These are both words of advice and warning. Dating 101… You might consider yourself divorced, but…BUT…if you don’t have that stamped piece of paper from the courthouse, you are still MARRIED. I don’t care if you are sleeping in separate bedrooms and have been for months; you’re still married. You might even be living in separate houses/townhouses/condos and have purchased yo...

These are both words of advice and warning. Dating 101…

You might consider yourself divorced, but…BUT…if you don’t have that stamped piece of paper from the courthouse, you are still MARRIED. I don’t care if you are sleeping in separate bedrooms and have been for months; you’re still married. You might even be living in separate houses/townhouses/condos and have purchased your own kitchen gadgets that were never “ours”; they’re yours. You’re still married, and you are a road hazard on the dating trail to others.

Let me explain by way of sharing from personal experience. I was living in our marital residence, my soon-to-be ex-husband had moved into his apartment. Six months had passed. He was dating, so I felt almost ready to venture into that scary land after 27 years of monogamy. SCARY! Into my world walks a handsome, witty, suave and charming doctor. Hmmm. He had a place he was renovating; his “ex” (we’ll come back to that) still lived in their marital residence.

“We are just a few weeks from finalizing everything; here look at the papers”, he assured me. The doctor was pretending and marching around as if he were divorced, and eventually I came to discover that she (the “ex”) was pretending they were still married. No one knew, except me, that they were getting a divorce. Or were they? Huh? Guess what? They were both wrong, and I was a crash victim. Suddenly I was dating a married man. I too wasn’t divorced….ugh, what a mess. What on Earth had I gotten myself into? It was an awakening experience for sure, like a cold bucket of water over my head while standing in a blizzard. I checked a year later…they still weren’t divorced.

There is a process that no one is exempt from having to go through when you get divorced. When marriage joins two people as one, there is no such thing as “separation” when you divorce; there is only a tearing apart. Ragged edges of what was once one life, torn apart like fabric, take time to mend. You need time to accept and face the huge, dark abyss of change. There is forgiveness that you need to give as a gift to yourself, yes, yourself, and healing that needs to take place. Time is needed, and there is no shortcut. I’m sorry, there just is no shortcut. I don’t care who you are, or how old, or how awful the marriage was, or how amicable the divorce. It takes time, and that amount varies with each of us, but it can’t be skipped or rushed.

When you get the impersonal piece of paper that represents the dissolve of your umpteen million years of wedded life, that is only the beginning of your journey toward healing. Think of that paper as the first blank page in the story of your new life, and remember that YOU are now the author. You cannot begin though without closing the last chapter of your old life first.

Colleen Brink is a writer, experienced educator, mother and wife. Colleen's life experiences have included loss of siblings, parents divorce, and divorce of her own marriage after 23 years. She is incredibly grateful that she recovered, found, and recently married one of the last "good" men on Earth. Colleen believes in the "pay it forward" philosophy and shares from her own experience hoping to help others to BounceBack! You may contact Colleen by clicking here.