The Finding Love After Divorce Guide

While finding love after divorce matters deeply, many take off too quickly from the starting line. A fast jumpstart back into dating can actually make it less likely that you’ll find love after divorce, at least in the short term. Without a doubt though, if your heart wants to find love it will. How quickly and how painlessly that happens will depend wholly on how you approach the post divorce process. 

What you do between the time of your separation and the time when you meet a new potential mate matters implicitly to the success of any future relationship. In other words, how you complete your marriage determines how you will begin your next romance. This therefore determines how likely you’ll be to sustain true love in it. 

Honestly, finding love after divorce isn’t difficult if you avoid the most common mistakes and genuinely pay attention to what your heart needs to heal and prepare. 

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Will I ever find love again after divorce? The mistakes that make it difficult.  

Whether you want to look at it or not, your marriage ended for a reason, probably many reasons. While most of us would love to believe that the responsibility for the ending falls squarely and solely on the (soon-to-be) ex-spouse, no marriage ends without the contributions of both people. Our personal power moving forward lies in our willingness and capacity to consider how we contributed to the demise of our prior relationship. This is not about self blame or self judgment. It’s not about self-criticism. It’s about growth. It’s about learning.

Regardless of what contributed to the end of your marriage, you’ve also gone through a heartbreaking experience. No matter the circumstances, you have experienced a loss, usually a significant one, that requires grieving. Separating from a spouse and rebuilding a life alone, possibly becoming a single parent, creates real waves of emotion and change, sometimes even chaos and commotion. You must take good care of yourself during this time. Finding another person to love too quickly after your divorce often blocks and prevents the healing process and personal attention you need at this all important time. 

Many falsely believe that as soon as they find another it will soothe the ache in the heart and erase the pain within. It won’t. Others imagine that finding a new beloved and starting over will somehow bring them what they didn’t have, what they longed for, in their marriage. Again, that strategy points directly to one of the most common mistakes recently divorced people who seek love too quickly make. 

What happens on the outside can’t possibly heal the hurt on the inside. 

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Walls of protection and effective dating strategies won’t help 

If you’ve had thoughts like “I’ll never let that happen again,” “I’m going to find someone committed to integrity/communication/passion/etc in a way that my ex-spouse wasn’t,” pay attention. If you find yourself standing guard, on the lookout for red flags that someone you date might be like the one you just left, these actually indicate that you haven’t yet completed with the past in the way your heart actually needs now. 

If you find yourself strategizing your approach to dating and finding love after divorce, your protective strategies display your own red flags. They reveal the truth that you have essential cleanup and preparation to do before you can set your next relationship up for success. 

If you’re looking for the quick answer, the fast pass back to love after divorce, this isn’t your article. This article will tell you the truth about what really matters to successfully find love after divorce – a love that not only has the capacity to take your breath away over and over again, but can last the course of a lifetime.

If you desire something much better than what you had, if you want to feel alive in a new relationship – and you have the courage to look within, clean out the cobwebs in your heart, heal the wounds, and drop the walls of protection – then you’re assured to find love after divorce. 

Let’s go deeper…

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The stages of returning to love after divorce

As we said, the divorce and post divorce process is anything but easy. No matter whether you might have been the one who wanted a divorce or how much you might feel ready to just put the past behind you and move on, a few things need to happen first. Acknowledging and allowing this natural process, and its stages, will speed up the time it takes to find true love after divorce.  

We outline here the stages of the post divorce care process that you can’t skip if you want to successfully find love again… 

1. Grieve – No matter what led to the divorce, you have lost something that you once found deeply valuable. You must grieve this loss, this change. For most, an aspect of their identify – husband, wife, spouse – will have abruptly ended. As human beings we feel. Our emotions matter and grieving helps in the housecleaning or “heartcleaning” process. Grieving isn’t always easy, but it matters. We suggest getting support if this feels difficult. 
2. Feel – Similarly, depending on the cause and the dynamics of your divorce, most people have an ocean of unfelt and unspoken emotions – hurt, betrayal, bitterness, resentment, invalidation, insignificance, and anger, just to name a few. Unfelt emotions will always close the heart and create barriers between you and future love after divorce connections. You’ll want to find a conscious and safe space to genuinely release these feelings so you can move on cleanly and freely. 
3. See your part – As we said earlier, a divorce never happens due solely to the actions and behaviors of one partner. Another important step in the process that prepares you to successfully find love after divorce invites you to consider your part in what happened in your marriage. The potential contributions are infinite and the more you know about your patterns and their impact on the challenges in your marriage, the more you can learn, heal and grow now. This ensures you don’t have to repeat the patterns and find yourself in deep heartbreak again. 
4. Heal – Most couples lack the capacity to divorce in a truly conscious and loving way. Too often they leave each other with significant unresolved upsets and therefore unhealed wounds of the heart. These wounds, when “treated” with love and consciousness, will heal in such a way that they fully resolve leaving no lasting impact. Ignored, the wounds simply get covered up with scars that inevitably limit future possibilities of true love after divorce. 
5. Strengthen the relationship with you – Many, after divorce, realize that they have lost themselves. Some actually discover that self abandonment harms relationships and that it is a common contributing factor that leads to the end of a marriage. Whether you have a pattern of losing yourself through self abandonment that contributed to your divorce or not, having a strong relationship with you leads to a strong relationship with another. That means that now is the time to evaluate the quality of the relationship you have with yourself and take the important opportunity to strengthen it even more. 
6. Open to receive. As you find yourself emerging from the first five stages of the post divorce process, you will likely notice that one day you simply feel genuinely ready for love after divorce. In this final stage, you’ll sense that resentment and accompanying walls of protection have fallen away leaving you in a natural state of openness, curiosity, and trust. In this final stage, a vision of future love will arise infused with quiet beautiful anticipation instead of desperation for love and defensive dating. If you do happen to find yourself grasping, settling, or building walls of protection at this point, it simply serves as an indication to return to the previous stages and uncover what else your heart, body, and soul need in order to open fully to loving again. 

Each of these stages and the steps within them work together to heal your heart and release anything and everything you don’t need nor want to carry into your next relationship. This is your opportunity to go slow to go fast toward love after divorce. On the other hand, if you skip steps, you’ll usually get sent back to “Go” while walking through even more unnecessary heartache. 

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How to love yourself after divorce

Those willing to consider the importance of self love after divorce will find themselves well served by the inquiry. As you have heard clearly here, your relationship with you matters. This could not be more important after divorce. 

Too often those moving through the divorce process feel as if they have failed. It’s not uncommon to blame yourself. Many question, especially if their partner initiated the divorce, whether they are lovable and worthy of love. Feelings of inadequacy or not being enough can visit frequently. Yet none of this internal dialog serves you, your heart, or your future relationships. 

The most important contribution you can make to loving yourself after divorce starts with your capacity for self forgiveness. No matter what you did or didn’t do in your marriage, no matter the mistakes you might have made, you did the best you could with the resources you had within you at the time. 

Honestly, life does not equip us well enough to navigate the ups, downs, and significant challenges married couples face. As a matter of fact, much of the conditioning we receive about loving relationships actually ends up sabotaging our long term connections. 

So, on the path to loving yourself after divorce, you want to see that you did the best you could. You want to forgive yourself for not knowing how to “do” marriage better. You want to find compassion and forgiveness for the wounded and scared parts of you that couldn’t always show up consciously. You need to forgive the parts that maybe even unconsciously sabotaged your relationship. 

Yes, you want to forgive yourself for all of that. 

Equally important, you want to hold kindness and compassion for the parts of you that feel hurt, the parts that may feel the whole range of emotions we mentioned above. Holding yourself with kindness and compassion will accelerate the Feeling and Healing stages we discussed above. 

From there, during the “Strengthen the relationship with you” stage, commit to releasing any habits of self abandonment, self sacrifice, and the resentment that always accompanies them. Do this by committing to honor who you are as well as your needs, wants, and desires.

Finally, self love after divorce honors that you are, as all humans are, imperfect by nature. Embrace your “perfect” imperfectness so that you can let yourself be seen and held fully in your humanness. At the same time, look for and find the beauty of your soul. See the brilliance and love you bring to those around you. Honor that brilliance as much as you honor your imperfections. 

This is self love in action. 

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While no one plans for a divorce when they get married, divorce still happens. Your journey from divorce to finding a new relationship invites you to reconnect with Love in a vaster, and deeper way – for you, for your ex, and for your future beloved. As you move through your separation, the more attention you pay to healing and these stages, the more likely you’ll be to find love after divorce much sooner and in much deeper and more sustainable ways. 

The patterns that might have caused your divorce – whether it be self abandonment, the friend zone, emasculation, unhealthy boundaries, attachment patterns, emotional unavailability, or anything else – can be shifted and transformed now into a much greater capacity for love in the future. 

It matters that you take responsibility for what happens next. Don’t deny your responsibilities for the end of your marriage. Don’t over take your responsibility either. Often getting outside perspectives and assistant can help keep you on track to the love you want after divorce. 

The question is – will you resist the temptation to seek love too soon after divorce? Will you go slow enough to allow a natural healing without lasting scars? Will you forgive yourself and your ex-partner? Will you honor your soul expression going forward?

Will you?

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Since 2006, highly conscious men and women, with a commitment to extraordinary relationships, have chosen Ecstatic Intimacy to find and cultivate Soul Partnerships from their bedrooms to their boardrooms. Ecstatic Intimacy believes in coveted relationships, for all. 

You too, are invited…