To divorce or not to divorce?

Julie had been married to her husband for 16 years when she decided it wasn't working. 'We'd been together since we were 17,' she says. 'We'd had three children, a retail business that had gone bust and we were in the process of rebuilding our finances when I woke up one morning and realised I didn't love my husband anymore.'

Julie, 45, a petite brunette who lives in Oxfordshire, describes the journey from this realisation to the breakdown of the marriage as 'a whirlwind'. 'Once I had decided I wanted out of the marriage, I couldn't stop,' she says. 'I imagined myself, a year down the line, happy, independent and coping with the children. It never occurred to me that it wouldn't all be for the best.'

Within six months Julie's husband had reluctantly moved out. 'It was as if I could not return from the brink once I had made my decision. It was a really difficult decision to make. I had loved him but I knew I didn't anymore.' Julia describes it as being akin to a loss of faith. 'It was as if I could no longer keep preaching something I didn't believe in.'

Julie is, of course, not alone in deciding to leave her marriage. One in three marriages in Britain now ends in divorce, and yet, despite the statistic, what happens after all those divorces is often ignored. No one expects it to be easy, especially when there are children involved, but does life-after-divorce meet the expectations women have of it? Do they feel released from an unhappy marriage? Or do they secretly and sadly wonder if there could have been another way forward? In short, could their marriages have been made to work?

For Julie, in retrospect, moving on may not have been the only solution. 'I had not anticipated how bad the fallout would be,' she says now, five years on. 'I knew it would be tricky but I hadn't expected an absolute emotional breakdown to happen around me.' Her youngest child, then aged five, was extremely upset. Julie's eldest child, a girl then aged 13, refused to live with her mother, saying she wanted to remain with her father. The family ended up separate and miserable.

Tags: married husband realisation children