Divorced me Podcast

About Divorced me Podcast

After my marriage ended, one question stayed: "Why did I get divorced?". I did love my ex husband, and I do believe he also loved me back then. But we somehow did not work as a couple. That’s why I started to put our story on paper. Not to find someone to blame. Just to understand what I had been quietly noticing for years and not yet putting into words. This podcast is where I try to do that — in small pieces, one moment at a time. divorcedme.substack.com (https://divorcedme.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

Missy Rönsch

Category

health & fitness · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

28 Apr 2026

Latest episode

1 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

24 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   1 Sept 2026

   Did my fears make him into the man I feared?

   [From my diary] July 23d 2024 Of course, I saw signs already at the beginning of our relationship. Or maybe I thought I was seeing them: the so-called red flags. And then you do not know where the truth is, and where your fears, clichés, inferiority complexes take over … Like, once he was driving out of a gas station, and a teenage girl almost bumped into our car, because she was busy impressing her friends with her walk. My husband screamed at her very rudely. I thought back then: “He will be screaming at me like this one day”. He did. But did I make him to? The near-miss at the gas station was a genuine fright — a driver feels that jolt, and some anger is part of the fear. Indeed, the teenager stepped into the path of a moving car. But the driver did not just brake, swear once, and drive on shaken. He screamed at her viciously, at a stranger he would never see again, who had no history with him and expected nothing of him. My fear did not conjure that. It was an early, accurate look at what he does when something crosses him, long before it was me. Red flags or my own fear? Early in a relationship, a real warning sign and plain anxiety can feel exactly the same. I had fears, and an inferiority complex I had been carrying long before I met my ex husband. Always prepared for the worst, I found evidence of bad things coming everywhere, and I stopped trusting my own eyes. Often I could not tell whether I was seeing something being wrong with him or was it my distorted perception, imposed by something from my past onto our shared present and future. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com) Such confusions are an honest problem. A warning and a worry feel identical, and back then, sitting in the passenger seat, I could not decide which it was. Legitimate surge, but illegitimate manner The girl walked into the path of a moving car because she was watching her friends instead of the road. That is a real danger and a real fright. If he had hit her, he would have been the one questioned and maybe charged, however careless she had been, because that is how it falls on drivers, and it is its own kind of unfair. Fear ran through that moment, and anger is part of fear. Most people would have felt something sharp. So there is no need to argue that this was a man abusing an innocent for no reason. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com) What struck me is not that he got angry, but how. The fright explains the surge. It does not explain — and less excuse — the manner. But was such a short situation enough for an honest judgement at all? Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal spent years measuring how much a person reveals in a few seconds. In a 1992 review of dozens of studies, they found that people shown very short video clips — often under a minute, sometimes seconds — judged a stranger’s character about as accurately as people who had watched far longer. Thin slices, they called them. My gut took a thin slice at that gas station. It did not read “he yelled when frightened,” which anyone might do. It read the rudeness and the disproportion, and it made a prediction: that will be me one day. Did I make him into a rude man? He did, in the end, scream at me during our fights the way he screamed at that girl. After the divorce, I wondered whether I had summoned it — whether expecting it, bracing for it, flinching in advance, invited him into being the worse version of himself. The self-fulfilling prophecy has been studied — among others — by the sociologist Robert Merton back in 1948. A belief about a situation can change how a person behaves, and that behavior can make the belief come true. Expect the worst of someone often enough, and you can sometimes help draw it out. The fine-grained “how does one person draw the feared behavior out of another” was demonstrated by later researchers. Applied to a marriage, the relationship version is Downey and colleagues’ work on rejection sensitivity from 1998: people who anxiously expect rejection tend to behave more defensively or negatively in a conflict, which pulls a colder or angrier response from their counterpart. Same shape — the fear steers your conduct, and your conduct shapes theirs: less warmth, more nervousness, worse performance, a chillier or more conflictual exchange. However, it has never been shown to manufacture a partner’s rage or cruelty. There is a real distinction between behaving in ways that draw out coldness and being the cause of another adult’s screaming. Set the two of us — me and the girl — beside each other. I carried the prophecy for years. I had watched him at that gas station, made my quiet prediction, and lived with it the whole time, half-braced, waiting. The girl carried nothing. She had known him for the length of one near-miss. She had no fear of him, no theory about him, nothing to fulfil. Whatever I carried changed nothing about how he behaved. What it doesn’t mean Even with all of that laid out, I kept blaming myself. Self-blame is very tempting. If I made him scream, then I had a hand on it. I could have been warmer, or calmer, or less afraid, and he would have softened, and the marriage becomes something I could have steered. That “realization” first feels painful, but in fact, it is a comforting one, because the other option is even worse: that I had almost no power at all, that his behaviour was his and ran on its own logic, and that no change in my behaviour, however good, would have changed the outcome. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com) The correct realization takes the agency away from me at all, which is scary; that’s why I was reluctant to see it. A lot of people who have been badly treated invent the same explanation. We would rather be at fault than be helpless, because being at fault at least means being in charge of something. I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com), a small iOS app for journaling through difficult moments. Thanks for reading Divorced me! Subscribe to receive new posts and support my work. This blog and podcast exist for educational purposes. To make the content more substantial and grounded in real research, I use AI tools for finding quotes and polishing the written style. The podcast episodes are spoken by myself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit divorcedme.substack.com (https://divorcedme.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   25 Aug 2026

   Why did we stop doing the one thing that made us feel alive together?

   [From my diary] November, 11th 2022 “On that mountain peak, I felt alive,” he said once, as we were going through photographs from our “good old days,” some time after we had decided to separate. We went for mountain hikes often when we first started dating. We actually met on a hike [with our common friends], and over the next few hikes we connected. We kept going out into nature almost every weekend that second summer, the first one after we moved in together (https://divorcedme.substack.com/p/did-moving-together-too-early-jeopardize?r=77285). But then we stopped. I put on weight and hated myself. I am not sure if it was a symptom of the alienation or something that accelerated it. Standing next to something vast, out in nature, gives people a rush of feeling alive, and doing it beside someone tends to pull the two of them closer. Our hikes did that for us. Then we stopped going. For a long time I have wondered whether giving it up was a sign that we as a couple were already fading, or one of the things that made us fade. My best guess is that it was both. When the hikes stopped, so did the main thing that kept us feeling alive next to each other. Marvelling together “Feeling alive on the mountain” is not only a popular poetic expression; it is a scientifically grounded concept. Dacher Keltner has spent years studying awe, the feeling that comes over people in front of something vast: a mountain range, a canyon, a sky full of stars, an ocean, a desert, or even Manhattan. Awe has a few particular effects on us. It shrinks the self, but not in a negative way; mostly it feels like relief. After being close to something huge, people come away with a stronger sense of being alive. Those giant things tend to pull us closer to one another, leaving us more generous and more inclined to belong to something. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com) My ex-husband and I were, without ever realizing it, awe-seekers together. We met on a hike. The early part of us was built out of weekends in the mountains, the two of us small under something enormous, and that is not a small way to fall in love. Keltner has written about this from his own life. He and his brother were awe-seekers too, and when his brother died, he found that much of the feeling had been bound up in the person he shared it with. I knew that feeling all too well. Shortly after the divorce I started going to the mountains regularly, and I kept catching myself looking for the guy I had met back then, the one I used to hike with. He was nowhere to be found. The symptom and the cause I still cannot say exactly whether the hikes ending was a symptom of the trouble between us or one of its causes. The research does not pick a side either. There is a long line of studies, going back to the sociologist Dennis Orthner in the 1970s, on what shared activity does for a couple. Couples who do involving things together tend to be closer and more content, and couples who drift into doing everything apart tend not to be. The study that fits my question best came later. Crawford and his colleagues followed married couples for more than a decade and found that shared activity and marital happiness move together, each one a cause and a consequence of the other. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com) That is the loop I could feel too. We hiked less because something was cooling, and it cooled faster because we hiked less. There was no clean line where the one turned into the other. They fed each other until the weekends were empty. The same research adds one condition worth keeping. Shared activity only helps when both people actually want to be there. Ours was that kind. We both loved it, which is probably part of why losing it took so much with it. The weaker one I did love hiking. But I was usually the weaker one, and I would fall behind, and falling behind made me feel less like a partner in the thing than like the one slowing it down. There is a reason for why that stings. Abraham Tesser’s self-evaluation maintenance model describes what happens when someone close outdoes a person at something that matters to them: the nearer the two are, the more it threatens how that person feels about themselves. Being outpaced by a stranger on a trail would have meant nothing to me. Being outpaced by the man walking beside me, over and over, was a different kind of ache. Had it been his skill at something I had no stake in, I could simply have been proud of him; the same model says a talent in a domain a person does not care about becomes a gift instead of a threat. But keeping up mattered to me. So instead of sharing in his strength, I measured myself against it, and came up short every weekend. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com) And not all of it was about him. A slope that matched his fitness gave him the easy, absorbed state that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow, which arrives when the challenge is matched by the ability to meet it. The same slope outran my fitness, so it gave me strain instead. Same mountain, different fit. When the marvelling stopped Somewhere in all of that, the shared marvelling stopped too. Not only the hikes, but the thing the hikes were for: standing together above the clouds, dwarfed by the same view. With nothing to look at, the mirror I used to pass without a glance became something I studied, and did not much like, as I also put on weight. What it doesn’t mean It does not mean the weight was why he stopped loving me, or why I stopped feeling loved. I kept telling myself the opposite, because it was an easy explanation, deeply rooted in the mainstream Western culture. But bodies do change in every long relationship. Regarding this, there is another interesting finding in the awe research. Standing in front of something vast shrinks the sense of self, and it even shrinks how people judge their own bodies to be. On the mountain I was small in the good way, next to something enormous, and my size was nowhere in my thoughts. It was afterward, in the emptied weekends with nothing vast to stand under, nothing left to look at but my refleciton in the mirror, that my attention fell back onto myself, and I turned it into something to dislike. The self-hatred did not come from being overweighted (or not as tiny as before). It came from losing something that previously made other problems look unimportant: a good, exhausting hike that used to knock all dark thoughts and frustration out of my head. Coming back down I have kept going back. For a while I told myself it was for the exercise, or the quiet, but that was never the real reason. I went up to look for him, and for the two of us we used to be up there. Anthropologists — e.g., Arnold van Gennep — called it a rite of passage: the pilgrim leaves the ordinary world, climbs into somewhere set apart, and comes back down into it changed. People have walked that shape up sacred mountains for centuries, in the name of their religion. My solo hikes were a small, private version of the same thing: A pilgrimage of grief. Illustration provided by Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com) I never found him up there. I did not really expect to. What I found, over a lot of weekends, was that I could climb up carrying him and come back down without him, and be all right. I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com), a small iOS app for journaling through difficult moments. Thank you for reading Divorced me! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit divorcedme.substack.com (https://divorcedme.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   18 Aug 2026

   Why did we try so hard to look like the couple that would last?

   [From my diary] August, the 8th 2023 I felt like in competition with other couples, wanting us to be better. I think my ex-husband felt the same urge. Maybe, it came from our own families where first marriages ended nightmarish. Many of his friends came together or even got married at the same time as we did. Many broke quickly enough, some much faster than we did. Each time we met with those couples, we tried to show how special we were. It was something subtle, like a kiss, or a detail about our daily routine that made us "stand out". It did not save us, indeed. The wish to have the best relationship in the room usually comes from insecurity, even when it feels like the opposite. We competed with the couples around us. A kiss at the right moment, some detail about our life mentioned so the others would notice it, and I took all of it as a sign we were doing well. The research mostly disagrees: people who keep measuring their relationship against other people's tend to be the least secure about it. We had our reasons. Both of us grew up in families where the first marriages fell apart, and at some point not repeating that became a full-time job. It changed nothing, and I have come to think the effort was part of what went wrong. All that energy went toward other people. Very little of it was left for us. The best couple in the room Almost everyone thinks their own relationship is a little better than other people’s. That is normal, and mostly harmless. Bram Buunk, who has spent years studying how couples size themselves up against other couples, found the belief is nearly universal; one of his papers is titled, roughly, most relationships are good, but ours is the best. A private sense that yours is the good one helps people stay committed. There is nothing wrong with having it. The illustration has been kindly provided by Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com) We went further than that. We did not just think it, we kept score, and we wanted to win. That is the part the research treats less kindly. People who compare their relationship to other people’s a lot, who reach for other couples as a measuring stick again and again, tend to be more insecure rather than less, and the habit tends to lower commitment over time instead of raising it. At the time the scorekeeping felt like confidence. Looking back, it was closer to worry. The families we came from The drabble points at the families we came from, and it is right to. Both of us grew up watching a first marriage fall apart, and in both cases it was bad. That matters more than it might seem. It is one of the most consistent findings in the research on divorce: if your parents divorced, your own marriage is roughly twice as likely to end the same way, and the risk is higher still when both partners bring that history, which we both did. Paul Amato, who has studied this for decades, has said it is about as well established as anything in social science. What passes down is not really a curse. It is more like a shortage of confidence, a learned sense that marriages come apart, even ones that look fine from outside. Amato found something strange here: the effect was strongest when the parents’ marriage had been fairly calm before it ended, the kind that looked okay until it suddenly was not. Two people raised on that arrive at their own wedding already tense. The tension has to go somewhere, and for us it went into proving. If we could be clearly better than everyone else, maybe we would be the ones who made it. We thought we were competing with the other couples. Really we were still arguing with our parents. A kiss, for an audience The shape it took is the part I least like remembering. A kiss. A comment about our routine — some ordinary thing we did that I made sound special — mentioned so the other couple would catch it. Small, and staged. Half of that kiss was for the room. Only half was actually ours. That is the problem with performing a relationship: the work goes to the people watching, and not to the marriage. We put our best attention into people whose opinion could never keep us together, and we spent it in the settings where we were relaxed and off duty, where it could have gone to each other instead. Most of those couples were breaking up anyway. Some sooner than we did. What it doesn’t mean None of this means there was nothing real between us. In some ways we probably were good together, and the specialness we kept advertising may have had something true underneath it. Feeling it was never the problem. The problem was that we could not stop performing it, and over time the performance wore away the thing it was meant to show. The illustration has been kindly provided by Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com) It also does not mean our families sentenced us to this. Twice the odds is still only odds. Plenty of people who grew up around divorce go on to build marriages that last, usually by deciding to trust what they have instead of testing it over and over. What we inherited was not the divorce itself but a nervousness about marriage, a habit of treating ours as something to win instead of somewhere to live. The performance did not fail because we did it badly. It failed because that is what performing does. Whatever holds a marriage together sits underneath all of it, out of sight, in how two people are with each other when nobody is around to be impressed. We put almost nothing there. That is why the kisses and the scorekeeping never amounted to anything. They were aimed at the wrong audience the whole time. I write these reflections while building Supportive Stranger (https://supportive-stranger-app.com), a small iOS app for the parts of a relationship that no one can see, except for yourself. Thanks for reading Divorced me! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit divorcedme.substack.com (https://divorcedme.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

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