After a divorce, these scenes intrude into your thoughts and replay themselves over and over again. Can you carry on normally, as if those pleasant memories had never existed? In solitude, you feel the beauty of it all and the heart yearns to relive them again. The pain of that love and joy will not go away. Divorce inflicts a lot of emotional pain on the couple. You cannot think of getting into another marriage or relationship, lest it hurts you again.

Divorce causes you to rethink – was it the right step or solution? It changes the pattern of your thoughts. You get more wary of people who attempt to get close to you. It makes you withdraw into your shell and makes the person, frequently turn inward, for analyzing people and those situations where you have to interact with the opposite gender.

A successful marriage needs love, commitment, understanding, companionship, and trust. A failed marriage becomes a symbol of the couple’s inability to maintain these ingredients. It is an unerring indication that either of the partners (or both), have accepted their miserable failure or their disinterest to work towards keeping the marriage alive and kicking. A feeling of guilt and helplessness, that one could not save his or her marriage permeates the air for some period, after the divorce. There is also the feeling that you can’t wear your divorce status on your sleeve, just like you could previously wear your happily-married-mother-of-two label, on your forehead.

There is also anger during the divorce and some embers of it remain, for a short duration. The act of divorce forcefully dismembers the family, into opposing camps. Parents, in-laws and friends are forced to watch the curtain fall on the marriage, as mute spectators. Children, often bear the brunt of long term negative effects of a failed marriage. Their emotional balance is mercilessly tossed around and forced to take sides. Physical environments are re-arranged, due to physical relocation of the divorced partners, to the farthest corners in opposite directions, despite the many inconveniences.

Divorce can be financially rewarding for you (by way of getting maintenance or financial freedom) or it can be a dead weight on your financial resources as you may be the one having to pay for the maintenance. Where’s the money for financial freedom? But for your lawyer, it is an extremely lucrative win-win situation. Many a lawyer, exploit the situation to their advantage. Maintaining your living standards, to your accustomed levels (prior to the divorce), definitely would require an extra effort.

Earlier you had a shoulder to lean on or a sounding board for all your thoughts. Post divorce, you will have to go it alone, even if you have social support from parents and friends. The sense of loss and insecurity would be greatest, if the partners had been dependent on each other for their day to day activities.

The divorced go out and try to forge carefully chosen artificial relationships, just for companionship. However these are also short lived, unless second time lucky. For some, the prospect of living alone, can take a toll on their physical and mental health. Post divorce, behavioural changes are very common. Even questions from strangers, regarding family life, force the divorced person to rethink his / her role. ("I am a happily married family man" as a pre-divorce statement would have to be carefully reworded to reflect the change in role, under the changed circumstances, after the divorce). Despite the concerned partners managing to initiate a relationship with a new individual, there is a constant comparison of the new relationship and the new person with the merits and demerits of the former relationship.

Time heals wounds but the wounds of divorce cannot be healed with time, simply because the partners themselves have willingly inflicted this deep wound on themselves and the ingredients for the healing balm are missing or the partners are not willing to let go of the past and the pain. Life could certainly come to a standstill after divorce if a couple aren’t determined to being their lives back on course.