On finding joy and inspiration after your divorce.

"Kingma deals with love so directly . . . that Coming Apart brings immediate comfort to anyone in pain." ― LA Weekly, Review

With over 250,000 copies sold, Coming Apart has been an important resource for hundreds of thousands of readers experiencing painful divorces and breakups. Whether going through a divorce, separation, or break up, bestselling author, Daphne Rose Kingma, offers the tools and validation needed to move forward.

Find joy in your life again. Love is great; a broken heart, not so much. Usually accompanied by insomnia, loss of appetite, and depression, the end of a relationship is a hard time for anyone. Healing from divorce requires grit and understanding. This breakup first aid kit helps you get through heartbreak without falling apart and with your self-esteem intact.

Understand yourself and become inspired. While only time can heal wounds, understanding what transpired in each of our relationships is what allows us to finally let go and move on. With a refreshing perspective on relationships and divorce, Coming Apart helps us understand that all relationships come with lessons to be learned. So, rather than obsess over your ex, explore the critical facets of relationship breakdowns:

• Why we choose who we choose
• What relationships are really about
• The life span of love
• How divorce is a new beginning
• A personal workbook to process and move forward

With a foreword by the author of Conscious Uncoupling, Katherine Woodward Thomas, this new edition is sure to impress fans of, How to Survive the Loss of a Love, Getting Past Your Breakup, The Breakup Bible, Uncoupling, and other divorce books for women.

From the book:

Obsolete Mythologies of Love

Another thing that makes breaking up so painful is that we have a number of myths about love and relationships, about how love and marriage “should be,” that are no longer a reflection of reality. Our beliefs about love no longer match up with what's going on in the world, and they are contradicted when our relationships end. I call these out-of-date notions the obsolete mythologies of love.

Love Is Forever

Our primary and probably most potent myth about love is that love is forever, that when we make a relationship, it will last for our whole lives. Our marriage vows—“Till death do us part”—are the public ceremonial expression of that myth. We don't say, “I'll love you as long as it feels good,” or, “I'll love you until I find somebody else.” We say, “I'll love you forever; I'll live with you until one of us dies.” We expect the person we choose to be our partner to be with us for our whole lives.

It is this assumption in particular that makes breaking up so hard to do. In ending a relationship, we negate the myth of forever; we violate the assumption that our relationship will last us for our whole lives. What we see is that instead of being forever, our relationship was just an episode.

Because almost all of us have subscribed to the myth of forever, when our relationships end, the only thing we can say is, “I must not be any good; there must be something the matter with me. I created this relationship with the intention it would last forever, but now it's ending. It certainly can't be ending because the idea that love is forever is wrong, so it's got to be me who is wrong.” We spend an unbelievable amount of time in self-flagellation because we can't imagine that the notion of forever could possibly be inappropriate. But it is. There isn't a person in the United States who hasn't witnessed a divorce or the heartbreaking end of a romance. The truth is that relationships end. It is high time we explode the myth that love is forever, so that when we end relationships, we can do so without such devastating crises in self-esteem.

Contents

Foreword
A Note to My Readers
Introduction to the Revised Edition

1 A Hand to Hold
2 Why Is Breaking Up So Hard to Do?
3 Exploding the Love Myths: Why Are We Really in Relationships?
4 Charting the Life-Span of Love: Seven Relationships and Why They Ended
5 The Emotional Process of Parting
6 The Unconscious Process of Parting
7 Binding the Wounds: How to Get Through the Ending
8 The Postscript Relationship: An Antidote to Love
9 Finding Resolution: A Personal Workbook
10 Is There Love after Love?
11 A Ritual for Parting

A Diagnostic Coda: When Love No Longer Works—Signs and Symptoms of Ending