A Couple Who Didn’t Know Where to Start With Divorce

The morning we finally admitted it was over, I was standing in the kitchen making toast. Not even proper breakfast, just toast, because neither of us had been to the supermarket in two weeks. Mark was sitting at the table with his phone face-down in front of him, which he'd started doing a lot, and I remember thinking: we can't even fight about this. We're too tired to fight.

I said it quietly. I told him I thought we both knew. He didn't argue. He just nodded, slowly, like I'd named something that had been sitting in the room with us for months.

We'd been married for eleven years. We had two kids, a house in Hertfordshire, a dog called Biscuit, and absolutely no idea what happened next.

That's the part nobody tells you about, really. Everyone has opinions on whether you should stay or go, whether you tried hard enough, whether the kids will be alright. But when you've actually made the decision, when it's done, you're left standing in your kitchen with cold toast and the quiet realisation that you don't have the first clue how any of it works.

I didn't know whether we needed solicitors straight away. I didn't know whether we had to go to court. I didn't know if we had to live apart before anything could be formalised, or whether we could stay in the same house while it was sorted. I Googled a lot of things at two in the morning over the following weeks, including the basic divorce process, and I mostly came away more confused than I'd started.

Mark and I weren't enemies. That's the thing I want to explain, because I think when people hear "divorce" they imagine rows and door-slamming and someone's stuff in bin bags on the drive. Ours wasn't like that. We'd just, quietly, grown into two people who wanted different things and made each other unhappy without meaning to. We still ate dinner together most nights. We still watched telly sometimes. We were just, underneath it all, done.

The problem with being on reasonable terms is that it almost makes the legal side harder to start. If you're furious with someone, there's an energy to it. You ring a solicitor, you feel justified, you want to fight. We just felt sad and a bit lost, and the idea of two sets of lawyers squaring off over everything we'd built felt wrong, and also expensive, and also like it would make us into adversaries when we weren't really.

A friend of mine, Karen, mentioned mediation almost in passing. Her brother had used it a few years before. She said it had helped them actually talk about things, rather than having everything filtered through someone else. I looked into it, half-heartedly at first, then with more interest.

I mentioned it to Mark one evening. He looked it up himself the next day. That's how we made most of our decisions by that point, separately, then circling back. He thought it was worth trying.

Our first joint session felt strange. We sat in a light room with a woman called Helen, who was calm and clear and didn't seem remotely rattled by any of it. I'd half expected it to feel like couples counselling, like someone trying to fix us, but it wasn't that at all. Helen was very plain about what she was and wasn't there to do. She wasn't there to save the marriage. She was there to help us work out what a fair and workable future looked like, for us and for the children.

Ellie was eight and Sam was five. Ellie had already asked, once, whether we were getting divorced. I'd told her we were still working things out, which was true but felt hollow even as I said it. Sam hadn't asked directly, but he'd started dragging his feet about going to nursery, and his key worker had gently flagged that he seemed a bit flat. Children pick things up. They always do.

The children came up in almost every session. Where would they live, how would the week be split, how would we handle school runs and after-school clubs and holidays? Mark and I had very different instincts about some of it. He wanted an equal split from the off, five days on, five days off, something like that. I felt the kids needed a more settled base, at least to begin with, and that we could review it as they got older. We went around on it quite a bit.

What I found useful, genuinely useful, was that Helen kept bringing us back to what was actually best for Ellie and Sam, not what felt fair to us as adults. That's a harder question than it sounds. I had to be honest with myself about whether some of my reasons were really about the children, or really about me, about not wanting to be the parent with the smaller share of the week, about fear.

It took a few sessions. There were moments when I left and cried in the car park because something Mark said had landed wrong, or because I'd thought we were nearly there and then a whole new set of questions had opened up. But we kept going back.

The financial side was the part I'd dreaded most. We had the house, a small amount of savings, and Mark had a pension I knew very little about. I'd worked part-time for most of our marriage, first because of Ellie, then because it had just carried on that way. I'd contributed less to the pot, at least in ways that showed up on paper. I worried that would be held against me somehow.

Helen helped us each put everything on the table. Not in an interrogating way, more like a structure to make sure nothing got missed. I'd had no idea what a pension sharing order was before any of this. I learned. I also learned that what I'd assumed might be a relatively simple split was actually more complicated, because the house had gone up in value and the equity was substantial, and there were questions about whether we'd sell or whether one of us could buy the other out.

We needed legal advice alongside the mediation. Helen was clear about that, and pointed us both towards getting what's called independent legal advice so that anything we agreed would be properly documented and binding. We each saw a solicitor separately, not to fight each other, just to understand our own positions. That felt manageable. That felt like the right use of lawyers.

By the end of it, we had an agreement. Not perfect for either of us, probably, but fair. The house would be sold. We'd split the proceeds in a way that recognised the years I'd worked fewer hours. The children would mostly be with me during term time, with long stretches with Mark, and we'd review it when Sam started school properly. We put it all into a financial consent order so it was legally recorded and done.

I remember the day I signed it. I sat at the kitchen table, the same table where I'd made that cold toast, and I thought: we did that. Between us. Without it becoming a war.

It's been two years now. Mark and I still talk. We have to, for the kids. Ellie has settled back down and is, I think, okay. Sam is fine. There are still hard days, still moments when I feel the loss of the life I thought I'd have. But there are also easier days, and more of them than I expected.

What I'd say to anyone standing in their kitchen, not knowing where to start, is just this: it doesn't have to be a fight. You don't have to go in swinging. There are ways to sort this that are quieter and fairer, and they're worth looking for. And if you need somewhere to talk it through with people who actually get it, there are support during divorce communities out there, full of people who've been exactly where you are.

This story is based on real divorce experiences, with details changed to protect confidentiality.