If A Man Does These 3 Simple Things After His Divorce, He's Truly Happy
OLIVET PICTURES | Unsplash Divorce will do your head in. Even if you're in a really bad marriage and you need to escape with just the tattered remnants of your soul intact, there will still be some sadness when word comes down that the divorce is finalized. Even total liberation can throw us for a loop.
For me, the entire process of my divorce — from the early stages of disbelief and emotional turmoil to eventual graceful acceptance and even zen — has been a wild ride. When you walk away from a marriage, even if the love might be long gone, there's something bittersweet about it all.
In my own tale, at least, there have been vast stretches of time when I went down the "If only we'd figured out a way" trail before finally succumbing to gently holding hands with my blues; it just seemed to make more sense than trying to bash in every teardrop's skull with a weapon of mass denial.
But amid the sadness, I've also found inspiring bright sides. Not in the sense that I find myself jumping for joy, more like little everyday stuff that suddenly makes so much more sense as a guy leaving a marriage and walking away from a dream.
So without further ado, here are three simple things I did after my divorce to be truly happy. They're nothing super profound — and that's the point. These few incidental things became almost magical during a time in my life when all of my senses were heightened by heartache. When you're divorcing and confused and upset and uncertain, small reminders that life goes on can make one heck of a difference. Trust me on that one.
If a man does these 3 things after his divorce, he’s truly happy:
1. He takes time to be alone
Most married people have to really work at carving out some alone time; my ex and I sure did. Between work and kids, we rarely had much time to hang out together, let alone our own solitude. Now that I'm divorced, despite being overcome with a lot of unsettled grief, I've been almost overwhelmed by the opportunity to have a little 'me time' for the first time in ages.
Standing alone in my home with no one else around (and no one showing up) was harrowing at first. I have to imagine it's not uncommon for new divorcees to gravitate towards seeing that isolation as something very sad or frightening. (Researchers at Scientific Reports found that when people choose to be by themselves rather than feeling forced into isolation, they feel less stressed and more connected to who they really are as a person.)
But it doesn't have to be. Even if you're a social animal who thrives on human company, time alone is a gift. I have three young kids who are crazy about my home, so on the days and nights that they're with their mom, I have to jam in a lot of work and chores. But during each stretch when they're gone and I'm done doing what needs to be done, I've come to revel in the chance to just hang out by myself, to think, to veg out.
Initially, I felt guilty for feeling so thrilled at the prospect of having time to myself, but I soon decided to heck with that, and soon enough, these moments of potential loneliness turned into the chance for me to be me again. With a book, a movie, a frozen pizz,a and a little wine, the possibilities are endless, and the rewards are immeasurable.
2. He feels empathy for other people
Lubomir Satko / Pexels
People often think they have good hearts and understanding minds, but you're never really as far along the road to enlightenment as you think you are. That's just human nature; there's always room to improve and be a better human, a greater friend, or a more worthwhile stranger. When my marriage started to crumble, I suddenly could connect with a much larger percentage of my fellow Earthlings because so many other people hurt too, for a billion different reasons.
People lose loved ones every day. They lose their jobs, and they wreck their car,s and they get sick or hurt. Real tried, and true sadness is everywhere, slamming into decent people every few minutes, and those people aren't just living inside CNN.
The same kind of melancholy and gut emotion you see people dealing with in war-torn nations lives right down your block, too, and when you're tuned into it, I believe you start to be a better person. Divorce has helped me in that way. As weird as it may sound on the surface, acknowledging and feeling connected to my neighbor's struggle — whether I know him or not — makes me feel more alive. And that makes me happy.
3. He listens to great music
Okay. My best for last. (And who knew? Who could have ever guessed that something as common as divorce could take a man by the hand and lead him back to something as common as music?) Not me, I'll tell you that much. But that's exactly what happened.
Like a lot of people, I dig my music: always have, always will. However, I think it's common to move away from music at times in your life, especially during a marriage. You're working, you're wrangling kids, and you want a little peace.
Even in the car on the way to your job or listening to tunes while you make dinner, we often slip away from that wildly serious relationship we had with bands and records and songs when we were young and free, when the music we listened to felt like it was written for us and about us. A study from 2024 looked at over 14,000 people and their music habits, and found that folks who listened to music at home more often were just plain happier, even when researchers accounted for things like their health and how much they socialized.
That's what happened to me; I lost so much of my passion as a music listener. My ears shut it down and everything became background noise. But then, out of nowhere, I found myself divorced, and out of nowhere, music came raging back into my world.
I believe that the true power of music, the soul of it, lies dormant while you're running around living your regular life, but then throw a tragedy into the mix and BOOM! That certain nameless magic buried down deep in the music that you used to know wakes up hard and fast. It leaps up out of a long coma to grab you by the throat and force your sad face down into that long-lost steaming pile of thrills and reflections and connections that you haven't felt for a long, long time.
I'm not exactly thrilled that I've had to experience the lows of a divorce. Yet on most evenings when I find myself without my kids, I end up riding down mountain roads where I live, my cigarette smoke curling up out the cracked window.
If you were watching, you'd see a grown man witnessing the sun sink below the hills. You'd see a grown man all up in his head, thinking about love and living and losing and learning. You'd see a grown man running a Honda down the valley at dusk to the blaring beauty of something I had never known before my broken heart.
You'd see a single dad, pushing middle age, staring at the horizon and listening to The Cure's Disintegration album loud as hell, knowing that every single song on this record I discovered almost 25 years after it first came out was written about a certain guy at a certain time in his up-and-down life.
And that guy is me. And you know what? That makes me really, truly happy, even after my divorce, at a time like this.
Serge Bielanko is a writer and musician who has been published on Babble, Huffington Post, Yahoo, and more.
