Last updated: April 2026
by Jess Knauf, Director of Client Strategy at Mediate UK, April 2026. Information reflects current family law and mediation requirements as of 24 April 2026.
Key Takeaways
- Research shows most people take around two years to emotionally recover from a divorce, with the first six months being the hardest.
- The choices you make during your divorce significantly shape your recovery, amicable settlements through mediation lead to faster emotional healing than adversarial court battles.
- A clear two-year plan covering home, work, relationships, children, and wider family gives your brain something to move towards and speeds up recovery.
- Prioritising your own wellbeing, the children, and your future financial security is more useful than trying to assign blame for the marriage ending.
- Family mediation, proper legal advice, and emotional support (a therapist, coach, or counsellor) are the three practical pillars of a healthy post-divorce recovery.
HOW TO GET OVER A DIVORCE
Getting over a divorce usually takes around two years of active emotional and practical work. The fastest recovery comes from setting a clear two-year plan, resolving finances and child arrangements through mediation rather than court, prioritising your own wellbeing, and focusing on your future needs rather than past grievances. Most people describe the second year as markedly easier than the first.
How to Get Over a Divorce: A Realistic 10-Step Plan
How to get over a divorce is one of the most searched questions by people going through separation in the UK, and for good reason. Divorce is in the top three most stressful life events a person can go through, alongside bereavement and serious illness. It affects your finances, your living situation, your relationship with your children, your friendship circles, and your mental health, often all at once.
The good news is that recovery is both predictable and manageable. Longstanding research by Professor Paul Amato and colleagues describes a temporary crisis period of around two years after divorce, after which most people return to their pre-divorce level of wellbeing. A 2017 longitudinal study by Kalmijn found it took most adults around four to five years to fully psychologically recover where the divorce occurred later in life. The common thread across all the research is that the steps you take in the first 12-24 months have a disproportionate impact on how long the whole process takes.
This guide sets out the 10 practical steps we give clients at Mediate UK for building a post-divorce life they actually want. Some are emotional, some are legal, and some are just about giving your brain a plan to move towards. If you are at the very start of the process, our guide to getting a divorce in England and Wales is a useful companion piece.
Create your two-year plan
Start with the end in mind. Take an hour away from everything and imagine what you want your life to look like in two years. Write down what you want for each of these six pillars:
- Work: what you want to be doing, whether that’s the same job, a new career, or your own business.
- Your ex: the kind of relationship you want with them, from polite business partners to nothing beyond child arrangements.
- Children: how you want them to feel about both parents, and what they should be doing.
- Home: where you want to be living, what sort of property, how many bedrooms.
- Wider family: relationships with grandparents, in-laws, cousins on both sides.
- Friends: who you want in your life and what you’ll do together.
Why two years? Because that is how long most of our clients say it took to feel fully ready to move on, which matches the research on post-divorce adjustment. Writing your plan down also matters, your brain starts quietly working on how to make it happen, even when you are not consciously thinking about it.
Acknowledge your own role (where it is safe to do so)
Unless your marriage was arranged or forced, you freely chose the person you married. That does not mean the divorce is your fault, but it does mean there are almost always lessons to take away. Did you stop communicating? Did you grow apart without doing anything about it? Did you prioritise work or children over the marriage?
Taking fair responsibility is liberating. Blaming the other party entirely, staying bitter, and carrying “I’ll never marry again” forward into every future relationship keeps you stuck. Acceptance and learning moves you on.
Important exception: If your divorce involves domestic abuse, this step does not apply. There is never an excuse for abuse, and your job is to focus on your safety. Support is available through the National Domestic Abuse Helpline (0808 2000 247) and Women’s Aid.
Be a little selfish
You are probably worrying about the children, your parents, your friends, and whether you’re coping well enough at work. Trying to keep everyone else afloat whilst going through emotional trauma is exhausting and unsustainable.
Give yourself permission to be selfish in small ways. Having a bad day? Stay in and watch Netflix. The world will survive. Need to escape with a friend for the weekend? Go. Want to treat yourself to that course, piece of clothing, or haircut? Do it, within your budget. This is not about blowing the household finances on new stuff. It is about recognising that self-care during the hardest period of your adult life is not self-indulgence.
Research backs this up. The American Psychological Association reports that around 40% of divorced individuals experience clinically significant anxiety in the year following divorce. Looking after yourself is not optional, it is preventative.
Prioritise the children, in practice, not just in principle
Every parent says they want to prioritise the children. They just rarely agree on what those priorities are. Roles often shift: a parent who stayed at home may need to take on paid work, and the parent who was the main earner may find themselves doing more school pickups than before. Done well, this is a positive.
Don’t just plan spending time with your children. Plan doing something with them. It doesn’t need to be expensive. Research consistently shows it is not the divorce itself that damages children, it is how the parents behave during and after. If one outcome is that the children get more quality time with one or both parents than they did before, that is a real positive.
Do this: Write a parenting plan together. We also have a guide to the most common parenting mistakes that separated parents make, and how to avoid them.
Accept that disagreement is normal
Plenty of happily married couples disagree about money and parenting. It is no surprise that disagreements intensify during a separation, when communication is already strained. The important thing is not that you agree on everything, it is that you agree on a method for resolving disagreements.
Family law in England and Wales is primarily forward-looking. Our guide to financial settlement on divorce explains how Section 25 of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 requires the court to focus on future needs rather than past grievances. Mortgage capacity, housing needs, pension provision, childcare costs, these are what actually decide outcomes.
Do this: If you cannot agree on the detail, at least agree on the method. There are eleven established methods of dispute resolution in family law, from direct conversation to arbitration. Family mediation is one of the most effective.
“The single biggest predictor we see of how quickly someone moves on from their divorce is whether they settled by agreement or fought it out in court. Amicable settlements protect your finances, protect your kids, and protect your future self. We have worked with thousands of people over the years who thought they needed court, and almost all of them later told us they were glad they found another way.”
Jess Knauf, Director of Client Strategy, Mediate UK
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Focus on moving forward, not looking back
You cannot change the past and you cannot change anyone else, only yourself. Every decision you make now should be aligned with your future needs, because that is what family law in England and Wales is designed around.
Do not spend weeks gathering evidence of who paid for what in 2015 or who did the washing up more often. In the vast majority of cases it will make no meaningful difference to a financial settlement. What does matter is your honest current needs, the children’s needs, and your future earning capacity. Focus there.
Practical test: Before raising something in mediation or with your solicitor, ask, “will this change the outcome, or am I just venting?” If it is venting, take it to a friend or a therapist instead.
Don’t use the law to punish the other party
Family law is not set up to punish or reward behaviour during a marriage, except in the rarest and most extreme cases. The only conduct that typically matters is conduct during the process itself: are you engaging in good faith, disclosing your finances honestly, and making reasonable offers? Courts can and do penalise parties who drag the process out or act unreasonably, including through costs orders.
Using the legal system as a weapon to punish your ex rarely ends well. You end up with significant legal bills and a court order you may not like but are stuck with. Of the eleven methods of dispute resolution available, starting with a direct conversation or mediation is almost always the cheaper and faster path, even if it feels less satisfying in the moment.
Rule of thumb: If the thought of “winning” against your ex is guiding your legal choices, you are about to spend a lot of money for a hollow victory.
Get proper support, on all three fronts
A healthy divorce recovery needs three types of support, and most people only get one or two:
- Emotional: a therapist, counsellor, divorce coach, or support group. Research shows social support alone can speed depression recovery by 40%. Contact Relate or look for a registered therapist on the BACP directory.
- Legal: proper independent legal advice on finances and, where relevant, child arrangements. Our legal advice packages offer fixed-fee sessions with a specialist family solicitor.
- Practical: mediation to reach agreements without court, a mortgage adviser to understand your capacity, a financial adviser if assets are complex.
Many people try to white-knuckle the emotional side alone and end up making poor financial and parenting decisions as a result. Asking for help is a strength, not a weakness.
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Don’t rush into a new relationship
Every situation is different, but if you are going to spend the next two years working on yourself and towards the life in your plan, you are going to be a particularly appealing partner when you are ready. Around 100,000 couples divorce each year in England and Wales (Office for National Statistics), and many more separate. There is no shortage of people in similar situations when you are ready.
When you do start dating again, you want to be the best version of yourself. You do not want your first date to be a venting session about how difficult your ex is being, or about what terms the consent order includes.
Rule of thumb: If you could not have a first date without your ex coming up in conversation, you are not ready yet. That is fine.
Find your future
Our tagline at Mediate UK is “Find Your Future”, because that is exactly what we help clients do. Yes, we help them reach an agreement, sort the legal paperwork, and get a clean break. But the real value we offer is letting two people move on with their lives, rather than staying stuck in an endless cycle of legal bills, court dates, and stress.
Getting the practical matters sorted, where you will live, how much you have to spend, what the child arrangements look like, frees you up to focus on the emotional side. The two are connected. People who have resolved the practical questions recover emotionally faster, because their brain is not cycling through unanswered what-ifs at 3am.
The reality check: Whatever method you use, the outcome should be one that lets you move on to what can genuinely be an excellent future, even if it looks different from the one you imagined when you first got married.
The Role of Mediation in Shaping Your Future
Family mediation helps couples reach agreements on finances, child arrangements, and property division in a structured, confidential setting. Unlike a contested court battle, mediation encourages honest communication, reduces conflict, and keeps both parties in control of the decisions that will shape the next chapter of their lives.
The way you approach the process matters, probably more than any other single factor. The research on post-divorce adjustment is clear: people who settle amicably recover faster emotionally, have better co-parenting relationships, and are less likely to experience clinical anxiety or depression in the year after divorce.
The Five Benefits of Mediation for Moving On
- Lower conflict: A less adversarial approach means you are far more likely to maintain a civil relationship with your ex, which matters enormously if you share children.
- Financial stability: Clear, agreed financial arrangements give you certainty to plan your next two years, and leave more money in the family pot rather than with lawyers.
- Child-focused outcomes: Putting the children’s needs first in mediation produces better co-parenting relationships. Child Inclusive Mediation can also give older children a direct voice in the process.
- Emotional closure: Mediation gives you a space to be heard, which often does more for emotional healing than winning a court argument ever could.
- Faster resolution: Most financial mediations complete in three to five sessions over a few months, compared with the 12-24 months a contested court process can take.
“When life screws you over, when people screw you over and let you down, you need to stop focusing on what is happening to you and focus on how you’re responding. Because life is never happening to you. Life is responding to you, your thoughts and your actions. Stop focusing on people who did bad to you and start focusing on the love you can now cultivate for yourself.”
Ralph Smart
Summary: How to Get Over a Divorce
Getting over a divorce is not a single event but a gradual process, and the research suggests it takes most people around two years of active work. The choices you make in those first 12-24 months have a disproportionate impact on how the rest of your life looks.
Set a clear two-year plan across work, home, children, family, and friends. Take fair responsibility where you can. Be a little selfish with your self-care. Resolve the practical and legal matters amicably through mediation rather than court. Get proper emotional, legal, and practical support. And above all, keep your focus forward. At Mediate UK we have helped over 7,000 couples find their future after separation. Yours is out there too.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to get over a divorce?
Research suggests most people take around two years to emotionally recover from a divorce, although the intensity reduces significantly after the first six months. A 2017 longitudinal study found full psychological recovery took up to four to five years where divorce happened later in life. How quickly you recover depends largely on how amicably you resolve the practical and legal issues.
What is the hardest stage of divorce?
Most people find the first six months the hardest, particularly the initial weeks after separation and the period when practical matters like housing and finances are being resolved. Around 40% of divorced individuals experience clinically significant anxiety in the first year. Proper emotional and legal support during this period makes the biggest difference to long-term outcomes.
Does mediation help you get over a divorce faster?
Yes. People who resolve finances and child arrangements through mediation consistently report faster emotional recovery than those who go to court. This is because mediation reduces conflict, resolves quicker (usually a few months rather than one to two years), preserves more financial resources, and leaves both parties with a say in the outcome. The Ministry of Justice reports that mediation reaches agreement in around 70% of cases.
When should I start dating again after divorce?
There is no fixed rule, but a useful test is whether you can go on a first date without your ex-partner coming up in conversation. If you cannot, you are not ready. Most relationship therapists recommend taking at least 12-18 months of genuine single time before dating seriously, particularly if you have children. The two-year timeline on emotional recovery is a good guide.
Can I get over a divorce if I still have to see my ex because of the children?
Yes. Many separated parents develop a functional, business-like relationship that focuses purely on the children. The key is clear boundaries: handovers are practical, communication is about the children only, and personal matters are dealt with elsewhere. A written parenting plan makes this much easier.
How do I stop being angry at my ex?
Anger usually comes from a sense of injustice or from unresolved practical issues. Working with a therapist or divorce coach helps with the emotional side. On the practical side, resolving finances and child arrangements cleanly through mediation removes a lot of the ongoing friction that keeps anger alive. Many of our clients tell us the anger faded within months of their consent order being sealed.
Is it normal to feel relief after divorce?
Yes, completely. Research consistently shows that many people, particularly those who were in unhappy marriages, feel significant relief once the divorce is underway or complete. This does not mean you are a bad person or that the marriage was a mistake. It means you are responding to a change in circumstances that was needed.
Where can I get emotional support during divorce?
There are several good UK resources. Relate offers relationship counselling including for separation and divorce. The BACP directory lists accredited therapists across the UK. Samaritans (116 123) is available 24/7 for anyone in emotional distress. For domestic abuse situations, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline (0808 2000 247) provides confidential support. Your GP can also refer you for NHS talking therapies.
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