Connor Beaton says you need to grieve a divorce before dating again. Grieving means feeling the full range of emotions about the death of your shared life, not numbing the pain with distractions. Only after genuine grief should you do an autopsy of the relationship to understand what went wrong.
Grieve first and then do the autopsy. Before you date anyone, don't bring the baggage into that. Don't bring the grief into the next relationship. Grieve the death of that previous relationship. Grieve the death of the marriage. And you actually have to let yourself feel the loss of the life that you were building with that person. Let yourself feel the wide range of emotions and the truth of how you feel about your current circumstances, but really let yourself grieve. And notice the inclination to move towards some type of numbing mechanism. The desire to numb out your grief is going to be so strong, but allowing yourself to stay with the grief is going to be important. Then once we have grieved a little bit, to start to do the autopsy. What a lot of guys are going to do is they're gonna wanna skip the grief and do the autopsy first. But what we wanna do is do the autopsy after we've let some grief happen.
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