The very fine art of ‘conscious uncoupling’ during divorce

IT’S over. This year of … what shall I call it? The Year of Living Dangerously?

If anything I was timid, particularly upon realising that my new singleness meant I’d have to pick up the dead rats the cat brought in.

Minus the only other male, he clearly felt he had to step up his hunting and gathering.

Rats, light bulbs — they’d been blue jobs but now they were mine.

The Year of Magical Thinking? Gorgeous book, marvellous woman Joan Didion. But her husband had died. She’d lost a life, I’d only lost a way of life.

Death is a tragedy blamelessly bestowed; divorce is a mess you bring upon yourself. Still, her words resonated. The need to get “tears out of the way so I could act sensibly”. The recognition that “life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

No, I shall call it The Year of Putting One Foot In Front Of The Other because, looking back, it’s been a tale of tentative steps rather than heroic strides.

“You’ve both handled this really well,” said a friend recently when I remarked that 12 months had passed.

“Well Gwyneth’s not wrong about everything,” I quipped, not because separation is funny but because every kindness makes you cry. I tell her that for all its quinoa-sprinkled bollocksiness, “conscious uncoupling” is not just good for the kids; it makes you feel as if you’ve salvaged something worthwhile. You don’t hurt less but it’s not the blunt instrument damage you get from, say, a Kramer vs. Kramer-style bludgeoning.

“You really should write about it,” she continued.

“What, like a ‘How To Divorce Well’ column?” I ventured. “There’s smug and then there’s insufferable. Remember I’m the woman who wrote a book subtitled ‘Thoughts on Making a Happy Family’. I already have egg on my face, I don’t need to go the whole omelet.”

“No,” she said, “write about how you get through a crisis. So many people are suffering. Tell them not only what helps but how you can help yourself.”

What helps, I want to tell her, are friends like you. People with the courage to come up and say, “I’ve heard, I’m sorry” rather than standing in the supermarket transfixed in front of the personal lubricants just to avoid you. It’s friends who turn up for a cuppa RIGHT NOW because they can hear that’s what you need, not next Wednesday when it suits them. Friends who say “Oo how lovely, I’ve never been to a ‘Separated Christmas’, shall we bring knives?” instead of holing up in their own untarnished lives.

One way to get through a divorce? Cover entire canvases in bruised blues. Illustration by Jonathan Bentley Source:Supplied

Sleep helps. A lot. Insomnia is like being buried alive in cauliflower cheese. Use anything — even short-term medication — to will your way to seven hours. For weeks I switched round, putting my head at the end of the bed to short-circuit my skittish mind. And read — there’s requiescence in others’ stories when your own feels too burdensome.

Inhabit the painful moments; there’s a perverse exhilaration in allowing yourself to fully feel. Regret, longing, shame, loneliness — they’re not emotions to be leap-frogged but waded through. Loss demands to be felt; it’s how we know what we had was worth something.

Accept care. My retired neighbour drags my bins on to the grass verge every Monday. I am beyond grateful.

There is no poignancy index just as there is little “perspective” offered by suffering worse than your own. Whether you’ve lost a limb, a lover, a pet, a parent or a job, you’re entitled to the whole paintbox of pain.

Cover entire canvases in bruised blues.

Make triptychs of grey.

One day you’ll be watching the news and notice your hurt transmute into compassion and you’ll wonder through what strange alchemy that came to be.

Enjoy the comfort of the ordinary. Through the winter of 2014 I ate porridge. In spring, during hours of contemplation, I noticed cirrus clouds. By summer I was relishing plump cherries. Only now, I note, I was stirred by things containing a double “rr”. Was this surfeit of “r”s making up for the two I’d lost in “marriage”?

Embrace work — it’s a salve. And exercise — whether you’re a devotee or new to its enlivening powers. Walking is therapy on legs.

Swimming eats tears.

Perversely, I did the same gym class every Friday because the instructor played Pat Benatar’s We Belong.

Clearly we don’t, but at volume it made me box faster and harder.

Ah music. It will never speak to you more than in moments of sorrow. It’s your right to listen to every wrist-slitting ballad and watch every Nicholas Sparks movie every made but don’t burden others with your miserable choices.

And temper it with comedy. I have a thing for Rob Brydon. Who is Welsh. How funny are the Welsh?

See a psychologist or counsellor — they’re like a filing system for your thoughts. “You can’t change the circumstances, only your response to them,” became my axiom. Conversely, don’t underestimate your own optimism as a tool of repair.

Finally, be patient.