04/02/2026
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War is a strange comparison until you sit with it for more than a minute. Suzanne Gordon made it in 1976, in her book Lonely in America, and nearly fifty years later it still catches you off guard. You read it and think, that's too much. And then you think about it a bit longer and ground shifts. The people you thought were on your side disappear or go quiet or reposition themselves in ways that tell you more than you wanted to know. You end up in a place you don't quite recognise anymore, telling the same story to people who are deciding, in real time, how involved they want to be.
The thing nobody prepares you for is how many times you have to say it. Not the big conversations, those are awful but at least they feel proportionate. The strange part is telling the dentist's receptionist, the school secretary, and the neighbour you only ever talked to about bins. Each time you say it, you feel it again. And you watch their face go through its motions. Some of them are working out whether they should have seen it coming. Some are reassessing you, right there in front of you, revising whatever they thought they knew. And you're supposed to help them through it, somehow, because standing there in your own wreckage and being gracious about it is apparently what you're expected to do.
Gordon called divorce a ritual without roots. She meant there's no script for it, no flowers or casseroles left on the doorstep and clear end point after which everyone agrees you've grieved enough. The person you're mourning is still alive. He's somewhere out there, maybe eating dinner right now, maybe already with someone else. And you're not supposed to talk about him the way you would if he'd died, because he hasn't, because he's fine, and because what you're feeling isn't supposed to be called grief. Except that it is. You've lost a future and a version of the past, too, because memory feels different now, all of it recast and suspect. Judith Viorst wrote about necessary losses, about the way growing up means losing again and again. But divorce is a loss that doesn't grow you. It just takes.
What nobody tells you is that you're about to find out which friends were really yours. The couples drift away first. They don't mean to, most of them, but couples socialise with couples and suddenly you're an odd number. The women who stay are the ones who were always yours in some deeper sense, and you're grateful for them, but there are fewer than you thought. You start to notice how much of your social life was borrowed. How many dinners happened because he had colleagues. How many weekends were structured around his friendships. And the loneliness of that realisation is a second loss inside the first one, because it tells you something about the marriage you're not sure you wanted to know.
There's also the endless paperwork. The solicitors and the bank and the mortgage and the utility companies and the forms that ask for your status and force you to tick a box that didn't exist for you six months ago. It takes hours, even weeks. And every form is a small humiliation, a tiny fresh confrontation with the fact that your life has come apart and now you have to file evidence of it. We don't talk about this much because it sounds petty next to the emotional devastation, but the practical labour of divorce falls heavily on women. They're the ones chasing the documents and the ones keeping the children's lives running while their own life is in pieces.
Gordon compared it to war because both experiences rip people away from their roots, their important relationships, and a part of themselves. And both leave you changed in ways that make it harder to explain yourself to people who haven't been through it. You come out the other side and you don't quite fit anymore. The world around you kept going while you were in it, and now you're expected to slot back in as if nothing happened. Except something did happen. And the loneliness isn't just that you're single now, or that your phone is quieter, or that Saturday nights feel different. It's that you've seen something about how contingent your whole life was, how quickly everything can rearrange itself, and nobody around you seems to want to talk about that.
Maybe that's the part that doesn't go away. The vigilance. Children of divorced mothers sometimes talk about it, the way they grew up watching their mothers rebuild, or fail to, and what that taught them about depending on anyone. We pass things on whether we mean to or not. And the loneliness Gordon described is about knowing something you wish you didn't know, that the life you built can disappear, that the people in it can disappear too, and that the grief you carry for all of it may never be fully named.
ยฉ Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved
