Loneliness after divorce: the silence you did not expect

Friday, a little after six in the evening. The children have just left with their other parent, the door has closed, and one slipper is still lying in the hallway. You put it away, wash two plates, glance at your phone. Nothing. The flat that was too loud half an hour ago is now so quiet you can hear the fridge. And then comes a thought you did not expect: “I wanted this. So why does it feel like this?”

Divorce is usually talked about in terms of arguments, solicitors, dividing things up and contact schedules. Far less is said about what comes afterwards, once all of that is settled: the silence. Not dramatic, cinematic grief, but an ordinary Tuesday evening when there is nobody to tell that the neighbour has finally mended the fence.

In this post I would like to explain why loneliness after divorce is so common even among people who wanted the separation, why it helps to tell loneliness apart from solitude and from social isolation, and what you can do about empty weekends and about friends when you no longer know whose they are. I have already written about the first weeks in The first thirty days after a breakup: what helps and what prolongs the pain; here I am interested in the later period, when everyone around you assumes you are “over it”.

Solitude, loneliness and social isolation are not the same

We use three words as if they meant one thing, but they describe three different things. Once you separate them, it is easier to see what you are actually missing.

Solitude is a state: you are on your own, with no one around you. In itself it is neither good nor bad. After years of a tense marriage, a quiet evening may be the first thing that truly does you good. There is more on this in the knowledge base under solitude.

Loneliness is a feeling. The researchers Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau described it as the unpleasant experience that arises when there is a gap between the relationships you have and the relationships you want. This means you can be lonely at a full table, and that you are not necessarily lonely when you are alone. The loneliness entry in the knowledge base sums this up briefly.

Social isolation, on the other hand, is something that can be counted: how many contacts you have, how often you see someone, whether you live alone. It describes a network, not a feeling.

That the difference is more than a matter of words is shown by a large meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues from 2015. They pooled data from seventy studies and found that all three are linked to a higher risk of early death, each in its own right: the feeling of loneliness with roughly a 26 per cent greater likelihood, social isolation with 29 and living alone with 32 per cent. These figures are not a forecast for any one person and no reason for alarm. What they do say is that the body takes seriously both how many people you have and how you feel about it. There is more on this in Loneliness and health: what the research shows and what it doesn’t.

Why the silence took you by surprise

Many people are prepared for divorce as the loss of a partner. Almost nobody is prepared for the loss of everyday life. A marriage, even a bad one, is full of small contacts you never count as a relationship: someone knows you have come home, someone notices you bought the wrong bread, someone rolls their eyes at your joke. When that is gone, you do not necessarily miss the person. You miss having a witness.

That is why loneliness also surprises those who left of their own accord and felt relieved. Relief and loneliness are not mutually exclusive. You can be certain the decision was right and still not know what to do with yourself on a Sunday afternoon. One does not cancel out the other, and loneliness is not proof that you made a mistake.

There is something else, rarely mentioned: divorce is a loss that the people around you do not treat as a loss. There is no funeral, no condolences, nobody brings lunch round. I write about what this kind of quiet loss does to a person in The grief nobody acknowledges: miscarriage, divorce, losing a job.

Two kinds of loneliness: missing a person or missing a circle

As early as 1973 the sociologist Robert Weiss described two kinds of loneliness that are worth knowing, because they call for different answers. Emotional loneliness arises when one close bond is missing, someone you are attached to. Social loneliness arises when a circle is missing: people you do things with, to whom you belong, who ask you along.

After divorce you may have both at once, though not in equal measure. The Dutch researchers Pearl Dykstra and Tineke Fokkema looked at exactly this in divorced and married people: emotional loneliness was more closely tied to whether a person had a partner, social loneliness to what their wider network was like.

Why is this useful? Because people often treat the wrong loneliness. Someone who misses one close bond signs up for three courses and comes back from each one emptier. Someone who misses a circle throws themselves into a new relationship and then expects one person to stand in for friends, Sunday lunches and company for the hills. Neither is a flaw of character. It is simply an answer to the wrong question.

Shared friends: who belongs to whom now

Divorce does not only divide the furniture. It divides the network too, except that nobody writes that into the agreement. Research from the Netherlands, where divorced people were followed over several years, shows that the circle usually shrinks after divorce, most of all where the contacts came through the partner: his family, her colleagues, the couples you went to the seaside with. The same research also shows that some people gradually rebuild their network with new contacts. Not everyone, and not quickly.

Friends rarely make this choice out of malice. Mostly they do not know what to do. Inviting both is awkward, inviting one feels like taking sides, so in the end they invite nobody. And you read that as a verdict.

“Maja and Rok had a barbecue. I saw the photos. Nobody rang me.”
“Have you been in touch with them since the divorce?”
“No. I was waiting to see whose side they were on.”
“And they are probably waiting to see whether you still want to be included at all.”
“So we are all waiting.”
“Somebody will have to go first. It does not have to be you. But it could be.”
(This dialogue is composed; it does not describe a real person.)

A few things are worth knowing here. First, some friendships were friendships with the couple, not with you, and they really will fall away. That hurts, but it says nothing about your worth. Second, with those who matter to you, it pays to say out loud what they do not dare to ask: “You don’t have to choose. I’d be glad if you invited me on my own sometime.” Third, do not turn people into judges. A friend who has to listen over every coffee to everything your former partner has done will, in time, ring less often, and not because they are on the other side.

Weekends without the children

For parents this is often the hardest part. During the week there is a rhythm: school, meals, homework, training. Then Friday comes and the structure of the day leaves along with the children. Many describe it as if someone had switched off the sound.

Two things get mixed together here. One is missing your children, which is entirely as it should be and needs no fixing. The other is that without the children you are suddenly without a role. For years you were above all a mum or a dad and a husband or a wife. When both roles vanish for two days, a question remains: who are you when nobody needs you? It is an uncomfortable question, but it is also the only one from which something new can begin.

It helps to divide child-free weekends into three parts and treat each one separately. Friday evening is a transition: prepare something small and constant for it that is not a screen, such as a walk along the same route or a call to the same person. Saturday should hold one arranged thing with other people, not five. Sunday afternoon, the hardest stretch for many, should have a task with a beginning and an end. The rest of the time can be empty. Not every hour needs to be filled.

And one more thing: the children do not need to know how empty it was. “I missed you both and I had a nice time” is a sentence that allows them to enjoy themselves with their other parent without a guilty conscience. There is more on staying aligned as parents in Co-parenting after separation: how to stay a team when you are no longer a couple.

What loneliness does to your thinking

Loneliness is not only sadness. In their research John Cacioppo and Louise Hawkley described how a lonely person becomes more alert to signs of rejection. A neutral face is read as cold, an unanswered message as deliberate, an invitation as politeness born of pity. From an evolutionary point of view this makes sense: whoever was once alone was at risk and so had to be wary. Today, though, that wariness brings about the very thing you fear. You withdraw first so as not to be rejected, and people take that to mean you do not want contact.

After divorce this loop is stronger still, because shame joins in. “Everybody knows.” “They think I couldn’t hold my family together.” Most people actually think about you far less than it seems, but a lonely mind does not readily believe that.

The good news is that this is a state, not a trait. Once you know that loneliness colours how you read others, you can take your first interpretation with a pinch of salt. Not “she doesn’t like me”, but “I don’t know why she hasn’t replied, and my head is currently offering me the worst version”.

An exercise: a map of one week

Before you change anything, it is good to see how things really are. The exercise takes fifteen minutes and a sheet of paper.

1. Draw seven columns, one for each day of the past week. In each, write down who you spoke to for more than a few sentences. Phone calls count. Text messages do not.
2. Put a mark next to each name: a plus if you felt calmer or more alive after the conversation, a minus if you felt emptier, a circle if it made no difference.
3. Mark the three hardest hours of the week. Not days, hours. For most people they are very precise: Friday at seven, Sunday at four.
4. For each of the three hours, write down what you are missing then: one person (emotional loneliness), company (social loneliness) or simply a task that would give the day a shape.
5. Choose one hour and one small arrangement for it next week. Just one. For example: on Sunday at four I will ring my sister. Repeat the exercise a week later and see whether the mark has changed.

If you would like to widen the picture from one week to your whole network, the knowledge base describes the map of your support network. After divorce it is useful mainly because it shows who has actually stayed. There are usually more of them than it seems on a Sunday afternoon.

What helps and what merely fills the silence

The difference between the two lies not in the activity but in what you are left with afterwards. The same thing can be contact for one person and escape for another.

As a rule, what helps is whatever is regular and where someone is expecting you: a weekly hike with the same people, a choir, a sports group, volunteering, coffee every Thursday with the same friend. Regularity matters more than enthusiasm, because belonging grows out of repetition, not out of one good evening. Old contacts help too. People from before the marriage, with whom contact faded, often respond more warmly than you expect, and with them you do not have to explain who you were before you were half of a couple.

What merely fills the silence is whatever leaves you emptier than before: hours of scrolling, checking your former partner’s profile, one glass more than you meant to have, work until ten at night. None of this is a sin and everyone does it sometimes. The only question is whether it is the exception or the only way you get through an evening.

A new relationship is a chapter of its own. Wanting closeness after divorce is entirely understandable and no sign of weakness. It is worth distinguishing, though, whether you are looking for a person or looking for an end to the silence, because the second usually leads into a relationship that only postpones the silence by a few months. I write about this in A new relationship after divorce: when is it too soon and how do you know you’re ready and in Dating after divorce: how to know you’re not just running away.

Where this does not apply

This whole post rests on the assumption that the silence after divorce is something that needs doing something about. That is not always true, and it is only fair to say where this framework breaks down.

First, for some people solitude after divorce is a relief and stays that way. Someone who lived for years with tension, criticism or fear may experience an empty flat as the first safe place in a long time. Such a person is not lonely and need not fix anything just because others think they ought to be unhappy. The researcher David Sbarra, who has studied divorce and health for many years, stresses that most people recover well after divorce; lasting difficulties affect a minority.

Second, the loneliness sometimes did not begin with the divorce. Many people were already lonely within the marriage; it was simply easier to hide. If so, new contacts will not be enough, because the question is not where to find people but what happens inside you when someone comes close. That is often a pattern from earlier relationships, and more a matter for therapy than for a dance class.

Third, what looks like loneliness may be depression. If for several weeks nothing has brought you pleasure, if you sleep badly, struggle to get up and everything seems pointless even when you are among people, talk to your GP. Advice about friends does not help then, and can even deepen the sense that you are to blame for not trying hard enough.

And fourth, if there was violence in the relationship, advice about keeping shared friends and easy-going arrangements with your former partner can be dangerous. Safety comes first then. In Slovenia the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence is available on 080 11 55.

When to seek help

Loneliness after divorce is not in itself a reason for therapy. For most people it eases once everyday life has been put back together. It does make sense to look for someone to talk to if, after a few months, you notice that your circle is narrowing rather than widening, that you avoid invitations even though you want them, that you cannot tear yourself away from what your former partner is doing, or that the pattern repeats and you felt similarly alone in earlier relationships.

As a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, I work within relational family therapy, where this is precisely what interests us: how early experiences of closeness and abandonment are repeated in adult relationships, and what can be changed. Sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. What the work around a separation looks like is described in Support through separation: how therapy keeps loss from turning into resentment.

If loneliness comes with thoughts that it would not matter if you were no longer here, do not wait. In Slovenia the Samarijan confidential helpline is available 24 hours a day on 116 123, the mental distress helpline (Klic v duševni stiski) between 7 pm and 7 am on 01 520 99 00, and in immediate danger call 112.

What to remember

• Solitude is a state, loneliness a feeling, social isolation a number of contacts. After divorce they often arrive together, but each calls for a different answer.
• Loneliness does not mean the divorce was a mistake. Relief and missing everyday life can exist side by side.
• Ask yourself whether you miss one close bond or a circle to belong to. A new partner does not replace friends, and ten acquaintances do not replace one close person.
• Shared friends are often not taking sides; they simply do not know what to do. Somebody has to go first.
• Weekends without the children are easier to get through with one regular arrangement than with a full timetable.