The first 72 hours
What to do, what to leave alone, and what every man gets wrong in the three days after she says it.
In progress4 min↓ 946 words
§ Journey
What to do, what to leave alone, and what every man gets wrong in the three days after she says it.
I remember standing at the kitchen sink the morning after, rinsing a coffee cup that didn't need rinsing, looking out at the same garden I'd looked at a thousand times before. Everything was where I'd left it. None of it belonged to me anymore.
The first 72 hours after the conversation ("we need to talk", "I want a separation", "I'm not happy") are the hours you will replay for years. Most men spend them doing the wrong things. Sending texts they regret. Booking lawyers they don't need yet. Telling people they shouldn't have told. Moving out of the house in a panic at 11pm. Drinking a bottle of something that doesn't help.
This is not a plan for the next twelve months. It is a plan for the next three days.
You will want to act. Don't.
The first instinct is to fix it, because that is what you have done your whole life with every other problem. This one does not respond to fixing on day one. Anything you say in the first 24 hours, she has already half-decided about. Anything you do, she will read as confirmation of the decision she just made.
The job in the first day is to stay in the room (literally and figuratively) without making it worse.
The reason for radio silence on telling people is simple. You will say it once and you cannot unsay it. If she changes her mind in 48 hours (sometimes they do, often they don't, and you cannot bank on it), you will have already detonated something in your wider network that takes a year to rebuild.
Get a notebook. A real one, paper. Not the Notes app on your phone, because the Notes app on your phone syncs to the iPad on the kitchen bench and you do not want her reading your half-finished sentences about her.
In the notebook, write:
This is not for evidence. This is so that in three weeks, when you are trying to remember whether she said "I want a separation" or "I want a divorce", you have the actual words and not the version your brain has rewritten while you weren't looking.
Memory is sand. Write it down while it's wet.
By day three you will be able to think about something for more than four minutes at a time. Use that to make small, reversible decisions. Not big ones.
Small and reversible looks like:
Big and irreversible looks like:
None of those need to happen in the first 72 hours. Most of them will be wrong if you do them now.
I have watched friends make every one of these. I made three of them myself.
You will feel like you are dying. You are not.
You will feel like everyone can see it on your face. They cannot.
You will feel like nothing will ever be normal again. Not in the shape it was. But normal returns. Different shape, same weight.
The 72-hour rule is this: do less, write more, tell no one, sleep where you're asked to sleep. Then on day four, you start the actual work.
Go slow. Stay quiet. Don't decide anything yet.
A blunt field guide to the first month after the conversation. Sleep, paperwork, the kids, and the part nobody warns you about.
5 minHow to start the talk you've been rehearsing in the shower for six months. A practical guide to the words, the room, the aftermath.
4 minWhen she ends it and you didn't see it coming. The first 72 hours, the stories you'll tell yourself, and what to actually do.
4 minA self-interrogation guide for the man considering ending his marriage. Not advice. Questions. The hard ones, in order.
5 min