When people think about divorce, they often imagine a single event: signing the papers, moving out of the family home, or standing before a judge. But divorce isn’t an event. It’s a process. And that process often begins long before anyone files paperwork and continues well after the divorce is final.
After more than 25 years working with families and being involved in over 1,000 divorces, I’ve learned that one of the biggest challenges people face isn’t necessarily the divorce itself. It’s not knowing what comes next. When you don’t understand the process, everything can feel urgent. Every decision feels monumental. And it’s easy to become so overwhelmed that you either rush into decisions or avoid making them altogether. That’s one of the reasons I created PartWise, an online divorce education platform, and developed the Divorce Journey Workbook. I wanted to give people a roadmap to help them understand where they are, what decisions lie ahead, and how to approach those decisions with greater confidence.
I think of the divorce journey as having five distinct stages: Readiness, Information Gathering, Initiation, Negotiation, and Transition.
Understanding these stages won’t eliminate the emotional challenges of divorce, but it can make the process feel much more manageable.
Stage 1: Readiness — Am I Ready for Divorce?
The first stage of divorce often happens entirely in your head. You may find yourself wondering whether your marriage can be saved, imagining what life would look like if you separated, or questioning whether you’re strong enough to make such a significant change.
You may feel angry one day, hopeful the next, and completely terrified the day after that.
All of these emotions can coexist.
Readiness isn’t necessarily about being 100% certain you want a divorce. It’s about understanding your feelings, evaluating your circumstances, and identifying what you need to make an informed decision. This stage also involves practical considerations. Can you afford to live separately? How might divorce affect your children? Do you understand your financial situation? Have you explored ways to repair your relationship?
One of the exercises in my workbook asks people to consider what they’ve already done to improve their marriage and what concerns them most about ending it. These questions matter because making a decision based solely on today’s emotions can have consequences that last for years.
Stage 2: Information Gathering — Knowledge Is Power
I cannot emphasize this enough: the more you understand about your financial, legal, and family circumstances, the better prepared you will be to make decisions during divorce. Unfortunately, this is a stage many people skip. I’ve worked with people who know absolutely everything about their household finances and others who couldn’t tell me where their retirement accounts are held or how much their family spends each month. Neither situation necessarily predicts how well someone will navigate divorce. But the person who lacks information has more work to do before making informed decisions.
Information gathering involves understanding four basic financial categories:
- Income: What money comes into the household?
- Expenses: What does it cost to maintain your current lifestyle?
- Assets: What do you own, individually and together?
- Debts: What do you owe?
It also means collecting important documents, including tax returns, bank statements, retirement account statements, mortgage information, and insurance policies. If you have children, this is also the time to start thinking about parenting schedules, living arrangements, and the routines that matter most to your family. Finally, you should learn about the different ways to divorce. You may be surprised to discover that litigation is only one option. Many couples can resolve their divorce through mediation, collaborative divorce, or agreements negotiated directly between themselves.
Stage 3: Initiation — Taking the First Steps
This is often the stage people associate with actually “getting divorced.” Initiation is when your private thoughts and preparation begin turning into action. For some people, that means telling their spouse they want a divorce. For others, it means hiring an attorney, beginning mediation, or filing legal paperwork.
One of the most difficult parts of this stage is deciding how and when to tell your spouse. I’ve seen this conversation go many different ways. Sometimes both spouses have been contemplating divorce for years, and the announcement comes as a relief. Other times, one spouse is completely blindsided. You cannot control how your spouse will respond, but you can think carefully about how you approach the conversation. Consider the timing, the setting, and what you want to communicate. You don’t need to revisit every disagreement you’ve ever had. You do need to be clear about where you stand and what you’re proposing as the next step.
If you have children, you’ll also need to consider when and how to tell them. Ideally, parents can communicate together, provide age-appropriate information, and reassure their children that they will continue to be loved and cared for. If your relationship involves abuse, threats, or intimidation, safety must come first. Work with appropriate legal or professional resources to develop a safe plan rather than assuming a direct conversation is the best approach.
Stage 4: Negotiation and Decision-Making — Creating Your Future
This is where much of the actual work of divorce takes place. Whether you’re sitting at your kitchen table, working with a mediator, negotiating through attorneys, or preparing for court, you will need to resolve important questions about your future.
I like to divide divorce decisions into three big buckets:
- Property division: How will you divide your assets and debts? What happens to the house, retirement accounts, investments, and other property?
- Cash flow: How will each of you financially support yourselves moving forward? Will spousal maintenance or child support be involved? What will your respective budgets look like?
- Parenting: If you have children, how will parenting time, decision-making responsibilities, holidays, and other important aspects of raising your children be handled?
These decisions can be emotionally exhausting because they’re about much more than numbers and schedules. The house may represent security. A retirement account may represent decades of hard work. A parenting schedule may feel like a measure of your relationship with your children. But successful negotiation requires separating emotional reactions from practical decisions.
One of the most important things I encourage people to do is distinguish between what they need, what they want, and what they’re willing to compromise on. You may discover that keeping the family home is less important than achieving long-term financial stability. Or that flexibility in a parenting schedule matters more than securing a particular number of overnights. There isn’t one perfect settlement that works for every family.
Stage 5: Transition — Turning Agreements Into Real Life
One of the biggest misconceptions about divorce is that everything becomes easier once the divorce decree is signed. Sometimes it does. But often, the end of the legal process marks the beginning of an entirely new set of challenges. Suddenly, you may be managing a household on your own, navigating a co-parenting schedule, adjusting to a different financial reality, or simply figuring out what to do with your time. The agreements that looked perfectly reasonable on paper have to work in everyday life.
This stage involves practical tasks such as dividing accounts, transferring property, updating insurance and beneficiaries, establishing new financial systems, and implementing parenting arrangements. But there’s also an emotional transition. You may feel relief, sadness, loneliness, excitement, or grief. Sometimes all in the same afternoon. You may discover strengths you didn’t know you had. You may also discover that certain parts of your new life are harder than you expected. Give yourself permission to adjust.
Although I’ve described these stages in order, real-life divorce rarely follows a neat sequence. You might be gathering financial information while you’re still deciding whether to leave your marriage. You might be negotiating a parenting schedule while already living in separate homes. And you may find yourself revisiting your emotional readiness long after your divorce has begun.
That’s completely normal. You can also be in a different stage than your spouse. One person may have spent years contemplating divorce while the other is only beginning to process the possibility.
Understanding these differences can help explain why divorce sometimes feels so frustrating. The goal isn’t to move through the stages as quickly as possible. It’s to recognize where you are, understand what you need, and make thoughtful decisions along the way.
Like this article? Check out “The Kitchen Table Divorce That Failed From Lack of Education”
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