Falling in Love After Divorce: How to Navigate Dating Authentically
Falling in love after divorce can feel confusing—dating alone can feel daunting. So many dualities seem to show up internally in your thoughts and feelings: loss and possibility, independence and longing, rigidity and flexibility, fear and joy. This is 100% normal.
You just came through something really hard. Your brain, being that its number one job is to protect you and keep you safe. It isn’t about to let you go through that kind of anguish again easily.
So how do you reconcile the desire to avoid heartbreak and the simultaneous desire to fall in love? While I don’t have all the answers, and everyone is unique, we can find answers by looking at falling in love after divorce through the lens of authenticity.
In doing this, you can navigate your unique path in a way that feels right for you and leads to what you’re looking for. Let’s talk about what this means and how you can start dating, and even falling in love, after divorce.
Why Authenticity?
It’s important to start by talking about the very nature of love. If you’re choosing love, you’re not choosing safety. Love does inherently put us at risk of being hurt. There are never guarantees in love and that is, in part, what gives love its aliveness; it can’t ever be completely safeguarded.
Many divorced individuals have been conditioned by their experiences to think about love in extremes:
Love is the fantasy version I missed out on.
Love only leads to catastrophe.
Love is hard and painful.
It’s true that no relationship is without hardship, conflict or threats at one time or another. It’s also true that many relationships satisfy and thrive across the decades. These two truths co-exist.
So how can you increase the probability that your relationship pains will fall within a narrower, more tolerable range? That these hardships won’t lead us to the same outcome as before? How can you increase the probability that alongside those challenges the romantic partnership will also bring you joy, connection, and security?
You do this by searching for that next partner with an approach to dating guided by authenticity. Authenticity is defined as “the quality of being genuine or real.” Here’s how you can do that and how this can help you find love again.
1. Give Yourself Time
The first step to dating with authenticity after a divorce is to give yourself time. This is important for many reasons.
For example, a good sign you aren’t ready to date is if stories of your ex dominate conversations, if you’re constantly comparing others to your ex, or if unresolved anger and blame continue to surface. You need more time to process your last relationship and grieve the loss.
Having a pause between relationships gives you necessary time to reflect on your last relationships and unhelpful patterns, which will help in future relationships. Use this time to think about how you want to grow as a partner and person in the next relationship.
How Time Helps
“You can’t divorce yourself” is a famous line by psychologist William Doherty. It means that whatever issues of yours contributed to the relationship ending will likely be triggered again—unless you gain insight into them.
Patricia Papernow, author of The Stepfamily Handbook, also says: “The more you can take responsibility for what went wrong, and right, in past relationships, the more likely you’ll succeed next time.”
Taking this time to be alone is also important as it builds self-reliance and competence in basic life skills. If you feel strong on your own you won’t act from a place of desperation. This matters because desperation turns off critical thinking.
Solo time is a chance to reclaim your values and goals without the interference of anyone else. If you decide to re-partner, the relationship is something you are choosing because it’s value-add to your life, not something you are choosing because you need to be rescued. This is authentic.
If you’ve given yourself this time, are having conversations and move onto a one-on-one date, how do you bring your authentic self to this experience?
2. Lead with Your Values and Goals
Falling in love after divorce doesn’t always (or often) happen with the snap of your fingers. It takes time getting to know someone and connecting to reach that place. This is why authenticity is important.
Assuming you’ve taken time to get clear on what matters most to you (that all-important pause I talked about), let those values and goals be your north star in your interactions. For example:
Talk about the things that matter to you
Share how you want to live your life.
Bring up your unique points of view.
Clarity and confidence in who you are, and the authenticity you show in bringing that forward, will attract an aligned fit. As a bonus, it will repel the wrong ones too! As you meet more people, you’ll be able to clearly see who is and isn’t the right person for you.
3. Be Honest about your Past
Your transparency will encourage authenticity in the person across from you. Remember, everyone, whether divorced or not, has had relationship bumps and scrapes and learnings along the way.
Falling in love after divorce (or any time!) requires you to open up about your lived experience. In doing so, you model vulnerability and self-acceptance. This signals to your potential partner that you value this in yourself and in them, setting a stage for two-way trust to build a fulfilling relationship.
4. Set Clear Boundaries and Intentions
You can only do this externally with someone if you have first listened internally to yourself about what you and your body needs.
What are your needs for alone time vs. togetherness?
Do you just want to stay in the talking phase of dating right now?
What level of physical intimacy are you seeking in this moment?
Are you falling in love and ready to go the distance?
Wherever you are, state your intentions as they become clear to you. It makes the minefield of coordinating needs and feelings with another human so much easier if you can be explicit and clear up front.
Remember, you have to know this internally first so take the time to understand what you need before heading out on dates. It may also change, and that’s okay too. As long as you know, and you make that clear with your partner, you can create that authentic connection.
5. Embrace Rejection
Get comfortable with both being the rejected one and with doing the rejecting. Rejection is going to happen on the way to falling in love after divorce. It’s also likely to happen when you date with authenticity because you aren’t hiding parts of yourself to be more accepted or liked or spare someone hurt feelings. You are leading with your authentic you.
Use self-care and your social support as a cushion for the disappointments that inevitably will emerge in this journey. Facing the pain of a poor fit frees you to find a better fit. When you try to avoid the acute pain of rejecting someone or being rejected and you stay in something that’s not working, you only prolong the pain.
Dating with authenticity requires courage. It means feeling all the feelings—and that’s a beautiful and sometimes challenging thing.
Dating as a Parent
If you’re getting serious with someone and you are a parent, inevitably, the question arises as to when to introduce that person to your kids. This could be a whole separate blogpost, so for now, I’ll point you to two books on the subject that I love, both by blending family expert Patricia Papernow: The Stepfamily Handbook and Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships.
I also recommend, when getting to this stage to work with a therapist or a coach. Working with a family therapist or step family coach can be an important step to help romantic partners navigate the process of merging families. Family cohesion takes time and there are clear, research-informed approaches that can vastly improve how couples navigate the blending process.
As the parent who is also now re-partnering, you will want to understand the competing pushes and pulls among family members in order to help kids adapt best. This is one area where professional support and education can make a huge difference.
Falling in Love After Divorce is Possible
Falling in love after divorce is a thrilling wild experience that you deserve. In the beginning, falling in love literally changes the brain to that of an addict’s. Over time, that euphoric lust-driven passion gives way to a companionate love, which can be very satisfying. Remember that all relationships require effort and relationships have seasons.
Any marriage therapist will tell you that the central task of marriage is to manage difference. Authentic dating prepares you best for holding these dualities, because you bring your whole messy, beautiful, empowered self to the process. You accept what is, instead of searching for fairytales or hiding parts of yourself to appear one way or another.
Sources
Doherty, W. J., Harris, S. M., & Wilde, J. L. (2016). Discernment counseling for “mixed‐agenda” couples. Journal of marital and family therapy, 42(2), 246-255.
Bonnell, K., & Papernow, P. L. (2019). The Stepfamily Handbook: From Dating, to Getting Serious, to Forming a" blended Family". CMC Publishers.
Papernow, P. L. (2013). Surviving and thriving in stepfamily relationships: What works and what doesn't. Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group.
Lebow, J. L., & Jenkins, P. H. (2018). Research for the psychotherapist: From science to practice. Routledge.