Dealing with divorce can be difficult. This is especially true if the marriage dissolved for painful reasons, such as an extramarital affair or abusive (either physical or emotional) behavior. It can be even more difficult if you have a job or career that requires you to be professionally on-point and put-together, even as your personal life is falling apart. Knowing how to deal with grief in the workplace can help you to surmount these seemingly unforeseen circumstances and allow you to process your divorce in a healthy, supportive way. First, it is important to understand the stages of grief associated with the end of marriage.

Stages of Divorce Grief

For partners who did not want the divorce or did not expect their partner to seek one, shock may be the first serious emotion that arises. This shock stems not only from the actual dissolution of the marriage, but also from the deeper psychological implications of the loss of the future plans you and your spouse had made together. Marriage is widely understood to be a life commitment. When the commitment is dramatically shortened by divorce, there are often heavy emotional consequences. This shock may also manifest itself as denial. Anger may come next, followed by guilt and depression. All of these emotions will likely affect the way you are able to perform in the workplace.

If you are in a marriage headed for divorce, there are several warning signs you can look for. It may seem cynical or even, relationship-wise, apocalyptic to look ahead and anticipate that divorce is on the horizon, but it is much better for all parties involved that reality is taken into consideration. That way, both parties can look ahead and begin planning for their new life—socially and financially as well as emotionally.

In many marriages, the writing is on the wall, plain and clear, and there are few doubts for either spouse that the relationship is headed for the end. This may be the case with an abusive relationship, for example, or one in which one partner has been unfaithful. Yet in other satiations, the slow decline of a relationship, the sputtering out of marriage and intimacy, can make identifying warning signs more difficult. This is particularly the case when those warning signs are internally-driven and recognized rather than external.

Know the Signs

There is no shortage of information and research into the effects of parental divorce on their children. For many years, conventional wisdom stated that children who did not grow up in an “intact” home, in which their parents were together, serving as an example of commitment, devotion, and partnership, that the child would grow up without a firm grasp of those concepts, unable to find those things in his or her own world as an adult.

As divorce rates hover at about 50 percent of all marriages and the social stigma of marital dissolution continues to fade, this conventional understanding of how divorce effects children does too. Some divorcees even believe that their relationship with their children—as well as their children’s independent psyches—is actually improved after divorce.

The first reason is an obvious one: if you and your spouse fight often or hard, whether or not there is physical violence, it can create an environment that is not stable enough for children. Children need calm and security—if the house in which they live is never secure or stable because of their parents’ constant bickering, the children will never be able to understand such concepts. Sometimes breaking what was thought to be stable is the best way to provide stability.

In August of 2014, the Illinois legislature enacted a measure to help standardize orders regarding alimony or, as it is legally known in Illinois, spousal maintenance. Maintenance orders were originally intended to protect a financially dependent partner recover after divorce, but as the average American marriage has evolved, many believe the law lagged behind. Specifically, there has been growing concern that awards were becoming less predictable due to number of variables involved and the wide discretion afforded to judges by the current law.

Set to go into effect on January 1, 2015, the new law amends the existing statute to provide a formula for calculating both the amount of a maintenance award and its expected duration. Prior to the amendments, the court had full discretion and only precedent upon which to determine the specifics of a support order. Taking into account such considerations as income, assets, and needs of the family, as well as health and educational factors, each presiding judge's perspective would be inevitably colored by his or her own experiences and tendencies. Subsequently, the resulting orders reflected the individuality of the court. The amended law hopes to minimize the variation and establish expected baselines for spousal maintenance in Illinois.

John Smith vs. Mary Smith: A Hypothetical Case Study