A therapist’s essay on divorce, data, and choosing yourself.

This one is for anyone who has ever talked themselves out of their own happiness.

The answer to the question in the headline? Yes.

There’s a version of this question that sounds selfish when you say it out loud. Like you already know the answer society wants you to give. Like the word happy is almost embarrassing in its smallness next to words like commitment and vows and family and what we built together.

But I want you to sit with that question for a minute, because I think it’s actually the most honest thing a person can ask. And I think the answer, the true answer – not the one we’ve been trained to give – is yes.

I know the day my marriage ended. Not when the papers were filed or the last box moved. The actual moment: 3:30 in the morning, September 13, 2017, lying in our bed, phone in hand, my ex-husband asleep beside me. I typed:

“I’m scared. I’m scared to BE scared. Alone; at night when things are hard. When I wake up, old anxiety grips me. I haven’t been alone in 15 years. Most of my adult life.”

And then I wrote what I had been too tired to say out loud:

“I’m tired of carrying our marriage, of envisioning our future, of creating experiences, of making decisions, of reaching out to hold you, and waiting to be reached out to in return. And the disappointment over and over and over again that you don’t, and I do, because it’s the only way sometimes I know you’re there.”

I wasn’t writing a manifesto. I was writing the truth before I could talk myself out of it.

Eight months later, on May 23, 2018, I walked into the Daley Center in Chicago’s Loop. I walked out 18 minutes later. Divorced.

Author Lyz Lenz, in her 2024 book This American Ex-Wife, puts language to something I’ve felt but rarely heard named so clearly:

We make women feel brave for sticking [marriage] out . . . we make women feel like they are doing something right for persisting in the lonely drudgery of American marriage, when the aftermath of the happily-ever-after of the heterosexual marriage is simply negotiating a relationship that is inherently unequal. A relationship made unequal not by accident but as a function of a society that relies on that inequality to fill in the gaps that it refuses to fund, child care, eldercare. We do not make women feel brave for making the opposite choice, for walking away from unhappiness.

We don’t make women feel brave for walking away. We make them feel brave for staying.

We reward endurance. We celebrate the woman who absorbs the labor, the loneliness, the quiet carrying of a life, and keeps going. We call that strength. We call that commitment. We call that love, even when it stopped feeling like love a long time ago.

The data is worth looking at here. A 2002 study by sociologist Linda Waite, et al. argued that divorce didn’t actually make unhappily married people happier (although her study at University of Chicago was funded by a conservative entity). That study gets cited a lot by people who want you to stay. 

But a 2013 study found that 74% of divorced women reported feeling liberated. And research by sociologists Neal Roese and Amy Summerville, which looked closely at what people actually regret, found that the top two regrets people carry are about education and career. Romance comes in third.

After my 18 minute court date in 2018, I sat in the law library on the 29th floor and I cried. Not because I had failed. Not because I was sad, exactly. I cried because I was proud.

I texted my ex: “It’s done. Sending love and peace today. Thank you for being such a good man.”

This isn’t a story about bad men. It’s a story about what marriage, as an institution, asks women to carry.

The question was whether I could keep carrying a marriage that had become mine alone to carry, and whether I was willing to call that love, or call it what it was.

I chose to call it what it was.

I want to name something before you use my story to talk yourself out of your own. Lenz is a mother. Her leaving had that complexity woven through every part of it. I don’t have kids. I know that changes the math in ways that feel enormous, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I also don’t think it changes the question. Having children means the how gets more complicated. It doesn’t mean the answer does.

Here’s what I know now, as a therapist who works with couples, and as a woman who has been on the other side of the question you’re asking:

Happiness is not a frivolous reason to change your life. It is not selfish to want a life that feels like yours. The fear you feel, the what people will think, the but I made a promise, the but what if I’m wrong, that fear is real. And it is also not the whole story.

You are allowed to want more than a life you survive.

You are allowed to choose yourself, not instead of love, but as love. The most honest, direct form of it.

The night I wrote that note on my phone, I was terrified. The day I signed the papers, I felt free.

Both of those things were true. Both of them still are.

Lenz asks the “to be happy?” question in her book too, on page 117. Her friend answers yes. Needless to say, I’m with him.

What are you waiting to feel brave enough to say?