A neighbor banged on my door one day to tell me my front yard was bubbling. This is generally not what a newly divorced mother of two small children wants to hear.

My children were with their father, thankfully, so I walked outside alone and discovered that a waterline had broken beneath my yard. Men came. They dug. I watched. I wanted to cry. I also remember feeling grateful for one very unglamorous thing: I had an emergency fund, and I could pay to fix it.

The men who came to repair the line were kind to me in a way I still remember. I don’t remember exactly what they said. I remember how it felt to have someone show up, know what to do and make something better. For a few hours, there was a broken thing in my life that somebody actually knew how to fix.

It felt almost therapeutic to have something fixed that I hadn’t wanted to break. I wish the rest of divorce worked that way.

I Will Never Tell A Woman To Get Divorced

Women who are divorced, divorcing or quietly wondering whether they want a divorce have started coming to me for advice. I understand why. I have been divorced for nearly a decade. My professional life has crossed mental health, personal finance and research. I have raised children as a single mother, built wealth and built a career.

But there is one thing I will not do: I will not tell a woman to leave her marriage.

I wanted love. I wanted marriage to work. Divorce was never some triumphant declaration that I had stopped believing in either one. And I don’t know what happens on the other side of another woman’s divorce decree. Neither does she.

Love is not necessarily waiting there. There may be dating and heartbreak. There may be Saturday nights alone. There may be relationships that end and people who quietly decide that if enough relationships in a woman’s life haven’t worked, perhaps she is the problem. There may also be a life she cannot yet imagine.

Research supports that ambiguity. Psychologists Kyle Bourassa, David Sbarra and Mark Whisman used data from the nationally representative Midlife in the United States study to examine marital quality and later life satisfaction . Women who left very low-quality marriages reported greater life satisfaction years later than comparable women who stayed; women leaving higher-quality marriages did not show the same pattern.

That matters because the question is not simply whether divorce is good or bad. The life a woman is leaving matters. A study cannot tell the woman sitting across from me what she should do with her marriage. Neither can I.

Fear After Divorce Changes Form

When I was married, I was afraid I would spend the rest of my life miserable and tethered to someone else. Starting over after divorce brought a different fear: I was afraid I wouldn’t make it alone.

I was raising two small children in Mississippi. I worried about money, surviving toddlers and getting them to sleep—or simply to stop bickering long enough for me to finish my work. I worried about maintaining a career that was far less than what I longed for but that I needed because two little people depended on me.

I have written before about the financial cost of single motherhood , but the cost is not only financial. It is also the relentless concentration of responsibility.

I worried people looked at me differently because I was divorced and single. I worried that every relationship that ended afterward might become evidence that perhaps I had caused all of it.

And I worried about something harder to quantify: there was no one person I could call who was required to care as much as I did about how hard my life had become.

My problem wasn’t simply being physically alone. I wanted to be known.

Friends care. Family cares. But there is a particular loneliness in realizing that nobody else is equally invested in the mundane details of your life. Who knows the water bill is due? Who cares that the children won’t sleep and you have work to finish? Who hears that you are exhausted for the hundredth time without making you wonder whether you have exhausted them, too?

Eventually, I started saying it less and kept going.

The Money Becomes Yours. So Does The Responsibility.

Financial independence after divorce can feel liberating. There is also something terrifying about realizing the responsibility is entirely yours, too.

Every bill. Every childcare expense. Every home repair. Every emergency. Every decision about whether you can afford something—and every decision about whether you can afford not to.

That pressure is not merely anecdotal. Sociologists Pamela Smock, Kristen Tzoc and Deborah Carr examined the economic consequences of divorce in the United States and found that women fared worse economically after divorce than men across the groups studied.

Work becomes part of the equation, too. In a 2025 Journal of Management review, Thomas Kelemen and colleagues synthesized 118 studies to examine the relationship between divorce and work . They identified economic dependence, competing work-family demands and changing social roles as key links between divorce and employment.

That language sounds academic. Living it was simpler: work is no longer just work when your paycheck is holding up the house.

Over time, I also began to recognize the wealth-building skills hidden in single motherhood . Resourcefulness, delayed gratification, risk management and learning to make decisions with little margin for error were not skills I set out to acquire. They were skills life required.

Before the waterline broke, my water had actually been shut off because a bill that had been on autopay suddenly wasn’t. At the time, it felt like evidence in a case I was quietly building against myself: Maybe I really couldn’t do all of this alone.

Then the waterline broke. This time, I had money set aside.

That emergency fund did not make me feel powerful. I was not standing in my bubbling front yard thinking about female financial empowerment. I was thinking, Thank God I can pay for this.

That distinction between having resources and feeling financially secure after divorce is something I have written about in why women who build wealth can still feel poor . Money cannot make a life unbreakable, but it can give you options when something breaks.

That is also why I think being financially okay is better understood through stability, protection, momentum and optionality than by a single account balance or net worth number.

My Children Became Wholly Precious To Me

Something else happened after my marriage ended. My relationship with my children became wholly mine.

Not because their father ceased to matter. He didn’t. But my relationship with them was no longer something I experienced primarily through the institution of our family. It was ours.

The bedtime battles were mine. The bickering was mine. The exhaustion was mine. So were the ordinary mornings, the inside jokes, the growing-up and the privilege of discovering who these two human beings were becoming.

When a family changes shape, there is grief in that. I won’t romanticize it. But there can also be an unexpected clarity about what remains. For me, my children became precious in a way I don’t know that I had words for before.

Becoming Strong Was Never The Goal

We love stories about resilient women. We tell women they are strong as though strength is always a compliment. Sometimes it is. Sometimes strength is simply what happens when nobody else can carry the thing that has to be carried.

If I could sit beside the younger version of myself—the woman standing in her front yard watching strangers repair a broken pipe—I know what I would tell her: You’re stronger than you think. And then I would tell her the part we usually leave off: You’ll become even stronger than you will ever want to be.

Because I didn’t dream of becoming a woman capable of carrying everything. I wanted true love. I wanted partnership. I wanted someone who cared that the waterline broke, someone who understood why I was tired before I had to explain it and someone who would carry some of the ordinary weight of being alive with me.

Nearly a decade later, some things have been fixed. Some have healed. Some have simply become part of me. I built the career I once worried I would never have. I learned how to handle the money. My children grew out of the years when bedtime could bring me to the edge of tears. I became the woman everyone assured me I would become: capable, independent and stronger than I ever wanted to be.

And here is the part I would tell the woman sitting across from me now, wondering whether she should stay or go: I still cannot tell you what to do. I still want someone to call. I still want to be understood without explaining every bruise. I still want someone who notices that something has broken and says, I’ve got this one.

Maybe that is what nearly a decade has taught me—not that I don’t need love, but that I can survive without it and still be soft enough to hope I won’t always have to.