For the person who did not want their marriage to end, or who did everything in their power to keep the marriage together but ultimately ended up divorced, there are a mountain of emotions that must be worked through.
No matter how or why a marriage ends, there are going to be emotional issues that must be resolved before a man or woman can enter into a new relationship and expect it to be successful.
The stigma of divorce is very real. It signifies failure — personal failure of the people involved. If you think there is no stigma, tell someone you have just met that you are recently widowed and see how they react. Tell the next person that you are recently divorced and note their reaction.
Both are situations over which you may have absolutely no control, but divorce implies your personal failure whereas the death of a spouse implies the ending of a good marriage by tragic means.
One woman friend has been married twice. Her first husband died, her second husband left her for another woman. She had no problem getting a smaller place to live after her husband died, but finding a suitable place to move to after her divorce brought her face-to-face with the divorce stigma. Her widowhood made her pure, her divorce made her defective.
That isn’t to say that some divorced men and women shouldn’t be avoided. You don’t want to find yourself falling in love with an abuser or an alcoholic or a cheat. But those undesireable qualities don’t just begin in marriage, they begin long before. Anyone — single, divorced, widowed — could have one or more of these “fatal flaws” which would make them a bad relationship choice.
No matter how ready you think you are for a committed relationship, if you haven’t been legally divorced for at least a year, if you haven’t worked through the anger and dispair of your divorce, if you haven’t worked through the emotional baggage you were handed when they walked out the door, you aren’t ready.
You don’t need to not date because you haven’t worked through everything. But you must keep in mind that any relationships you enter in to may end unpleasantly if you’re less than honest with yourself and with the other person.
What if someone told you: “I’m really not ready for a serious relationship as I’ve just recently been divorced. You seem like a very nice person and I’d really like to get to know you better, but I just thought it would be best to be upfront about where my head’s at right now.”
Would you disregard the caution and plow headlong into a relationship? If you did, you would at least know that this person may not be ready for the same level of relationship that you want or need. At that point, you’ve made your choice and must accept responsibility for the outcome whether or not it’s what you hope it will be.