"I Filed for a Simple Divorce in 2023. He Contested it for Two Years"

A woman was explaining why she had decided not to file for divorce even though her husband had left, moved on with someone else, and had children with her. She was done chasing the paperwork. She was going to live her life, date someone new, and let him carry whatever legal loose ends remained.

And something about that hit differently.

Because she was right. After everything a woman goes through in a marriage that falls apart (the holding together, the enduring, the trying, the failing to make something work that was being undermined from the other side), filing for divorce is the last administrative task she performs for a husband who has already moved on without her.

He left casually. In many cases, he remarried. He built a new life, a new family, a new address. And she is the one who has to pay the filing fees, gather the paperwork, navigate the court system, and formally close a chapter he closed emotionally years ago.

The last duty. The last service. The final piece of admin for a marriage she did not end.

Why 69% of Divorces Are Filed by Women

Research consistently shows that women initiate approximately 69% of divorces in the United States. This statistic is often used to suggest that women are more dissatisfied with marriage, more willing to leave, more likely to give up.

What it actually describes, in many cases, is something far less triumphant.

Many of these women did not want a divorce. They wanted their marriages to work. They stayed long after they should have, tried long after hope had run out, and eventually took up the paperwork not because they wanted to leave but because no one else was going to close the door properly.

Filing for divorce, for these women, was not a declaration of independence. It was the last proof that she was the responsible one — even at the end, even after everything, even when the thing she was being responsible about was dismantling what he had already abandoned.

When He Makes Even the Leaving Hard

One woman shared her experience in the comments of the post that started this conversation:

She filed for a straightforward divorce in the UK in 2023. Her estranged husband flew to Nigeria and filed a contesting claim there simultaneously. What should have taken six months stretched across 35 court hearings over two years. He and his lawyers repeatedly failed to appear. She spent money she should not have had to spend, on a process she should not have had to fight, to exit a marriage he had already exited in every way that mattered.

The UK court eventually grew tired of waiting and granted the divorce in his absence — Decree Nisi in May 2025, Absolute by January 2026.

“I’m just glad to have severed things legally,” she wrote. “I just don’t want anything marital connecting me and this man.”

This is what some men do with the divorce process. They use it as punishment. They are done with the marriage (finished, moved on, sometimes remarried) but they will not grant her the legal exit she needs to move forward with her own life. The message, underneath the procedural obstruction, is: I am done with you, but I will decide when you are done with me.

In countries where courts can be navigated with money and connections, this kind of sabotage is not even difficult. It simply requires a man with enough resources and enough spite to use them.

The Women Who Are Still Waiting

This is the part of the conversation that almost never gets told.

While 69% of divorces are filed by women, a significant number of women are not filing at all. They are waiting, not because they want to, not because there is anything left to save, but because their religious framework has told them that filing is a sin — that a wife who initiates divorce is committing something against God — and so they wait for him to come back or for him to file first.

He does neither.

He is with someone else. He may have married her. He may have children with her. And the woman at home is still technically his wife, still abstaining from other relationships because to be with another man would be adultery, still praying for a return that is not coming.

I have seen this too close to home to describe it as abstract.

A friend of my mother’s. Her husband left over twenty years ago and remarried in a new city. She went to find him — to beg him to return, or at the very least to file so she could move forward. He closed the door in her face. She slept outside in the cold because she had nowhere else to go and no money for a hotel.

She raised her three children alone through those years. The struggle was severe enough that her daughters could not attend university — they went to a polytechnic instead. Her son became wayward, running away from home repeatedly. Her daughter fell pregnant and became a single mother, blaming her mother for a hard life she associated with her mother’s choices. The other daughter was a source of joy, but even her wedding became a struggle — her father appeared and he and his estranged wife fought that very day.

And then, years later, his second wife died. He came back. Spoke of realising his wrongs, and my mother’s friend accepted him. They are together again now. She calls it “God’s will”.

She shares her testimony in church, telling other women whose husbands have left to keep praying, stay loyal, trust God, and one day their husbands will return too.

Some of those women are listening. Some of them are already twenty years into the waiting.

Kindness

I do not believe closure is something another person can give you but I do believe in kindness. And the absence of kindness is the through-line in every story in this piece.

The kindness of telling someone honestly when you are done — not disappearing, not making them chase a legal exit, not leaving them in a limbo that serves only your desire to control the timeline of their suffering.

The man who left and did not file exercised power through absence. The man who flew to Nigeria to contest a UK divorce exercised power through obstruction. Both are telling the same story: I am done with you, but you do not get to be done with me until I say so.

That is not love. It is not even indifference. It is a kind of cruelty that wears the face of inaction.

And then there is the other kindness — the one that belongs entirely to the woman.

Kindness to yourself.

If he left, he left. Whether you were wrong or he was wrong, whether the marriage was good or terrible, whether the leaving made sense or was incomprehensible — the point is that he left. And staying legally, emotionally, spiritually tethered to a man who has built an entire life without you is not faithfulness. It is not virtue. It is the waste of a life that deserves to actually be lived.

It is hard to say that plainly. It is harder to hear it when twenty years of waiting have been framed as faithfulness and rewarded with a testimony. But the women currently being encouraged to wait by women who waited — they deserve the full story, not just the ending that eventually came.

Most of the time, he does not come back. And even when he does, the cost of the waiting does not disappear. The children grew up in it. The years moved through it. The woman who waited is not the same woman who could have moved forward.

Be kind to yourself enough to move forward.

Close the door properly, even if he will not. That final act of administration is not a defeat. It is the last thing you do for him and the first thing you do for yourself.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.