting for me on the other side of that loss.

Today, my life looks completely different to the one I imagined all those years ago while searching for apartments in Lisbon. I remarried, moved to Thailand, built a business helping others navigate divorce and grief, and discovered a version of myself that I probably would never have met if I had stayed where I was. I still own that apartment today, and during one of the hardest periods of my life, it became a place of refuge. It gave me somewhere to escape the memories and pain I had left behind at home. More importantly, it became a place I could share with close friends at a time when I needed them most.

None of that happened because I rushed my healing. It happened because I allowed myself to move through the grief rather than fight it. I stopped trying to force myself to be okay and accepted that healing takes time.

If you're currently going through a divorce and wondering why it hurts so much, perhaps it's because you're not only grieving a person. Perhaps you're grieving a future. The plans you made, the life you expected and the dreams you spent years building have all changed. That is a loss, and it deserves to be acknowledged.

Be kind to yourself. You are not weak, and you are not failing. You are grieving. The good news is that grief does change. The pain softens, the memories become easier to carry, and, little by little, you begin to focus less on the life that ended and more on the life that is still waiting to be lived.

One future may have ended, but another one is still waiting to be written.

At Mending Hearts Retreats, we help people going through divorce, grief and major life changes rebuild their confidence, find clarity and start looking forward to the future again.

You don't need to have all the answers right now. You just need to take the first step.

To find out more about our upcoming retreats or arrange a conversation, get in touch. We'd love to hear your story. www.mendingheartsretreat.com