By admin 
When people talk about divorce, there is a tendency to immediately try to portray the two people involved as heroes or villains. It’s not enough that we desperately want to assign blame to one half of the couple, but we also tend to treat the other person as the ultimate victim or as someone we feel sorry for.
That urge is so strong that we even do it along gender lines. If you surf online you will find endless articles and studies asking, “Is divorce harder for men or women?”
The answers tend to vary greatly. One search will get you A Psychology today article that says that men find breaking up a marriage more difficult, experience a much greater long-term toll on their overall mental health and happiness.
In the meantime, another search will take place present a Gallup poll that says 56 percent of divorced women and 47 percent of divorced women have experienced this increased daily stress (compared to 45 percent of divorced men and 40 percent of divorced men). But is “Is divorce harder for men or women” the right question to ask?
Experts agree that there is one big truth that both men and women need to face before breaking up: divorce is hard for everyone.
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Former Senior VP of YourTango Experts Melanie Gorman assembled a panel of professional divorce coaches — Laura Bonarrigo, Sonja Stribling, Cherie MorrisAnd Pegotty Cooper – to ask them whether men and women really experience divorce differently, and the panel largely agreed on one important truth when it comes to divorce.
Measuring “Who has it worse?” is an exercise in futility, especially when you’re talking about genders. That may seem like a cop-out, but it’s true. In almost every case where you could generalize how men and women respond to divorce, the reality is that everyone suffers. Everyone is experiencing heartache and loss.
Divorce is difficult for women. Divorce is hard for men. Divorce is difficult for everyone.
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Are there certain masculine behaviors that men exhibit during a divorce? Yes.
Men tend to check out mentally long before they physically leave. That’s why men often seem almost emotionless during divorce proceedings. They went through their grieving process months before the reality of the divorce filing began.
That might make you think men have it easier… until you think about what happens and when the woman initiates the divorceespecially if the man didn’t see it coming. Suddenly, all his masculine detachment is gone and he struggles to process the breakup in real time, without enough time to make sense of it all.
Men and women do not have a set, gendered way in which they respond to divorce in every situation. And it doesn’t get any easier if you try to apportion blame for the circumstances of the divorce.
Here’s why: In most divorce cases, the only people who know what happened in that marriage are the couple in question.
With the exception of (obviously) cases where abuse or violence occurred, you simply never know for sure what happened between those spouses. He will have his reality. She will have her reality. And there will never be a right way to compare one person’s pain to another’s.
And the most important thing to realize when it comes to divorce is that it doesn’t matter: everyone is hurting and everyone needs to heal.
After a divorce, assigning blame is the least constructive thing anyone can do. Instead, they should forget who had it worse, focus on themselves and… spending time allowing itself to heal.
Because divorce is not more difficult for men than for women, or vice versa.
Divorce is difficult. It’s a rite of passage. And it’s something that everyone goes through in their unique way, regardless of their gender.
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