Can you isolate the exact moment on a date or in a relationship when you know–perhaps on a subconscious level–that it’s not going to work out? That the guy is going to vanish into thin air, in a not-so-magical swirl of dust? I call it the moment of “imminent poof.”

The signs are always there for the taking. So why do we ignore them?  Does our desire to convey that we are “open” and easygoing, or to be in a relationship, blind us from listening to our gut?

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Have any of you gotten to that place, where you’ve woken up one morning in your apartment alone, an empty space beside you where your former spouse used to be, and you realize, “I’m over it?”

Somehow — slowly and yet suddenly — the heavy cloud of mourning, the knots of anguish in your stomach are gone. You never thought they’d go away. In fact, you might have learned to live with that feeling, accepting it as an inevitable imprint of divorce trauma. You’ve stopped fighting it.

And that’s when it goes away.

There is no way to predict when it will happen. The aftermath of a divorce is composed of many painful stages, and each time you think you’ve graduated past one phase, you enter into another one. I suspect it is different for everyone. It is a function of who we are and how long we were married for, not to mention the nature of our relationship and the manner in which it fell apart.

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