Getting Back to Dating: The Pursuit of Healthy Love Post Divorce

Relationships have been under the spotlight throughout the pandemic, many have blossomed under lockdown, but many have broken down. Here psychotherapist Noel McDermott looks at signs that it’s time to move on and how to look at love post-divorce.

Noel McDermott comments:

“As we move into a post pandemic world over the next few years, it may be time to look at your relationships, to question if we can repair and improve our relationships or if it’s time to move on and find healthy love post-divorce.”

Signs that your relationship is over and it’s time to move on:

Controlling and narcissistic behaviours: anger and controlling behaviours are the type of behaviours that escalate over time, they don’t improve spontaneously, they only get worse. They can be the result of personality issues, poor childhood, trauma, substance misuse.
Indifference: hate is not the opposite of love, indifference is. The lack of emotional content in a human-to-human relationship means there is no relationship. We should have feelings about each other, or we should give up with trying.
Drama: there’s nothing quite so toxic as non-stop drama. It creates a very distorted sense of intimacy - intensity is not intimacy - and creates the conditions for developing mental illness and physical illness (drama equals stress hormones and stress hormones are our biggest killer).
Coercion, threats, or violence: It might seem obvious to say this but as abusers tend to groom victims, the victims in this situation may be too afraid, too isolated, or too caught up in the self-blaming that grooming is aimed at producing to self-advocate. It may be that only an external actor can impact on these situations. If you witness these things n a friend or loved one’s relationship, seek professional and legal help. You may need to get the police involved.
Addiction: if your partner is in active addiction to alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling etc and does not fully accept they need help, are actively in help for it and that help is working then move on.

The Pursuit of Healthy Love

The first thing to do is to give up thinking that there is a simple rule book for life or relationships as there isn’t and the desire to have one might suggest anxiety about taking risks. Life involves taking risks and if you are not taking risks then you are not living, this is especially true in terms of love relationships.

Learning to move on

When people move into a new relationship, they still try to work through the problems of the previous relationship, it’s another way of refusing to accept the loss and move on and this can be a crucial issue. It’s more than possible to grieve the loss of a relationship that you are already in.

When is the right time to start a new relationship?

This is often linked to how the previous relationship ended and the nature of that relationship. Let’s look at a divorce that happens after a couple have gradually grown apart and ends with mutual understanding and rational split of resources and responsibilities if there are children to co-parent. Clearly both parties will have come to terms will the situation already and can start and in many cases, will have started another relationship. In a situation where a divorce occurs after one partner was abusive, or carried out secret affairs, there will be a significant amount of emotional baggage to process. This is probably best done in singleton, which is not to suggest you shouldn’t have intimacy, but is to suggest the capacity to have long term stable intimacy with another will follow on from doing the repair work on oneself. Do engage in dating and having liaisons if you wish, this may be very helpful in retrieving aspects of self-esteem but be very thoughtful about what is known as rebound.

Where there is a lot of stress, fear and anger involved, letting go and moving on is always more difficult. The odd thing about love is that it confers freedom on all the parties involved psychologically. Stable attachment, which is what therapists rather boringly call love, is designed by nature to allow us the courage to explore. The less stable the attachment the more we cling on.

Stable attachment in relationships

Stable attachment in relationships is a two-way process and both parties need to be in a relatively stable place emotionally to give and receive in this way. This might be a useful rule in thinking about when to start a new relationship aimed at longevity and mutual growth. As with any loss, grieving a marriage takes time but the intensity of the early experience fades and as it fades it’s perfectly reasonable to get involved again. It’s probably though not sensible if the experience is still very intense or still too painful or damaging to even experience. If that’s the case, you are likely simply to be trying to heal damage rather than love and be loved. My advice would be that healing damage is better done with a therapist rather than a love partner.

Checklist - The Six Stages of Relationship Grief

It’s best then not to think about timescales for starting new relationships but milestones or markers. While there is not a direct correlation between loss through death and loss through divorce and whilst every experience of loss is unique, it’s useful to look at the six stages of grief to provide you with a guide to getting back to dating for the longer term:

· NUMBNESS AND DENIAL

· ANXIETY AND PANIC

· BARGAINING AND CONTROL

· FRUSTRATION AND ANGER

· DEPRESSION AND DESPAIR

· ACCEPTANCE AND PEACE

This list is a little simplistic and, in some ways, idealised, we never develop in a linear fashion as humans, but it might make a handy checklist. Clearly starting a new relationship once you have achieved acceptance and peace over the ending of the old one is the preference.

Noel McDermott is a Psychotherapist with over 25 years’ experience in health, social care, and education. He has created unique, mental health services in the independent sector. Noel’s company offer at-home mental health care and will source, identify and co-ordinate personalised care teams for the individual. They have recently launched a range of online therapy resources to help clients access help without leaving home – www.noelcdermott.net