Latest / Reflect Reclaim & Liberate - with Sallyanne Hartnell / Marriage Is Obsolete. Or Is It...?

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Marriage Is Obsolete. Or Is It...? · Reflect Reclaim & Liberate - with Sallyanne Hartnell

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Reflect, Reclaim and Liberate, a podcast covering all things relationships, separation and divorce.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: How to create healthy, happy, fulfilling relationships without sacrificing any part of yourself.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Supporting anyone feeling challenged in their relationship or marriage, these are confidential conversations for you if you're navigating separation, divorce or reorganising life afterwards.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Decide whether to stay or leave a relationship or marriage, divorce with less drama, and consciously choose what's next for you.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is recorded, the Warrentry people of the Kulin Nation, and pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: I acknowledge them as the original storytellers of this land.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, hello, and welcome to this week's episode of Reflect, Reclaim and Liberate.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And today I'm opening with a bold statement.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Marriage is obsolete.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Or is it?
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: This statement and this question isn't actually something I just dreamt up scrolling on Instagram or something I'm saying purely to be controversial.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: In my work as a divorce coach and strategist, most of my clients, not all, but most are women female identifying.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And most of them, again, not all, but the majority are separating from or divorcing a male partner.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: They are exiting a straight cisgender relationship marriage.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: And what I see, what I keep watching happen on the other side of that separation, is that a significant number of these women do not repartner afterwards at all, or at least not in the same way.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: Many of them don't even want to, and instead they consciously choose themselves and their single life, and they fiercely protect that new way of living, that new way of being.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: So when the opportunity shows up, when someone new show shows up for them, a date, a possibility, a person who could maybe become something more than just another person.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um the question underneath it isn't what could this look like?
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Could this be good?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually more significant than that.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: And it's more precise.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it comes down to is this new thing, new person, new relationship worth risking what I have, what I've built for myself by myself.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is this new potential relationship worth risking my peace?
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: And for a growing number of women, the honest answer to that question is no.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Go back to the cost-benefit equation and they weigh up the cost and the benefit and what it will cost them to step back into a relationship that looks traditionally like a marriage, they're not willing to pay that price.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: And there are a couple of things, there's a lot of things, but there are a couple of things I want to name here because it's not one single feeling or thing that is driving that no thank you.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: It's at least two, and they're not the same.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes, yes, it is protection, it's the nervous system doing exactly what it's built to do, refusing to gamble the piece that it's fought really hard to rebuild.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes it's abundance, a life so full already that bringing in someone new, adding a relationship, a new relationship, would have to be an addition, not a subtraction, just to be worth considering, just to be worth letting in.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: One is guarding against loss, protection is guarding against loss, loss.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And the second, the abundance side of that, is guarding something you've already created, something you've already won for yourself, and often it's both in the same woman, in the same moment, in the same beat.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm not gonna try and resolve that into one tidy explanation in this episode because I don't think it resolves.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's just true.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's just truth.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: We are both, or this woman is both, protecting herself and her pace, and she's asking, what does this give me versus what it costs me?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: And maybe you feel a flicker of agreement there, or maybe your body just recoiled.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're already composing a really strong worded response in your head, that voice in your head is really loud, and that's good, stay with that because I'm not trying to convince you here of of anything, it's about asking a question that more and more women quietly, privately, in the space after divorce, and also while they are still in a marriage or a relationship that doesn't look and feel like they want it to, it is a question that more and more women are asking themselves what if?
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: What if I don't actually need this anymore?
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_00: Not can't have it, not failed to find it, don't need it, don't even want it.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's the question I really want to, the question, that's the conversation I really want to have today about marriage, about what it was designed to do, what we were told it would give us, what we're conditioned to believe about it, and whether for a growing number of women both in marriage, still in relationship and on the other side of divorce, it actually still makes sense.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: It might make some of you a little bit uncomfortable, which honestly is exactly where the most important conversations and questions live, right?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because what I see over and over in my work, in women who are post-divorce, who have rebuilt their lives, who have reclaimed and liberated themselves, reclaimed their sense of self, reclaimed their entire life.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: They are quietly realizing that they don't ever want to go back to what was.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: Not to that marriage, and not in fact to any marriage, particularly not on the terms that marriage has historically required of them.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I keep saying it, this isn't only for those of you who've already left, because maybe you're not separated or divorced at all.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're just asking some questions, quietly weighing things up, doing the maths, wondering whether the questions you're asking, what you're carrying is normal or it's just invisible because no one else can see it.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're still inside a marriage right now, one that doesn't feel like you want it to or hoped it would, one that maybe feels unequal, one that asks more of you or takes more from you than it gives, if you're still in it, still carrying it, still wondering if this is as good as it gets, if this is just what a marriage is, or if it's actually the thing that's wrong, stay with me, stay with me on this episode.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna tell you what to do with that.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been around listening for a while, you know I will not tell you what to do, but I'm just gonna name something that a lot of women carry and we don't say out loud, regardless of where we're sitting in the marriage, relationship, separation, divorce space, right?
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: So this conversation is for all of you, and it's a really important one that I think we need to have.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're wondering, is it me, is it them, maybe it is, but maybe it's not you.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's not even them, the other person that you're in relationship with.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's the system, and I don't mean that abstractly.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean when I say system, I mean patriarchy.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: The actual structure marriage was built inside, created to support, built for and by men, right?
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: A system designed to keep women small and men in positions of power everywhere, including in our own homes.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And this is conditioning that we're all brought up inside of, we're all raised inside this system, and sometimes we don't even realise, we don't even think to question it, but this is what's happening.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: When you look at who is walking away from or disregarding future partnership, marriage, relationship after divorce, that is disproportionately women.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Women who've been married or in long-term relationships, who have done the work of a marriage, often let's face it, the lion's share of it, and who, when they are out of it, when they find themselves free of it, discover something a little bit unexpected, and that is relief.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Not just heartbreak or pain or grief, that comes too, right?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: And not failure, not this dreaded aloneness that they spend, some of them spent years facing, fearing, right?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: Fearing if I leave, I will be alone.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: Relief.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: And once you sit with enough of these women, as I have, and across different decades of life, right, a pattern starts to show up, and it looks different depending on when she leaves, but underneath it's the same realization.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: So let's take women over 50.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: What we're seeing there is called grey divorce, leaving later, leaving for good, and very deliberately not looking for another relationship, a second marriage.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe, yes, a relationship, but really a relationship on their on their own terms.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: One that gives them what they want and need, not takes from them, not demands of them.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not because, as I said earlier, they can't find someone, it's because they already know exactly what marriage would cost them, and they've already paid that price, probably for years.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: Then we look at millennial women.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Divorce rates in that generation are actually low.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: But is that because they're not getting married?
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Not sure about that.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Sit with the ones who are staying, and you hear, or talk to the ones who are staying, and you hear something else entirely.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_00: Often they've given up on the idea of real equality inside the home, and that's a bit sad, right?
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: They've stopped expecting a genuine 50-50 equal partnership, and most, when I push them, say they'd settle for an appreciation of everything they already carry.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: But even that's not guaranteed for these millennial women, right?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: So instead of leaving, a lot of them have started just quietly planning.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: When would it be least disruptive for the kids to leave?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: When will they be financially positioned to leave and live a really good life solo?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is like a 10-15 year horizon for some of them, held quietly, privately, and I've worked with a number of them.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: A short pause before we continue.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: If this episode is resonating, there are two ways to step closer.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: One, join my newsletter list for behind-the-scenes things I don't share anywhere else.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: And two, if you're wondering what it would look like to work with me, book a free intro call.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: I work closely with a small number of clients at any one time so you get this folk high-touch support through it all.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: The decisions, the separation, the divorce, and the life you create for yourself afterwards.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Links for both are in the show notes.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_00: Now back to this week's episode.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: They hold this plan, they create this map for themselves while the marriage carries on looking from the outside completely fine.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: They've asked, they've asked, they've asked, they've had an expectation that this will be an equal, shared load, partnership, family, and it's not.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so they create their plan.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: But why not now if they've already decided?
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: For all the reasons, right?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: They're what watching, waiting, making sure the kids will be alright, they need their finances, financial ducks lined up so that they can go.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing is, they're not going out there shopping for a second act.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: They don't need to cut their losses and go now and look for the next partner.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're not looking for a new partner.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: They're not looking for a better version of this same arrangement.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: They've actually looked at the structure of marriage as an institution and they've decided that that is its problem.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: The structure itself is the problem.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: So not him specifically, not this specific partner, and not her own judgment in choosing wrong.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_00: It's the container.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's not screw this marriage, fuck this marriage.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's fuck the system, fuck the patriarchy, if we're being honest, because women have grown beyond it.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Not everybody, you know, I'm not dissing marriage completely.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: If that's what you want and you want to repartner after separation, divorce, awesome.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_00: But many women have grown beyond this system, and the system is yet to catch up to that growth, right?
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, yes, not all men, but let's be honest, it's a lot.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of men who would never think about themselves or call themselves sexist, patriarchal, they think of themselves as good partners, they are still operating entirely on default in a patriarchal system that was built for them.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: Defaults that they've never actually had to examine because the system was built in their favour.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: But women, on the other hand, women have done or are doing that examination, that unpicking, that unraveling, and really looking at this system, this structure, and working out, does this benefit me?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: And the answer for many is no, it does not.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: And for most men, that's never really been required of them.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: They don't need to look at a system that fully works for them, right?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: And once a woman arrives there, she doesn't, as I said, she doesn't necessarily want a better, improved, up-level version of the same thing.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: She wants out of it, out of that one, out of that marriage, out of that relationship.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_00: She wants out of needing it because she actually doesn't.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't actually need it.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: She's set herself up financially, like I said before, she set the kids up.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't need this, and she wants out of wanting it, because she doesn't.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: She opts out of wanting it, I should say, because she doesn't.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't want it, even though she's been taught, told condition from a really young age, probably from birth, if we think about it, that it is the thing to want, the thing she should strive for, that she should want, and she doesn't.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: She doesn't want it, not anymore.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: And she wants out of anyone else requiring her to be in it.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: The expectation, the obligation, and that's worth talking about, right?
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_00: I want to introduce you to Louise.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: Her name has been changed, but her story is real, and it's one I've heard in so many different forms more times than I can count.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Louise left her marriage at 38.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: There was no dramatic ending, no affair, no single moment of blow-up rupture, just the slow, suffocating realization that she had been quietly disappearing inside of life that, for all intents and purposes, looked completely fine from the outside.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Her ex-husband was remarried within two years, and she genuinely understands why.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_00: He needed a partner.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: But what she discovered in the space after their separation and divorce was that she didn't, or at least not in the way she'd been taught to want a partner.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: And let's be honest, she did not feel like this was freedom straight away.
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a story she told me there was a night not long after she'd moved out of the family home when a crash, a smash outside jolted her awake at night.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: Something really loud, something close, down in the courtyard of her new property.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: And she instantly, like boom, wide awake, startled awake, reached across the bed out of instinct, and there was no one there.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: No one to nudge away, no one to say, Did you hear that?
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And she lay there for a second, talking herself down, and then she checked the security camera app on her phone, and nothing to worry about, just the outdoor furniture, one of the chairs blown over in the wind.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_00: But in that moment before she checked, she was acutely aware of her aloneness.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Everything was all on her, and I've talked about that in recent episodes of the podcast where it's the greatest thing and the hardest thing about solo life.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Everything's all on you, it's all yours, all your decisions, all your choices, and also everything's all on you.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: There is no one else.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, Louise talked herself down, settled her heart rate of breathing, and eventually went back to sleep.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: Next day she was talking to I was gonna say a friend, but it's actually was me.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_00: Next day we had a coaching call and she told me about this, and I said to her something that perhaps she didn't expect, and that was that there's something really powerful about learning to comfort yourself, learning to hold space for yourself, learning to not automatically default to someone else for that.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not about being, you know, fiercely independent or fierce independence as a trauma response.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's about self-trust, knowing that whatever happens, you've got your own back.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_00: You can reach out for friends, you can reach out to family or a partner or your coach, but ultimately you've got you.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: And over time, Louise started to notice more and more and more that this was true, whether it was a crash in the courtyard or deciding whether to stay or leave a job, what to eat for dinner, or deciding which model new car to buy.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Whatever it was, it didn't matter.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: The fears, the hard decisions, the moments where she would have previously outsourced it, outsourced that reassurance to someone else, waited for someone else to tell her that she was making the right decision, she was going to be okay.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: She started meeting all of that in and for herself, solving her own problems, trusting her own judgment, really trusting it, and not just going through the motions while secretly hoping or waiting someone else would validate her answer, her choice, her decision.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: She also started becoming more compassionate about her own mistakes because there was no one else to absorb the blame or buffer the consequences.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was just her, like again, all on her, right?
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that interestingly, unexpectedly made her gentler, kinder, and more compassionate with herself rather than harsher.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: And then came the thing that she had hoped for, anticipated.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: Then came the freedom.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: And not just freedom in that abstract sense, but freedom in the granular, daily, almost embarrassingly simple, ordinary sense, right?
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: The freedom to make a decision, where to walk, what to eat, when to sleep, where to spend Saturday, what to spend her money on, without clocking or calculating or thinking about how that will would land with someone else.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: Without running it through the old filter of hmm, how will this decision affect him?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: If I did this or this, how will that impact someone else?
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: What would he think?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: What would he want?
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: What would he do?
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: Will it be okay if I do this or I don't do this?
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Is this gonna start something?
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: That constant low-level negotiation she probably hadn't even realized she was doing when in the relationship that was gone.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the space left is pretty enormous.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: So she's in her early 40s now, and although not closed off completely to the idea of a relationship, she will say that clearly, she doesn't and isn't actively looking for one.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the really interesting thing: she doesn't long for or yearn for one, she has built a life that genuinely fulfills her, and she holds on to that with both hands, and she said to me, I love my life exactly as it is, and to welcome someone else into it, that someone would have to be quite extraordinary.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_00: An addition, not a subtraction.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_00: I am not giving up anything I have created for mediocrity or ordinary.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: We've been raised, we've been conditioned, if you like, with a very specific story, and it's still running, it's still rolling in 2026, right?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: The partner, the wedding, the house, the kids, in that order, on that timeline, and that is the measure of a life well lived.
• 25:11
  SPEAKER_00: And for a long time that story had a real structural truth to it, right?
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: Women needed marriage, legally, financially, socially.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a fairy tale, it was actually a necessary framework for survival.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: But that framework has changed.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: And as a society, we haven't fully caught up with all of what that means.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: We, as women, we earn our own money, we own our own homes, we can travel alone, build careers, raise kids, and create rich, full, deeply meaningful lives that are entirely independent of a partner.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_00: The infrastructure of female dependence has been dismantled piece by piece by piece.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: But what hasn't kept pace for many women is the mental and emotional labour that goes on inside a marriage, inside a long-term relationship.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the research on this is consistent.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: In heterosexual partnerships, women continue to carry the majority of domestic labour, mental load, emotional management, and the invisible work.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, not in all marriages, but in enough of them that it's not an anomaly, it's a pattern.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: So women are looking at marriage, arriving at marriage with more autonomy, more self-knowledge, and more options than any generation before them.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're encountering inside those marriages, some of the same imbalances that our mothers and our grandmothers managed and navigated.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: And at some point, the cost stops adding up.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_00: The cost-benefit equation does not add up.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I want to be clear about something because I know how this conversation can be flattened, manipulated, shifted, changed, whatever.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: This podcast episode is not an argument against love, it is not an argument against partnership or commitment or building a life with someone who genuinely deserves you, is worthy of you.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_00: It is an argument and a pretty firm one against the idea that any of those things require marriage and against the inherited belief that a woman without a partner is a woman who has failed at something, at life.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's an argument for a deliberate, consciously chosen, and consciously created partnership where each person is held and holds the other equally.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_00: Historically, traditionally, in cisgendered heterosexual marriages or long-term de facto partnerships, that has not been the case for many, many, many women.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Many of my clients.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not obsolescence.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_00: That is finally freedom, free choice, liberation, operating exactly as it should.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: The question that marriage used to answer: who will take care of me?
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: Who will who will I belong to?
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Who will complete me?
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Women are answering very differently now.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: They're taking care of themselves.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: They are belonging to themselves, and that sense of completion was never missing.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: It was just buried under decades and decades of being told that that completion came in the form of someone else, in the form of a marriage.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_00: So where does all that leave us?
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_00: I think the real question isn't, is marriage obsolete?
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_00: The real question is, what do you actually want?
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: Not what we're told by conditioning by the media, by our family and broader society to want.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_00: Not what previous generations or earlier versions of ourselves wanted.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: Not what our friends and our family members want for themselves and also for us, right?
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: For themselves and for you.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And not what you might have journaled about or stuck on a vision board at 22, 32, 42, whatever.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: What do you want now with this full deep knowledge and understanding of yourself, with full autonomy and full agency, full ownership and therefore full responsibility, right?
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: For your own life.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: Full permission to answer honestly.
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_00: What do I really, really want?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: And for some of you, that answer is a partnership, a real one, an equal one, built on terms that actually work for both of the people inside it.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's completely valid.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want that, I want that for you fiercely.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: For some of you, the answer is going to be, I don't know yet.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: You're still maybe in the excavation phase of post-divorce life, digging into all the rubble, finding out who you are without the marriage, without the relationship, without the connection to another person defining you.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly where you're supposed to and need to be.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: And for some of you, maybe more of you than will say it out loud, the answer is I think I'm good.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_00: What I have, what I have is enough, and I think I might actually prefer this.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: I like my life, I love my life, and to invite someone into it risks loss that I'm not willing to navigate.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that answer is valid too.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's more than valid.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's really brave because we live in a world that will consistently try to frame it as sad, as giving up, as cynical, as settling, as failure, when actually it's the opposite.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's the absolute opposite of settling.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: It is the refusal to settle.
• 31:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so back to the original question: is marriage obsolete?
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I think yes, it is.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: At least that version of marriage that required us, required women to make themselves smaller, to hold and carry more than their share, to need a partner in order to be considered complete.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: That version, I think it's pretty done.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: But what comes next is potentially something better, and maybe I'm a bit Pollyanner-ish about this, right?
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I've got my rose-colored glasses on, but I think what comes next can be something better, and that's a world where women choose partnership, and yes, I'm speaking from a position of privilege.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_00: I know I live in Australia, I am white, educated, I have financial resources at my fingertips, all the things, right?
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: I know I'm speaking from a position of privilege here, but a world where women choose partnership because they want it, genuinely, freely, on equal terms, or they don't.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_00: And either way, that's fine.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: They're whole, they're successful, they're amazing.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're sitting here listening to this, perhaps in the quiet of post-divorce life, wondering if it's okay to get off the app, stop looking, to stop performing the search, to stop treating your current life as waiting for the real one.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_00: Or if you're in a relationship or marriage that is not lighting you up, it is a less than equal partnership.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you're living inside a marriage that does feel obsolete, that isn't holding all of you.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: This is your life.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do you want to live your life?
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because your life is now.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Don't wait.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_00: Live now.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: As always, thank you for being here.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_00: If this episode landed for you, share it with one woman who would be supported to listen.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're ready to stop surviving post-divorce life or surviving a marriage that feels obsolete, and start consciously choosing, consciously designing what comes next, you know where to find me.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's a link in the show notes if you want to book an intro call to explore working one-on-one with me.
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for being here.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_00: Until next time, bye for now.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Sally Ann Hartnell, divorce coach and strategist, and you've been listening to Reflect, Reclaim and Liberate.
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can follow me on Instagram at Reflect Coaching, and if you can think of anyone who would love or benefit from listening to this episode, please share it with them.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'd also be so grateful if you would follow and review the podcast so we can get it in the ears of a whole lot more people just like you who are ready to reclaim and liberate themselves in life and love.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you'll join me next week for another episode of Reflect, Reclaim and Liberate.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: Until then,