246. How To Tell Your Spouse You Want a Divorce

Thinking about divorce? The way you approach telling your spouse can determine your safety, your financial future, and your children's wellbeing. This isn't about whether you should leave—it's about understanding what happens when you do.

Most women walk into this conversation with the same mindset that kept them stuck in the relationship. You've minimized problems for years. You've told yourself "I can handle this" or "It's not that bad." That thinking protects you while you're staying. It harms you when you're leaving.

Here's the truth: You cannot approach a difficult spouse with an "everything will work out" mentality. You cannot show all your cards to someone who hides theirs. You cannot expect peaceful co-parenting from someone who disregards your wellbeing.

The solution? Recalibrate before you speak.

First, understand your unique situation. Know where the money sits. Know the risks. Know what leaving the home means in your state.

Second, make a plan. For some women, this means a safety plan. For others, it means gathering financial documents, consulting an attorney, or having support in place. One client took a month to prepare—and that preparation protected her and her children.

Third, build emotional resilience. Prepare for what might happen so you don't get blindsided.

Preparing doesn't mean you have to file. It means you refuse to ignore the issue.

Ready to create your plan? Schedule a dating consultation call with Sade at sadecurry.com/info

Transcript

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Dating After Divorce podcast. Okay, that was wrong. We just changed the podcast name, and I have already relapsed. Okay, welcome to the Extraordinary Life After Divorce. Extraordinary Life and Dating After a Divorce. All right, I'm going to work on it. Anyway, welcome back to the podcast, and we are continuing on our series in January 2026 on divorce—specifically on divorce for those of you that are still in the in-between, who are thinking about a divorce or in the middle of a divorce. And you've been following the podcast because you do hope to date in the future.

I did want to share my knowledge from working with my own clients on divorce. I said in the previous episodes, I did start out as a divorce coach. It's always been a part of my practice. I continue to help women with their divorces, and I just haven't put a lot of my thoughts and philosophy around that out there. So I wanted to cover today how to tell your husband you want a divorce.

And that just seems like a no-brainer—it wouldn't be an issue—but it can be. And it's not really about how to tell him you want a divorce. It's really more about your own understanding of what's coming when you want a divorce, or your own understanding of what's coming when you ask for a divorce. So the "telling your spouse you want a divorce" part is actually just the teaser. It was the title that kind of covered everything that I want to talk about today.

Understanding What You're Walking Into

What I found is that a lot of people, especially if this is your first marriage, most women don't know what it means to ask their particular spouse for a divorce. They don't know what that looks like, and they don't have anything else to measure it by. So it's sort of you don't know what you don't know, and that is what you really want to avoid in this situation.

For some people, it's not a big deal. Your spouse is not a violent person. They're not abusive. They're not toxic. You guys get along. You've just fallen out of love. For those people who have just a reasonably healthy relationship, maybe it would be fine. But for most people who want a divorce, there are some things that are happening in their relationship that are unhealthy. And some people have some things that are really unhealthy and really unsafe happening, whether it's spiritual abuse, financial abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, emotional cruelty, infidelity—a lot of really unhealthy things.

And if you are in a relationship where those things are happening, and that is the reason you want a divorce, just walking up to your spouse and saying "I want a divorce" will do more harm than good. This is not to say don't go, don't get a divorce, or don't ask for a divorce. It's to say just thinking "Oh, if I talk to him, we can work things out. We can make this amicable. This can be amicable," or "We can co-parent peacefully. We can do this peacefully"—trying to do that with a spouse who is manipulative, dishonest, abusive, toxic, has an anger problem—trying to do that with that kind of a person will do more harm than good. It's walking into a gunfight with a pen knife.

The Mindset That Keeps You Stuck

And I get it. I get why you would do that. Because if you think about it—and this was my situation in my first marriage as well—if you think about it, you have been in a gunfight the whole time. So you've been in this relationship for 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and there's been a gunfight going on the whole time, right? It's been bad the whole time.

There is a certain mindset that has kept you there. There's a certain mindset that let you ignore all of the red flags and stay in that relationship. If I were to look back at who I was and how I was thinking, some of my thoughts were: "Oh, I can handle this. This is not a big deal. This will work out. I can fix it." All those things. "It's not as bad as it seems. It's not me." A lot of minimizing.

So if you think about it, you've had these patterns the whole time. You're more than likely going to approach asking for a divorce in the same way, because you haven't changed. Your thoughts haven't changed. Your person hasn't changed. You've changed enough to know you want out, but you haven't changed enough to change your approach to things.

A Real Client Example

And this is what happened with a client of mine. When she came to me, she wanted to ask for a divorce. And she's a very analytical person by nature, very slow to take action by nature. And really, that's what saved her, because when she came to the consultation call, I was able to tell her—by the time she told me the whole situation with the toxicity and the abuse and the unhealthiness and everything that was happening—I was able to say, "You can't just go ask this person for a divorce. There is a gun in the home. That could be very unsafe. You have to think about these things ahead of time."

She had no access to the money. Didn't know where the bank accounts were. Had an idea that they had plenty of money, but didn't know where the money was. And you walk up to a spouse who is being secretive about their money—about your money, because it's everybody's money—who keeps basically has all of these things... I don't want to go into that side of it. I really want to stay on the asking for the divorce part in this episode.

So you have the spouse who has all of these problems already, and then you sort of take your cards and you say, "Okay, here are all my cards. I'm putting all my cards on the table." You cannot put all your cards on the table with someone who, one, has hidden all of their cards, and two, is unwilling to even consider your wellbeing.

Most women who I work with who are wanting a divorce know that the situation that they're in, the person that they're with, is not focused on their wellbeing, and that's why they want out. So not only are you showing your cards to someone who is not focused on your wellbeing, who is likely selfish, manipulative, abusive, you're going to them showing all your cards and saying, "Hey, I really just want this very nice divorce," with someone who isn't nice, someone who isn't good, someone who doesn't want to see you do well. That's not the way to do it.

Breaking Free from "Damsel in Distress" Thinking

So that mindset of "I can handle this. This can be simple. This can be easy"—that desire for that easy life, that easy moment in something that is very difficult—basically, you want a gunfight to be easy. That is going to harm you if you move that way, right?

So the solution to that is to recalibrate before you talk about a divorce. I mean, not before you talk about a divorce or prepare for a divorce on your own, but before you go to your spouse to say "I want a divorce"—is to understand what can happen when you do, in your particular situation.

Now, every situation is different, right? The client that I'm talking about was a stay-at-home mom, didn't have any income of her own, was completely financially dependent on her husband. They had a lot of children. He did not have—she did not have access to the funds. Financial documents, they were all in the office, locked away. There was a lot going on. So in hers, he was not physically abusive. However, they did have a weapon in the home, right?

So in your situation—and this is where taking advice from other people can be challenging, because people will give you advice. Someone messaged me this week saying, asking me if I had advice for their situation. I'm not an advice-giver. I'm a coach. I am a strategist. I am going to help you achieve real results and your real goals, whatever they are. This is not "Hey, send me one line about your situation and then ask me for advice." I'm not your girlfriend. I'm not your bestie. I am—divorce is a very serious thing. It has serious consequences for you and your financial future and serious consequences for your children and their financial future and their wellbeing. Everybody's health. This is not a game.

But as women, we have been socialized to approach it as a game, to approach it thinking someone is going to save us and someone's going to understand. We've been—this is the word that I was thinking about this morning—we've been socialized to think of marriage and divorce and dating after divorce and all of these things as damsels in distress. Even when we are in the boardroom or we're physicians and we are CEOs, we are powerful women in the world, when it comes to relationships, women have been socialized to be damsels in distress.

And this is why outcomes in divorces can be so hard on women and so hard on children, because we go into it with this passive damsel-in-distress "I just want it to be peaceful. I just want things to be..." The world is not that way. This is not how the world is, right? There is a reality to these situations, and that reality has consequences for everyone. And for some of you listening, those consequences are tougher than other people.

The Three-Step Approach

And so my advice, my approach to this, is to say, "Hey, this can have serious consequences, so I'm going to take a beat"—not to postpone it or procrastinate it or to put it off, but to understand what are the requirements of this thing that I'm walking into.

So the first thing you want to do is understand your unique situation. Understand what it means to be in a relationship where you are financially dependent on your spouse. Understand what it means when you don't know where the money is. Understand what it can mean if you are choosing to leave the home. Before you do any of these things, before you tell him anything, understand these things first.

Number two, take the time to make a plan. Again, that depends on your unique circumstances. For some of you, the plan is a safety plan, because this person might be violent, or you suspect they might harm you or they might harm the children. There are so many stories around this. I don't want to go into them because they're tough—they're tough to listen to, they're tough to hear about—but they are very, very real.

So for some of you, there is a real safety component to deciding you want to divorce, deciding you want to leave. Many women get harmed in that moment, and that is not a call to stay. It's a call to think. It's a call to pause. It's a call to get the support you need and make a plan. So you have to make a plan for physical safety, for financial safety, getting the information you need, talking to an attorney, talking to a coach, understanding what you need around you—the support you need around you to be able to do this—to plan how you would tell your spouse that you want a divorce.

In the case of this particular client, we did make a plan. It took us a month to make a plan, because there was a lot going on. We made the plan. And not only did we make the plan, we had a safety plan. And part of her safety plan was to have another adult in the home who knew what was about to happen, who could get her help if it went bad. We scripted what she was going to say, because we looked at "Okay, this is what triggers this guy. You're asking for the divorce. We're not getting ready to blame him for it"—not because he's not to blame; there's a lot to blame him for—but that wasn't going to be effective or useful in that situation for her.

So we had a script. We had a plan. We had a plan for who was going to pick the kids up. We had a plan for someone who was going to help make sure everybody was going to be—everything. Now, of course, there's no perfect plan, but imagine having no plan at all, right?

So the first thing is making sure you understand that this has very serious consequences. Don't go into it blind. Don't go into it impulsively, and don't put it off either. What happens when you put it off is that you will eventually blurt it out. You will eventually walk out. You will eventually leave. Things will eventually get so bad that you will leave. And again, not only are you then in the situation where you have declared that you want to leave, you have now also done it without a plan, right? So procrastinating just pushes you to the limit where you then blurt it out in a reactive way, and then that's not good either. So I'm not saying put it off. I'm saying have a plan.

So understand your unique situation, have a plan, and then finally, build the emotional resilience to tolerate the uncertainty and the unpredictability of what can happen. We just don't know what can happen. When you have support, when you have a good attorney, when you have a coach, when you have somebody who's been through it, who can walk you through all the aspects of it and talk you through all the aspects of it, you will have a better idea, a better ability to handle what comes. You'll be less susceptible to being blindsided and shocked. You'll be less anxious. You won't have as many—I remember when I had my panic attack when I got served with a certain set of papers. If I had had me to walk me through my divorce, I would not have had that panic attack, because I would have been ready for it. Because looking at the kind of person that I was married to at the time, it was textbook narcissistic behavior, right?

And so if someone had said, "Okay, he's likely to do one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight things. Be prepared. Here's what you're going to do when that happens," I would have been good. It would still have sucked. It would still have been pretty bad, but I would have been better prepared. I would have been more emotionally resilient. I would have been less blindsided, right? And I would have been safer. My kids would have been safer. All right.

You Don't Have to File

So in the case of this client, we had a plan. It took several months to put the plans together. She needed to get her hands on where the money was—financial documents—they were all in the office, locked away, and so it took her some time to find a period where she was sure he wasn't going to be home and she could get to it. And that's the kind of patience and deliberate, conscious preparation that can be required.

And here's the thing: you might decide you don't want to file afterwards. I actually have another client where that was the case. We started preparing. She called me and was saying, "Okay, this is it. I'm done. I'm so sick of this person. I'm filing for a divorce. I hate this." And I was saying, "Okay, slow down, right?" And we talked about it. I said, "Okay, well, these are the things you need to do before you even broach the topic, right?" And so she did similar things—gather the information and all that—and then they worked it out. He was willing to go do counseling. He was willing to do certain things. And I'm so happy, because that's one of the few situations where things do work out.

So being prepared, being deliberate, thinking about these things ahead of time—if that's what you are, if it's on your mind, you should think about it. Don't suppress it. Don't push it away. Don't do what I did. Okay? It's not helpful. If leaving and getting a divorce is on your mind, there's a reason it's on your mind. It makes sense to explore it. You can explore it in therapy, if you find someone who is proficient at that. You can explore it with a divorce coach, someone who has been through it and is credentialed to walk you through it. That can be helpful as well. None of these things means you have to file for a divorce. It just means you have an issue and you're refusing to ignore it going forward.