I was married to my college sweetheart for 30 years before our divorce. It was tough. It's been a couple of years now and I was angry for the first 6 months, sad for the next year, and now I'm just kind of numb about it - just feel philosophically that it's one of those shit experiences that goes with life that you can't do anything about. Nobody promised life was going to be easy, you know?

It's really going to depend on the person and the situation as to how you handle it. It's obviously going to be worse on the person who gets the shaft in the deal. How does a person start over when they are no longer a spring chicken? Well, it is what it is and you learn from the experience and get on down the road.

One thing I did learn, though, is that if a spouse dies, people are there to pat you on the back and say they are sorry and that everything will be alright. When you divorce after a long-term marriage, people don't know what to say, so they don't say anything. You know they are thinking, why do it after so many years? No pat on the back - just pretty much the attitude that it's just a divorce and get over it. That might be OK when you've only been married 4-5 years, but when it was decades it truly is like a death. It's the death of your family, it's the death of the future you planned, it might be the death of your financial security, It might mean a home and job change, needing to make new friends because your old married friends don't want to hang with a single any longer, your kids have difficulty processing it and so that impacts your relationship with them. It's a big change.