Illusion 1:
"Divorce is simply a legal document that indicates you are no longer married.''

The Reality:
Divorce is also a psychological process that takes time and has no set ending date. That legal document is only one stage in the divorce process, which involves mourning the death of your relationship, letting go of the past, and living in the present. You will move through these stages at your own speed—each person has his or her own timetable for becoming truly divorced. You will recognize the feeling when you finally realize that you are a valuable person in your own right not just as part of a couple. You will never be truly divorced if you allow the hurt of your breakup to continue to flare angrily in your mind for years after you and your spouse have separated.

Illusion 2:
"All my problems will end once I divorce this turkey."

The Reality:
Many unpleasant surprises may await you once you divorce the person you believe is the cause of all your problems. You'll feel temporary relief and then find that some things are worse than before. You may be faced with the problem of finding a place to live, hassles over the children's custody and visitation rights, money problems, friends who seem to avoid you, unexpected eruptions of guilt and remorse. the difficulties of establishing new relationships with the opposite sex. or the split up of your relationship with the person you left your spouse for. Until you begin taking personal responsibility for your contribution
to the breakup and begin to identify your own self-defeating behavior so you can eliminate it, you will tend to repeat the past rather than improve upon it. You will, in other words, simply be exchanging one set of problems for another.

Illusion 3:
"I was unlucky in choosing my spouse. Now that I'm divorced, my luck will change."

The Reality:
Luck has nothing to do with it. Marriages fail because of unrealistic expectations' the failure to recognize your spouse's needs, the tendency to become a resentment collector, and the inability to openly communicate without anger—not because of bad luck. Unless you deal with these issues, your belief in good luck the next time rests on the same solid foundation as the belief in Santa Claus.

Illusion 4:
"I'm really not normal. This divorce is making me crazy."

The Reality:
You are normal if you are experiencing some off-the-wall behavior and out-of-control feelings (bursts of anger, sieges of depression, problems at work, attacks of loneliness and self-pity). A divorce is life's most wounding experience, apart from the actual death of a loved one. The disarray within you is part of the mourning process, which will help you make way for your own self-renewal as a single person. You would be abnormal if you forced your feelings into a straitjacket, giving the outside world the impression that everything's cool when it isn't. Denying the pain will set the stage for an emotional eruption later on. Allowing a wound to fester is far worse than dealing with it immediately.

Illusion 5:
"Everyone will now think of me as a failure because I'm divorced.''

The Reality:
Even as recently as a decade ago, there might have been some truth to this fear. However. this is no longer the case. Divorce is now considered a normal, though painful, event, since one out of every two marriages ends in divorce. Each year, two and a half million men and women get divorced, which means that every person you meet has been touched by divorce— if not their own, then that of someone they know. You will find that most people will react to your divorce nonjudgmentally.

Illusion 6:
''I made a mistake marrying the person I did, and now I'm paying for it."

The Reality:
If you label your marriage a mistake, you are liable to run scared the rest of your life, always looking over your shoulder and waiting for your next mistake to catch up with you. Such an attitude inhibits you from living your life constructively. By focusing on your past marriage as a mistake instead of a learning experience, the future will indeed look grim. Consider, however, the good advice we give our children. We are always telling them it's okay to make a mistake providing they learn from it. Your life will become brighter when you ask yourself what you have learned from your past marriage and how you can correct the errors of judgment, the lack of insight, and the unskillful way you dealt with your marital problems so that you can avoid those errors in new relationships.

Illusion 7:
"Now that I'm divorced, there is another person out there who will make me happy."

The Reality:
No other person can make you happy. It is naive to believe that another person can be your permanent entertainment factory. Usually, the partner in such a relationship is expecting the same from you! And if not, that person will feel resentful that you are demanding of them something no person can give. The best relationship occurs when two people are already happy with themselves but wish to become happier by being interdependent.

Illusion 8:
"The person who asks for a divorce usually has another lover waiting in the wings to live with."

The Reality:
Nowadays, this is frequently not the case. The belief that it is usually the man who wants the divorce because he already has another woman on the side is simply not true. In the eighties, the impact of the women's movement has been powerful indeed. Now that women have a stronger sense of self-worth and the ability to earn a living, they are refusing to be taken for granted by men and to remain in unhappy marriages.

Illusion 9:
"I'll be free from harassment now that I've got my divorce paper."

The Reality:
A legal document will not curb the explosive feelings of a spouse who believes he has been rejected or betrayed. Harassment can continue long after the divorce is finalized if your exspouse is determined to get even. You don't have to put up with harassment. Your lawyer can apply to the court for a restraining order! It takes two to be victimized, and you don't have to participate in the game.

Illusion 10:
"My children will hate me because I want a divorce, and they may never want to see me again."

The Reality:
Even though you and your spouse no longer love each other, the children will continue to love both of you. A divorce will initially shatter the sense of security the children feel living in a two-parent household (although living in separate households may increase the security the children feel if your spouse was alcoholic. violent, or screamingly argumentative most of the time). The uncertainty they may feel now that Mom and Dad are living separately may appear to you as an expression of hostility toward you. However, the hostility is really an expression of their fear for their survival, their fear that you are abandoning them forever.

Beneath that is their fear that you no longer love them. The way you and your ex-spouse handle your divorce will determine how your children will relate to you. They will continue to love and respect both of you when they see you taking positive charge of your lives as separate persons, when you don't badmouth your ex-spouse to them, when you have reliable and flexible visitation rights, all of which assures the children that Mom and Dad's living apart is only a geographical distance and that your love for them has never wavered.

Illusion 11:
"Men are hurt less than women by a divorce."

Real Reality:
Pain is pain, whether experienced by a man or a woman, and divorce is one of the most painful experiences any human being will ever encounter. To claim men hurt less is to imply that men are less human than women. Speaking personally as a man whose divorce was one of the most anguishing experiences in my life, I know the depths of pain a man can feel when love ends. I have seen the guilt, fear, anxiety, loneliness, vulnerability, and self-flagellation in the eyes of countless men I have counseled at the time of their divorces. Pain is always a subjective experience, and each person expresses his or her pain in uniquely individual ways. Men want the same thing as women: love and affection. And in a divorce, when men feel they have lost these two essential elements, they suffer equally with women.

Illusion 12:
"We're going to have a 'friendly' divorce with no hard feelings toward each other."

The Reality:
If you haven't invested your heart in your marriage, truly believing you were marrying for life, if you were married only a few months or married just for money or to escape a bad family life, if you married without love and commitment to each other, then you may be able to have a "friendly" divorce. But most people don't marry for those reasons, and you probably didn't either. Therefore you will be in for an unpleasant surprise if you are counting on a friendly, nonemotional divorce.

You would be less than human if you did not feel some hostility toward your ax-spouse. No hard feelings? Of course there would be some initially, since you have been hurt and the person you were married to was the one who hurt you. The facade of we're-still-good-friends ordinarily cracks when you discuss money questions like alimony or child support. or when one of you has a new lover and the other seethes with jealousy.

In the initial stages of divorce, acknowledging your pain is normal. You can, however, minimize the hostility you feel by enriching your new life as a single person with new friends, experiences, hobbies—events that have nothing to do with your ex-spouse but are of paramount importance in reinforcing your own sense of self-worth.

Illusion 13:
"My spouse wanted the divorce and I didn't. I've been rejected, and that means nobody will ever love me again and I'll be alone for the rest of my life."

The Reality:
Almost everyone who has been left behind feels this way at the beginning of a divorce. However, this is usually the exact reverse of what happens. In fact, four out of five divorced people eventually find someone who loves them as they are and marries them. That your husband was no longer responsive to you does not mean that there are not many other men who will be attracted to you. There will be. However, if you hold on to the belief that you are an outcast because you have been rejected by your spouse' you will send out signals to everyone you meet that you are not worthy of being loved. And that will be your surest guarantee for becoming that lonely person you fear you may become.

Illusion 14:
"Now that I'm single, my friends tell me to get involved with singles organizations and divorce groups, but I don't want to associate with losers—because that's all they are."

The Reality:
The men and women in these organizations are trying to move forward in their lives. They want to make new friends and learn more about the advantages of single life. You want the same things they do. To call them losers is to call yourself a loser, since you are no different from them. You will be setting up a barrier that will prevent you from expressing yourself to new people when you start labeling others as losers. Try them and you might like them.

Illusion 15:
"I'll never get married again. Marriage is for the birds, and my divorce proves it.''

The Reality:
If you feel this way, remember that you may very well not feel this way forever.

Your old marriage may have been for the birds, but that doesn't mean a new marriage could not be quite different, and better, than the old one—providing you let go of the belief that any new marriage must be a duplication of the one you left. On the other hand. you may be one of a very small minority of people who is not comfortable with married life and discover that you prefer single life. Are you a permanent single, or are you only temporarely disenchanted? An open mind about your future will enable you to find out.

Illusion 16:
"I'm too old to change. My divorce should have happened earlier, because the best years of my life would have been ahead of me instead of behind."

The Reality:
Your age will prevent you from improving the quality of your life after your divorce only if you allow your thinking to be controlled by outmoded notions of what you can and cannot do. The good news is that all of us are now living in an age revolution. Previous ideas about how your age should control your self-image have been proven false by modern scientific findings in psychology, physiology, and biology.

Divorce can be a beginning as well as an ending, provided you recognize that it's not how old you are but who you are that counts.

Illusion 17:
"Divorce is better than marriage."

The Reality:
Divorce and marriage are not answers in themselves to life's problems. They are simply arrangements in society that you can employ if you need or want them. You can be miserable in a marriage or you can be happy. You can be happy in divorce or you can be miserable. Divorce and marriage are what you make of them. They are like two equally empty houses: It's how you furnish each house that will determine its quality. Furnish the house shabbily, keep it gloomy, dust-ridden, and dirty, and it will be a miserable place. Pay attention to it, care for it, and it will be a fine place to live. As a divorced person, you have an opportunity to live where you feel comfortable. That place is inside yourself. By tending to that place with greater self-awareness, you can like the life you might be living again as a single person.