When Your Ex Dates During Divorce: The Silver Lining to the Suckage of Watching Them Get Their Groove Back

So last week around this time, I told you that dating during your divorce isn't exactly consequence-free — it can complicate the negotiating table, leave a financial trail, distract you from the task at hand of actually completing your own divorce, and land wrong in a custody case if you're not careful. All while limiting your dating pool to those people who are willing to date someone who is still legally married to someone else. As I said there, it's not inherently a bad thing to date before a divorce is final, but know what you might expect going in, and choose how you spend the critical period before your divorce is finalized wisely.

Now that I've been kind of a buzzkill about your own dating life, I'm going to do something even more annoying: explain why your ex dating during your divorce may actually be a good thing. Or at least not as crappy as you might think. I know, I know. But hear me out.

Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of crappiness about it. For most people, even if the marriage ended with basically mutual contempt towards each other, it's still painful to see the person you said "I do" to and with whom you built a life for years or even decades out and about, making kissy face with some rando. This is especially true when that new person is taller, shorter, smarter, dumber, younger, older, wealthier, poorer, more exciting, less exciting, hotter, or not hotter than you. I remember in the months after my separation seeing my ex post pictures on Facebook of dates in Central Park with some guy I'd never seen or heard of before, doing the kinds of things I wanted to do as a couple on weekends but she never seemed to want to do with me. I wasn't exactly heartbroken. But I was sad. And kind of jealous. And surprised that she had developed a relationship that quickly got to the "let's post pictures of our love on Facebook" stage when I was still just starting to fumble around with the whole concept of learning to date again. And wondering why she felt led to post those photos when she had maybe 19 friends on Facebook and I was one of them, and I was indeed the one who had suggested she set up a Facebook account to be more social (this was 2009) and was her very first friend on there even though we were separated.

So, yeah, not fun, and especially not fun when you're going through the worst time of your life in a divorce. And I can imagine for many if not most people, their experience of seeing their ex-that-they-are-still-married-to out on the dating scene is far more difficult, and even devastating, than mine.

But here's something that might make it a little easier to swallow that bitter pill: in a lot of cases, your ex moving on is quietly working in your favor in your ongoing divorce. A few ways that tends to play out:

They may now want the divorce done as badly as you do.

Someone building a new life with someone else, whether it's Central Park Guy or whoever your ex has traded up (or down, no judgment) for, usually wants the same thing you do: to stop being legally tethered to their past. For one thing, you're simply not allowed to marry a new person while you're still married to someone else (sorry, bigamy fans). And it happens with surprising frequency that one person suddenly wants to get a divorce done without all the hollering and fighting just so they can marry someone else. But more often, a happily dating person who is busy planning brunch dates and coming up with couple's Zendaya-and-Tom-Holland-themed Halloween costume ideas for their brand-new relationship may have less motivation to be dragging discovery out for eight extra months. Shared motivation to just be done is gold when it comes to divorce. Take it and run.

They may fight you less about money.

A lot of divorce fighting comes from fear, and financial fear is the worst of it. The finances of one household now being used to support two is rarely easy, and a sudden shift in ability to spend from the marital lifestyle one was used to can trigger the old fight or flight instinct in a way that often veers toward fight. Someone with a new partner, and maybe a second income floating around in their life, tends to be less panicked about surviving on their own. A less panicked person is usually a much easier person to negotiate with, and they may feel less inclined to go for the old jugular.

They may be done relitigating the marriage.

One of the most tried-and-true ways to make your divorce messy and expensive is for one or both people to seek "emotional justice" in the legal process of the divorce – in legal terms, using the law to prove to themselves and others that their spouse is a raging a-hole. As Terrence Real, a family therapist, writes in his excellent book Us, "Hurt partners, like all trauma survivors, are driven to put reality back together again," and we want to know the size and the model of the truck that just ran us over. Spoiler alert, you will not find it in the divorce process. But someone who's emotionally moved on is often no longer looking to the divorce for emotional justice, or for a pound of your flesh, because they're not living inside the wound anymore. The spouse still nursing the hurt is the one who wants to make the other pay for it. The spouse who's genuinely moved forward often just wants to sign the papers and go live their life. Their peace can become your peace, if you let it.

Spousal support usually ends at remarriage.

As a legal matter, spousal support typically terminates when the supported spouse remarries (specifics vary by state, and this generally doesn't apply to child support, which is about the kids, not the marriage). So if you're paying spousal support and your ex remarries, that obligation usually ends. I should add that ex-spouses have a funny way of not quite getting around to the wedding until support runs out, so don't budget around a remarriage that might be strategically postponed, but it's important info to keep in mind.

This cuts both ways.

If you're the one who found someone new, every one of these dynamics applies to your ex's side of the table too. Also, everything I said last week about the risks of dating mid-divorce applies to your ex too. If your ex's new relationship happens to reveal something genuinely relevant to custody or finances, that may be worth factoring in appropriately. Tread lightly there, and hopefully you both tread lightly on each other.

None of this makes the possibly brutal emotional sting of seeing your spouse with a new partner disappear, and I'm not pretending it should. But the resentment you're tempted to hold onto costs you far more than it costs them — and the thing you're resenting may be the very thing helping you get free.

So let them be happy. Let yourself be sad, but also let yourself be done. Go build the next chapter of your own life. It's closer than it feels today.