DIVORCE DONE DIFFERENTLY

From arguments over finances and children to the emotional fallout of love gone wrong, divorce can be an ugly and perilous journey. But what if there was a kinder, gentler way to navigate the end of a marriage?

- JENNY BROWN

A simple invitation marked the beginning of the end. Cheryl Duffy’s husband seemed strangely reticent when old friends suggested they should all go on holiday together. “I don’t know what I’ll be doing next year,” he told them, abruptly shutting down the dinner party conversation.

It seemed odd, yet Cheryl had no idea her marriage was about to implode. “What did you mean?” she asked her husband when they got home that night. His answer was to shatter Cheryl’s life – yet ultimately lead her to a new career helping other people survive the trauma of separation and divorce.

“He said when our daughter finished her Year 10 exams, he was leaving,” the 56-year-old bleakly recalls of that moment 14 years ago. “They were due in November, this was June, so for all that time I had to make out nothing was happening, there was nothing wrong. Nobody knew the truth except my mother. Otherwise, I had to put on a facade.”

After 19 years and two children together, Cheryl was utterly blindsided, the first in her social circle to face divorce. By turns brokenhearted, furious, disbelieving and terrified of a lonely future, she wondered where her “happily ever after” had gone.

“I’m very sentimental. I’d kept all the old Valentine and birthday cards from my husband, and I would get them out so often,” says the author of The Divorce Tango. “I just couldn’t comprehend how he felt that way once, and now he didn’t. Was he lying about it all that time?”