Deciding Who You Can Confide In About Your Divorce
Who you might be able to confide in- a cheat sheet
· Preferably someone who doesn’t have any contact with your spouse
· Are they married or related to someone who has contact with your spouse?
· Can they keep a secret? (Not, do they want to, CAN they?)
These are all questions you’ll need to ask yourself but below is how my situation looked. I had an unusual thing going on where I lived halfway across the world so I could pretty much keep things quiet while I went through the whole process. I never hid what was happening, but I also didn’t offer it up or make weird and ambiguous status updates either.
I never hid the information from anyone that asked, but I only really shared the ALL details with a handful of people.
Stage 1 (Before I told Husband I Wanted a Divorce):
- Lawyer
- Accountant
- Mom
- Local Best Friend
- US-based Best Friend
If I had one at the time, I probably would have also told a therapist. I did not write in my journal about this at all. I wrote about a lot of the turmoil I was experiencing before then…again, I had no idea divorce was even an option for me until I realized it was the only way I could ever be myself.
Stage 2 (After Telling Husband I Wanted a Divorce):
- Local friends in Australia
- 3 best friends who lived overseas
- Therapist
So, an interesting thing happened because the same week that I told my husband I wanted a divorce, my younger sister got engaged. I think my mom and I saw eye to eye in the fact that we didn’t really see any point in telling our extended family or friends about my situation 1) because we literally had no answers to any questions they would have 2) we wanted to focus on the impending wedding.
It helped that I had a completely offline husband so I could keep it to myself. I hardly posted anything about him anyway, I didn’t do a photo purge or change my relationship status, or any of the tell-tale social media moves that people do when they breakup.
It was never a secret to me, the people who knew me and were in my regular life knew. I just happened to also be far, far away from a lot of other people and I later revealed this in an Instagram story that still sits on my account highlights. I like to sometimes check in on people and I thought it would just be common courtesy 😊.