For the year after it ends
Rebuilding after a divorce or a breakup
The first months ask you to make decisions you have had no practice making, usually on four hours of sleep. This site takes them one at a time: what to handle this week, what can wait until spring, and what tends to actually help.
Some people mend quietly. Some mend loudly, with a packed calendar and a car full of bad singing. Nothing here will tell you which one you are supposed to be.
Where you are right now
The year reads more clearly in stages than in dates, and the stages overlap. Each one becomes its own section of the site as the writing reaches it.
First Weeks
Days 1 to 90The acute stretch, when everything feels urgent and almost none of it is. What genuinely has to be handled this week, what can wait until next month, and how to say it out loud to the people who need to hear it.
Read this sectionUntangling
Runs alongside everythingThe joined-up parts of a shared life, taken apart in a sensible order: accounts, passwords, devices, messages to an ex, the school year across two homes, and the questions worth taking to a lawyer before you agree to anything.
Read this sectionLiving Alone
Month 2 onwardA house arranged for two people, reset for one. Quiet evenings, cooking for yourself, who still has a key or an app, and the first holidays without them.
Read this sectionRebuilding
No fixed startThe slower work: grief that arrives without any of the rituals, money on one income, a social circle that reorganized itself without asking, and a body that reacted to all of this whether or not you gave it permission.
Read this sectionTrying Again
If the question comes upThe one question the rest of this site does not answer: whether to attempt reconciliation. No tactics for winning anybody back, no recommendation either way, and no version of this at all where there has been abuse, because that is a safety matter rather than a relationship decision.
Read this sectionWhat's Next
When it comesLooking back at the year and forward at the next one: what actually changed, the loose ends worth auditing, whether you are ready for anything new, and why deciding you would rather stay on your own is a settled answer rather than an unfinished one.
Read this sectionDivorce and breakups are covered together here. Six weeks out of a twelve year marriage and six weeks out of a five year relationship need most of the same page.
Latest
All articlesYou Got Back Together. Now What?
After getting back together is where most advice stops. What the first months actually feel like, what to change, and why the court case does not close itself.
11 min readAm I Ruining My Kids by Getting Divorced?
Am I ruining my kids by getting divorced? What the research bodies say, why conflict matters more than the split, and what is genuinely in your control.
10 min readBack to School After a Divorce: Two Homes, One School Year
Back to school after a divorce: what federal rules say about both parents' access to school records, what to tell the school, and homework in two homes.
11 min readBeneficiary After a Divorce: The Form That Still Says Their Name
Beneficiary after a divorce: why a decree does not change who a plan pays, which accounts follow which rule, and what remarrying does to a form you fixed.
12 min read
Tools
Both toolsChecklist and Planner
Every practical task after a separation, grouped by stage and broken into steps, with room for the things only you would write down.
It counts paperwork rather than progress, and nothing is timed. Kept on your device, sent nowhere.
One-Income Check
What a month actually costs on one income, how much of it is fixed, and what each result usually means next.
It states a gap rather than a verdict, and the arithmetic happens in your browser.
How this site works
No tactics for winning them back
There is a whole industry built on no contact rules and texts designed to make someone miss you. This is not part of it. If you are weighing whether to try again, that question has its own section here, written to help you decide rather than to sell you an outcome.
Written by someone with no letters after her name
Tess Lindgren is a pen name, and she is not a therapist, a lawyer, or a financial advisor. What she does is work out the practical order of things and write it down clearly. Where you need a professional, the page says so.
No timeline you are behind on
The name refers to the shape of a calendar, the first weekend, the first holiday, the first birthday. It is not a claim that a year is how long this takes, and nothing here comes with a schedule.
If you need help right now.Call or text 988 for the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. If you are not safe at home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233, or text START to 88788. Both are free, confidential, and open at any hour.