Do you have a favorite way to help women be able to do that?

I do have a couple of things I like to do.

One of the things I like to do is have people create what I call a small and a large bucket list for themselves.

And big, I mean, everybody knows about the bucket list and those can be big things, but they could also be expensive things too.

too, right? Like, oh, I really want to go to Switzerland.

Well, that's great.

Put it on your bucket list.

Can you walk us through the book and kind of how it is set up and what you

I want to pause and hold those because I have some more questions about why are 70 percent of the divorces being filed by or requested by women? What's going on there?

There's a Harvard study that shows marriage works really well for men.

Marriage.

really improves men's financial health, their physical health, and their mental health.

I think men are still in the society not socialized to have important emotional connections with other men.

So oftentimes their emotional connection is with their wife only or primarily.

Whereas if you ask a woman who her best friend is, it's possible she might say my husband, but she's also going to say, and my friend Sarah and my friend Sally and my friend Kristen are my best friends.

Let's recommend that they buy your book and tell them how the book will help them.

Tell us more about the path to grief and from to clarity and what you have observed in your clients and how you help them get there.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I think what you're referring to is the model that I developed when I was writing the book, which is the five phases of divorce grief.

Is that what you're referring to? Yeah, yeah.

Which is really more about after the decision has been made.

And I'm happy to talk more about making the decision.

But if we want to go into those five phases, yeah.

saying true i can relate to what you're saying yeah yeah

So how do you guide people individuals as they're thinking about this process and starting to open up to people about it?

Yeah.

So I really encourage people that when they're thinking about telling their the people around them that they're getting divorced, that they don't have to tell everybody the same story, nor should they tell everybody the same story.

And sometimes people kind of think in that shell-shocked moment, like, oh my God, I have to tell everybody the whole story, or I can only tell the one sentence version to everybody.

But so I really think what's important to think through, like, who are your circle of people and who do you trust the most? with your most personal things.

There's so many other people too, in your life, people who maybe not are untrustworthy, but you have no idea, you don't want to trust, you know, it's like, oh, the guy at the post office where you're buying your stamps or the coffee barista or whatever, you know, and you don't have to tell those people the whole story.

But things do come up, especially if you have kids, you know, other parents will could ask you or, or your colleagues could say, how's your husband doing? Or how's your wife doing? Or they ask innocently, right? And so you have to have something at the ready.

but even if you don't have parents it automatically puts you in the position of them needing to defend them right right it's like i'm coming to you for support by telling you this like i don't need you shitting on the person that i'm right regardless of the circumstances so yeah i'm curious is that one that

But like, what are the kinds of stories you're hearing or the early warning signs or the, as people look back, you know, where did it start to become so disconnected? Or what, what was there that they might have noticed if they'd known?

Right, right.

Well, one big turning point, it seems like is when people have children.

So oftentimes, things start out pretty well, or, or they start out well, and people are in their 20s, and they don't have many responsibilities.

So it's not that hard to be in a relationship where, you know, you can sleep late on the weekends, and you know, re-renting an apartment so you don't need to worry about money so much or, you know, things like that.

And then one of the times I really see the troubles begin is when couples have children.

And suddenly, I think both the workload increases so much when you have children and but also the decision-making too.

So as you're talking to people post-divorce who've made this decision and taken that action, how do you work with them? Or does this come up as part of the support group? Like, how are you going to not repeat this situation the next time? Like, what's been your role in this? Or how are you going to choose differently? Or, you know, because ideally, we would not partner again with somebody with whom we would not be connected.

What this is all about and what got you to it.

Yeah, so I've been running these.

I have three weekly divorce support groups in my practice in Boston, and I've been running them for 15 years, same day, same time.

People come and use the groups for as long as it's helpful to them.

And in the old days, when I first started running the group, people would ask me for a book.

And I gave them, I don't know if you're familiar with Crazy Time.

I gave them that book.

How do you experience that with a lot of your clients, your support groups?

Mm

...

but let's think about your kids are in the house, and you're out of the house for a week, and then you're in the house for a week.

So you come back to the house.

You've been out for a week.

You still have to make a ton of joint decisions about the house, right, with the person you're divorcing.

You're divorcing for a reason, and part of the reason is 'cause you probably can't make decisions that well together, right? So you have to come back to the house.

So can you walk us through the five phases that you talk about?

Or this comes after they've been discovered, they didn't wanna be discovered, and now they tell you about their unhappiness.

Right.

Right.

Well, it's a way of deflecting responsibility.

It's a way of blaming the other person, right? Rather than saying, "I really messed up.

I need to own that and take responsibility for that." And I think, you know, what you were saying before about people and the way in which you have to kind of rearrange your thoughts about your future when you're faced with an affair, you know, I think affairs are almost always traumatic events.

The discovery of them are traumatic events.

[laughs] I'm sure it's hard to, like, sell this on your clients and your support group people in the early days, but how do you give them hope that there's a better day out there?

That is not a good thing.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Right.

Right.

Right.

So I've seen a number of women whose partners have gotten very fixated on a new hobby, whether it's, like, their golf game or running an ultramarathon or, you know, just getting into some kind of hobby that takes them away from the relationship for a lot of time, a lot of time.

... five phases of divorce grief?

So, I mean, I think and when we talk about divorce and women's experience, we can be talking about divorce women or people who identify as women from their experience with their partner.

Absolutely.

You know, I think the LGBTQ community has been so left out of so many things really, and certainly conversation about marriage and absolutely the conversation about divorce.

I mean, if you look at all the books and, you know, podcasts and websites out there, there's so little for the LGBT community on divorce.

And so I was really intentional about including that community in this book.

And frankly, every marriage is unique, and every divorce is unique, and yet there are these real themes, I think, and feelings that people really have in common.

And I see that so much in the divorce support groups.

That people getting stuck in this idea that this is a failed marriage or I have failed can really be a trapping experience.

Never say never.

It will go state- y- yeah, I know.

It will go state by state, and probably it will start in the red states.

We've already seen it starting to happen.

Right now we have no-fault divorce, okay? And what that means is that you're allowed to get divorced without having to provide some huge level of proof about what happened in your marriage.

If they get rid of no-fault divorce, what's gonna happen is, people are gonna need to prove, like that they were abused, for instance.

That their spouse was addicted.

Yeah.