Divorce Happens

"Does it matter that I've been doing everything? Or am I going to sound like I'm just complaining?" That's the question at the heart of this week's Hey Olivia letter, and I know so many of you are going to feel it in...

"I can't lose any more of her. What do we do, and who decides?" This week's Hey Olivia letter is a really tender one, and I read it slowly. It comes from a parent whose daughter was stillborn at nine months. She was...

Your divorce decree is signed, and you assume the money part is done. Then the loose threads start showing up: the beneficiary you never changed, the deed still in both names, the retirement account that was awarded to...

Monique Alexander has never believed we can exist in this world without community. Not the most famous people, not the most successful, and not anyone going through a divorce. "No one is meant to go through that or any...

After more than 20 years as a divorce attorney, Amanda Mason calls herself a "recovering divorce attorney." She spent those years watching families get "absolutely tortured by the traditional processes," whether in a...

One parent wants to keep the Social Security cards at their house. The other says no. And suddenly a question that will matter a handful of times in a child's life is a legal fight. That, says family law attorney...

The papers are signed. The ink is dry. And somehow you still don't feel better. Olivia Howell remembers that moment exactly: standing in her marital house, thinking she had made it through the hardest part, and then...

"I'm not strong enough to be a single mom." That was the story Olivia Howell told herself when her marriage was ending, and it felt like a fact. Most people going through divorce carry a version of it: I can't handle...

This week's letter is a tender one. A listener wrote in after a pregnancy loss, holding the rainbow baby they prayed for and quietly planning to end their marriage. Everyone around them says how lucky they are. And they...

There is a particular kind of grief that comes with realizing you are not going to be with your children every day anymore. For so many moms going through divorce, especially women who have spent years as the primary...

College can feel impossibly far away when your children are young and you’re in the middle of a divorce. And then, somehow, senior year arrives—and suddenly you’re staring at FAFSA forms, financial aid applications...

It’s time to retire the phrase “failed marriage.” A marriage can last twenty years, contain children and homes and illnesses and inside jokes and terrible fights and beautiful vacations, and still come to an end. None...

You do not have to know yet. You do not have to wake up tomorrow morning certain that you are getting divorced, certain that you are staying married, certain that the relationship can be fixed, or certain about what...

When you’re getting divorced with children, there are some decisions that look deceptively simple on paper: Where will the kids sleep? Who takes them to soccer? What happens on Thanksgiving? Who schedules the dentist...

"I started believing that the criticism, the feeling small, the walking on eggshells, was just what marriage was. I've caught myself telling friends 'it's not that bad' about things that, when I actually say them out...