The first ninety days after a separation

Expect the practical to arrive before the emotional. The first ninety days are mostly logistics: where you sleep, what you can afford, who you tell. The grief usually turns up later, once the admin quietens down, which is why so many men come apart around month six and assume something is wrong with them. Nothing is.

I’ve been through a separation and a divorce.

I’m not going to tell you about the other person, because that part isn’t only mine to tell. I’ll tell you about me.

I lost a significant portion of my life savings in the settlement. I lost the house, the plan, and the version of the future I had been organising my life around. I went through most of it during Melbourne’s lockdowns, which removed nearly every outlet I had for managing anything. And I was the first of my friends to go through it, so there was nobody who had been there ahead of me.

I got through it. Not gracefully. But I got through it, and I’ve since spent years working with men going through the same thing.

Here’s what the first ninety days actually look like.

Logistics. Almost entirely logistics.

Where you sleep tonight. What you can afford. What happens to the car, the dog, the joint account, the mail. Who you tell, in what order, and what you say. Whether you’ve to sit through a conversation with your mother about it.

The first ninety days for most men is a project. And in a strange way, that’s a mercy, because a project is something a man knows how to do. There are tasks. There’s a list. There’s a feeling of forward motion.

A lot of men do this part impressively well, and conclude from it that they’re handling the whole thing well.

They’re not handling the whole thing. They are handling the admin.

Because the admin ends.

The lease is signed. The accounts are separated. The furniture question has been resolved. The urgent list, the one that was giving your days a shape, quietly runs out.

And what’s waiting underneath is everything that was postponed while you were busy.

This is the single most common thing I see, and almost nobody is warned about it. A man will tell me he was fine for months and then, apparently out of nowhere, couldn’t get out of bed on a Tuesday. He is frightened by it, because by his own reckoning he should be improving by then, not deteriorating.

He isn’t deteriorating. He has just arrived at the actual event, several months after everyone stopped asking how he was going.

Because nothing about it’s set up to be grieved.

When somebody dies, there’s a structure. A funeral. People bringing food. A socially recognised period where you’re permitted to be a mess, and nobody expects anything of you.

A separation has none of that. There’s no ritual. There’s no date on the calendar. Half the people you’d normally lean on are also connected to your former partner, so leaning on them is complicated. And a fair number of people around you’ll treat it as a piece of news rather than a loss, because the person you lost is still alive and still posting.

But you’ve lost something. Usually several things at once.

The relationship. The daily structure. The house. The shared future. Half your friendship group, whether or not anyone intended that. Frequently a significant part of your financial position. And your sense of who you were, because a big part of that was built around being someone’s partner.

That’s grief. It just doesn’t come with a casserole.

Five things, and they’re all unglamorous.

Sleep, eat, move. This sounds like the kind of advice that gets ignored, and it usually is. It’s also the difference between a hard period and a dangerous one. Your capacity for everything else runs off these three, and every one of them collapses first.

Don’t make permanent decisions on temporary feelings. Not in the first ninety days. Not the resignation, not the interstate move, not the tattoo, not the message you’ve drafted eleven times at midnight. Almost nothing needs deciding this week. The things that do have deadlines attached, and the rest don’t.

Get it out of your head and onto paper. I started writing at a kitchen table because my head was full and the page had room. It became the thing that changed the direction of my life. Ten minutes, no editing, no reader. Thoughts moving too fast to be examined get believed instead. Writing slows them to the speed of a pen, and half of what terrorises you at 2am looks flimsy in ink.

Tell one person the real version. Not “yeah, it’s all pretty amicable.” The real version. One person is enough. It doesn’t have to be a professional. It can be anyone you trust.

Expect the second wave and plan for it. Put it in your calendar if you’ve to. Around the time the admin runs out, this is likely to get harder rather than easier. Knowing that in advance is the difference between “this is the bit I was told about” and “something is seriously wrong with me.”

I can’t give you a date and neither can anyone else. Anyone offering you one is guessing.

What I can tell you is that it does stop, and that at the point where it did for me, I couldn’t have believed it.

I also came to a decision somewhere in the middle of it that mattered more than anything else I did.

It was up to me to make a conscious decision to be either the hero or the victim in my own story.

There was plenty available to be a victim about, and some of it was legitimate. The money. The timing. The lockdowns. What I eventually worked out is that being right about all of it changed nothing, and that the only part of it I had any influence over was what I did next.

That’s not a comfortable thing to hear at day thirty. I’d not have wanted to hear it. But at some point, and only you know when, it becomes the most useful thing available.

One foot in front of the other.

• Handle the basics first. Sleep, food, movement. Everything else runs off them and all three collapse first.

• Make a list of what has an actual deadline. Most of what feels urgent doesn’t. Put everything without a deadline on a separate list and don’t look at it this month.

• Write for ten minutes a day. Pen and paper. No editing, no reader. If nothing comes, answer one question: what’s actually going on for me right now.

• Tell one person the real version. This week. Not the amicable summary.

• Diarise the six month mark. Not as something to dread. As a note to yourself that if it gets harder around then, that’s expected and not a sign you’re going backwards.

This week: tell one person the real version. Not the summary you’ve been giving people. One person, one honest conversation.

There’s no reliable timeframe, and anyone offering one is guessing. What is consistent is the shape rather than the length: a practical phase first, a harder emotional phase once the admin quietens, and then gradual improvement that people usually only notice looking backwards.

Frequently because the practical load absorbs the first few months, and because many men were less involved in the emotional processing that preceded the separation. When the logistics run out, everything that was postponed arrives at once, often around the six month mark.

Yes, and it’s one of the most common things men describe. The two aren’t contradictory. Relief that a difficult situation has ended can sit alongside real grief for what was lost, and both can be true in the same hour.

There’s no wrong time, and waiting for things to settle often means waiting a long time. Some men want support during the practical phase; more commonly it becomes useful when the admin quietens and the grief arrives.

Rumination is usually an attempt to get a different answer out of a fixed set of facts. Writing it down helps, because thoughts move faster than they can be examined and slowing them to the speed of a pen makes them visible enough to question.

MensLine Australia (1300 78 99 78) is free, available 24 hours, and specifically set up for men going through relationship breakdown. Lifeline (13 11 14) and Griefline (1300 845 745) are also free. None of these require a referral or a diagnosis.

Solid Foundations Counselling is not a crisis service. If you need support right now, Lifeline is available 24 hours on 13 11 14, and 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 for family and domestic violence. In an emergency, call 000.

If you’re in it, or you’re six months past it and it has just landed, I offer a free introductory call. No cost, no pressure, no obligation. Click the banner above or get in touch on 0422967392.

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