In September 2020, journalist Stacey Duguid returned from fashion month to her London rental and realised that she had two choices. Either she told the truth to her almost 25,000 followers on Instagram, or she deleted social media altogether.
'I thought to myself, I’m living a lie here. I’m going to work looking fabulous and then I’m going home and I’m completely broken,' she tells ELLE UK. 'I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I’m living in a sh*thole. So I decided to tell the truth and the floodgates opened.'
Her feed was awash with the trappings of a fashion insider’s life. Designer clothes, expensive holidays, fancy dinners. But the truth was that Duguid’s husband of two years, partner of nine, had filed for divorce. The dissolution of their relationship had happened slowly and then all at once. Taking to Instagram, Duguid penned an emotional caption about her separation and the response, from both women and men, was 'overwhelming'.
'It was a release for me. There really is only so much you can tell your friends and family, because they’ve got their own stuff going on,' she says.
Feeling bolstered by the support of her virtual community, Duguid launched a TikTok account and began posting videos of the outfits she wore to represent herself in her divorce proceedings. She called the series #MyDivorceInOutfits and filmed herself walking out of her home wearing floor-sweeping Giles Deacon gowns and carnal red Preen by Thornton Bregazzi dresses. After her divorce was finalised last summer, Duguid was approached by a publisher to write a ‘divorce memoir’, which will be released later this year. Like a phoenix from the ashes, Duguid has risen to rebrand herself as an ‘accidental divorce influencer.’
Divorce has similarly seen its own image rehabilitated in recent years. On TikTok, #Divorced has 1.8 billion views, while #DivorcedLife has just shy of 62 million. There are divorce podcasts, manuals, dinners and even divorce all-inclusives – Virgin Atlantic debuted its first package designed for the newly-single in 2019, swiftly followed by Ushuaia Ibiza which launched its own offering the following year. There’s big business in the broken-hearted.
Popular culture is increasingly touching the once-taboo topic too. In her interview with Oprah in 2021 ahead of the release of her fourth studio album 30, Adele spoke of her own recent divorce. 'It’s a process: the process of a divorce, the process of being a single parent, the process of not seeing your child every single day wasn’t really a plan that I had when I became a mum,' she said. The success of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s debut novel Fleishman Is In Trouble, whose adaptation featuring Jesse Eisenberg and Claire Danes was recently released on Hulu, has also triggered conversations about divorce. The story centres on the demise of a couple’s marriage, told from the perspective of one of their friends.
The great re-brand has happened in tandem with a spike in rates of divorce in the UK. Data shows that there were 33,234 divorce applications made in the UK from April to June 2022, the highest number of applications in a decade. According to PwC, divorces are set to rise this year alone at the fastest pace since 1971. This year, the number of people getting divorced in England and Wales is expected to rise 23% to 140,000.
In our Western culture that has typically shamed divorce – a hangover from historical anglo-Christian views on marriage – it would seem that we’re adopting more progressive attitudes, something that others have long pioneered. Divorcing couples in Japan are known to smash a wedding ring with a mallet. In the African Sahrawi community, parties are thrown for the divorced wife, with friends reading original poems that celebrate her beauty. In France, people are starting to develop divorce ceremonies in which either both or one half of the couple throw their wedding rings into the Seine in Paris.
'There’s been a real shift in the discussions that people are having about divorce and it’s something that in many ways we’ve adopted from America,' states mindfulness teacher-turned-divorce coach, Tosh Brittan. 'It’s about reclaiming a period that’s typically difficult for people.'
We’ve also imported divorce parties from across the pond, which have become increasingly popular, and whose existence can be traced back to Christine Gallagher, a divorce-party planner in Los Angeles, who wrote a how-to divorce manual in 2006. According to Google Trends, searches for ‘divorce party ideas’ in the UK have spiked by 150% over the last year alone.
'We throw parties to celebrate all other beginnings in life – why would we not also want to throw one to celebrate the beginning of life after divorce, too?' Brittan asks.
Brittan, who is known as the 'Divorce Goddess', is clear that the changes in conversations surrounding divorce have helped to shift some of the taboo. 'When women in particular go through divorces, they can really find that they’ve lost themselves as wives, mothers and women,' Brittan says. 'So if a holiday, party or some kind of celebration or conversation helps to empower them to remember who they were before, then that can only be a good thing.'
Gabrielle Stone is another divorce influencer whose popularity has spiked in recent years. The actor posted a video to TikTok in 2020 explaining her plight after discovering that her husband was having an affair with a 19-year-old. Shortly after finding evidence of his infidelities, Stone filed for divorce at the age of 28.
'Divorce wasn’t discussed publicly then, especially divorce at a younger age,' she admits. 'It felt very shameful and like I had failed at something you’re not meant to fail at. It wasn’t something that people celebrated at all.'
As a result of her internet popularity, Stone has amassed a following of millions and sold over 100,000 copies of her self-published memoir, Eat, Pray, #FML, which she wrote in the aftermath of her divorce. Her TikTok is peppered with videos of her discussing her divorce and the positive ways in which it changed her life.
Duguid isn’t convinced that the pageantry and celebration now cloaking divorce is entirely innocent though. 'It’s one thing to want to be with and around a community of people going through the same thing as you,' she says. 'But it feels like another tax on people by encouraging them to buy things they don’t need when they’re inevitably already going through a period of financial strain.'
Brittan agrees that there can be a sinister air to the revelry. 'There’s a very fine line between celebrating the end of something and trashing your ex, which isn’t going to help you to feel more empowered long-term.' A scroll of divorce parties, dinners and holidays on TikTok reveals evidence of the trashing that can accompany these celebrations: 'F*ck Them' cakes, 'The End Of An Error' banners and 'Ding, Dong, The Asshole’s Gone' balloons.
Despite some of the pitfalls of its current ubiquity in the zeitgeist, Brittan is clear that divorce’s proliferation is helping us to better understand, process and openly discuss it as a society. This year, Brittan will debut a divorce masterclasses into businesses, which will provide a safe place for people to discuss their separations. The masterclass is something that there wouldn’t have been an appetite for a couple of years ago and has transpired as a result of people more freely discussing their divorces.
'Divorce can be really dark,' Stone concedes. 'But whatever you have to do to get through it, when you see the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s more beautiful than you could have ever imagined.'
