Divorce cake.

On courage, conditioning, and the stories we reward.

I want to write a love letter to divorce. To everyone who has ever been divorced, is going through a divorce, or is grappling with the liminal space between.

Opening your heart to the possibility of forever with someone is bold. It’s brave. At least, it deserves to be.

I got divorced at 31. I had a six-month-old baby. Almost immediately, I felt it—the pause. The recalibration. The unspoken audit.

The way the news landed heavier because of the timing, because of the baby, because of the story people were already telling themselves about what a “good” mother, a “successful” marriage, a “strong” woman was supposed to look like.

One friend asked if I’d tried hard enough. For my son.

It didn’t come from cruelty. It came from conditioning. But it landed like a verdict.

Of course I had tried. In ways no one saw. In ways that didn’t photograph well. In ways that slowly hollowed me out.

What made divorce so hard wasn’t just the grief of ending a marriage—it was carrying that grief alongside the implication that choosing honesty over endurance meant I was choosing wrong.

Marriage is expected. Divorce is scrutinized.

Somewhere between 25 and 45—let’s be honest, that’s generous—we’re expected to choose the person we’ll walk through life with.

Some of us are just waking up in our thirties. That makes for some seriously half-baked decisions. We can’t choose forever when we haven’t fully metabolized who we are. And even as we question outdated ideas everywhere else, divorce is still treated like a failure of character instead of an act of discernment.

What went wrong? Who’s to blame?

Divorce disrupts systems. Ours. Theirs. What I wish I’d received then—and what I hope each of us can offer now—is neutrality. Nobody walks around with an I’m one straw away from leaving sign on their forehead. Of course it comes as a shock. It did for them, too. Trust me.

Divorce is hard.

I notice that the loudest voices preaching marriage is hard, stick with it, have never been divorced.

Because divorce is hard, too.

Just differently—and often without the social permission, praise, or support we offer people who stay.

I’ve never heard of someone who steps into it lightly. Not when it’s two humans. Not when it involves little humans (or animals). Not when you know your decision will be quietly interpreted as a referendum on your grit, your love.

That anyone navigating it also carries a societal story suggesting they didn’t try hard enough—or failed—is outdated and offensive.

Here’s what I know now that I couldn’t articulate then:

There is a bright-line difference between working through hard seasons with the person you know—deep down—is your partner, and staying with someone you’ve loved but know is not.

Being in a different partnership now has clarified where I was back then. How staying would have required me to abandon myself. How that would have taught my son something far more damaging than divorce ever could.

I know the pain of divorce. And I know the pain of not living in full truth.

I can tell you very clearly which one cuts deeper.

This is why stick-it-out-no-matter-what narratives without nuance are dangerous. Dangerous for people in quiet erosion. Dangerous for those navigating coercion. Dangerous for anyone who knows something is wrong but can’t yet explain it.

Time spent out of integrity—and the exhaustion of efforting to get back there—can cause irreparable harm.

Abuse doesn’t require bruises. Misalignment doesn’t require a villain.

It can be that you are no longer embodying the you of this lifetime alongside this person—someone you may have chosen before you knew who that you would be.

Some people do stick the landing the first time. They grow and morph together. Heck yes for that.

Am I alone in feeling that cannot be the expectation?

I believe it distorts our understanding of growth to assume one-and-done is best practice—or even the best-case scenario—in partnership.

I got a divorce cake to honor what I learned. To mark the courage it took to listen when the world was telling me not to. If anyone needs to hear it: I’d get you a divorce cake, too.

Choosing yourself—or letting someone you love choose themselves—can feel like a death cycle you might never return from. And, it is worth celebrating.

If a wedding cake is a celebration of hope,

a divorce cake is a celebration of truth.

And it is always better to live your truth

than to live somebody else’s.

Our beautiful, growing, and morphing family.