Divorce can be one of the hardest challenges we can face as adults. Recovering from a marriage breakdown and learning how to be happy alone takes time. Author and podcast host Elizabeth Day experienced this first-hand when she separated from her first husband, the journalist Kamal Ahmed, in 2015.
Sitting down with Davina McCall on the Begin Again podcast, Elizabeth talks openly about when she finally realised, aged 35, that she needed to walk away from the relationship. “It’s so painful feeling that you’re in the wrong marriage,” she says. “There is no loneliness quite like it, and I think many people understandably are terrified of being on their own and of taking that step and ending a relationship.”
Davina asks Elizabeth, who’s now 46, what advice she has for people who feel like something isn't right in their marriage. “What I would always say is that the loneliness you’re feeling as part of a couple is the worst kind because you feel sort of alienated from the person who should be the one to make you feel loved and safe and secure,” she says.
Everyone’s situation will be different, but the author says she had a “period of being deeply unhappy but not really knowing what the source of it was and not really knowing" that she was deeply unhappy. "I was numb, really numb, sort of out of it."
Some “key friends” helped her find the courage to end the marriage. “What happened was I allowed my body to take over. I realised this wasn’t going to be an intelligence thing. I couldn’t mentally think my way through it. I had to allow myself to feel it. And then I got to a stage when suddenly - it felt sudden but it was gradual - when I was like ‘I need to leave’ and it just happened. It was an instinct, a primal, bodily instinct that took over,” she explains.
She advises people who are torn over what to do to “trust the process and your body will tell you”. Elizabeth says her own body told her “loud and clear” that she had to go. “It felt like it came from my stomach and not from my head, and it was sort of automatic."
She didn’t think ahead to what the separation would mean for her as a woman in her mid-to-late 30s who would be using dating apps for the first time. She says it was an “emotional safety” aspect, and she just knew she needed to get out, "or I was going to lose myself entirely”.
Elizabeth, whose most recent novel One of Us came out last month, says she is “so grateful” for what her first marriage taught her. “A marriage is not a failure just because it ends,” she says.
“You can always feel sadness for the life unlived, for the thing that didn’t work out, but that doesn’t make it a failure, and it doesn’t make it a wrong choice," she says.
Davina, who divorced after 17 years of marriage to her ex-husband Matthew Robertson, agreed. "Every lesson you learn is preparing you to function brilliantly in the right relationship", she says.
Elizabeth’s divorce was finalised when she was 36, and she says she spent the following few years dating and using dating apps before she met her now-husband, Justin Basini, on Hinge. The couple got married in 2021.
Elizabeth's advice on divorce
- Seek support and advice from your friends and family.
- Trust your gut and follow your instincts.
- You should feel loved, secure, and happy in your relationship. If you don't, something needs to change.
- Divorce is not a failure but an opportunity to change and learn more about yourself.
- It can take time to find the right kind of love again.
- Talking about it openly will help other people going through it.
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