After my divorce, I took some time off from having a romantic life to begin the tough work of figuring out where I'd gone wrong and what on Earth I could do to understand how to be a whole person in a relationship.

Men - not all men but a good majority of the ones I have known and worked with - tend to think of difficult situations in their lives as problems that need to be solved.

Women are encouraged to go on an emotional journey of self-care after a divorce, while men are expected to need help learning how to cook and parent on their own.

In my experience as a therapist and as a friend, it seems that the majority of the breakup resources available are for women and not men. Women, who tend to be more vocal about their emotional struggles, are the squeaky wheel that gets the grease from friends, from online communities, from books, and from therapeutic approaches.

The period that directly follows the dissolution of a long term relationship is extremely volatile, with emotions running the gamut from misery to elation to relief to terror.

Post-divorce, the world can feel harsh and full of jagged edges.

Sometimes we are much better at judging people based on how they treat everyone other than ourselves. We make a million excuses for why they treat us how they do.

If you've had a marriage that ended because of a betrayal in trust on your spouse's behalf, the idea of trusting another person with your heart can seem completely ridiculous.

Often, when cheating happens, we rush to place blame solely on one person - either the person who did the cheating, or more insidiously, if it happened to us, we blame ourselves for not being 'good enough' to keep them around. But putting it all on one person doesn't paint the entire picture.

Ghosts of Marriages Past can haunt many aspects of a new relationship - your expectations of what a man should do, how you behave in conflict, your ideas of how commitment should look - they can even make your new man look untrustworthy when he's really behaving normally.

Marriage, even a happy and successful one, can be extremely stressful, but that stress is worth it if you're marrying the best person for you.

Sometimes we put so much effort into things we're doing, like dating or wedding planning, that we don't stop to think about whether or not we even want the results of that effort.

A lot of people end up getting married more out of expectation than out of passion for each other, but if your options have ever been, 'We either get married or break up,' be careful. Marriage should be a new addition you add to the house that is your relationship, not the structure you impose on the house once it's already built.

Nothing makes a girl feel as unsexy as divorce.

People all want and need different emotional responses - some people like to be talked down when they're angry; some people want to be left alone.

If you don't simply communicate with your spouse what household tasks you would like them to do, you are setting yourself up to be angry.

Unequivocally, individual human beings who live together will always have different standards of what a 'clean house' looks like.

We all have an idea of how we like to be treated that we would like others to adhere to, and somehow we've gotten in our heads that the perfect person for us will just know what this code of behavior is.

Cheating is very rarely about the actual act of being with another person.

If you've experienced cheating in a new marriage, the real work is not obsessively combing through all the details of what happened, but rather figuring out if your relationship is worth saving.

In some cases, newlyweds want so badly for things to be perfect that they ignore warning signs, both in themselves and each other.

Sometimes new spouses don't fully process the commitment they've made until after the deal is done, and then they panic.

The benefits of a healthy, thriving relationship may not be nearly as exciting as watching your career take off, but both aspects of your life are equally important.

Balanced, passionate, grounded people are the ones whose careers are ultimately the most successful.