Here Comes National Divorce Day
When New Year Energy Takes the Wrong Turn
The first Monday after New Year’s Day carries an unfortunate distinction: National Divorce Day. Some attorneys call that first week National Divorce Week — the period when inquiries spike, consultations get booked solid, and separation papers get filed at rates higher than any other time of year.
So, January 5th (and that week) this year.
The pattern makes sense on the surface. “New Year, New You” momentum meets accumulated marital dissatisfaction, and people finally take action. But here’s what’s actually happening: people are using transformation energy for demolition rather than reconstruction. They’re architecting exits when they could be architecting themselves.
The Holiday Holding Patterns
Three distinct patterns emerge in the weeks before National Divorce Day, each revealing something about how disconnection compounds:
The “One Last Christmas” orchestrators have already decided. They’re managing family memories and children’s experiences, trying to create one final good holiday together. The heartbreaking awareness here: they know divorce will fundamentally alter their children’s reality, taking away the only family structure they’ve known. Yet they’re choosing exit over repair. Here’s the thing: if you have enough awareness to stage a goodbye, you have enough awareness to recognize you’re choosing to end something that could be transformed.
The “This Proves It” evidence collectors go through Thanksgiving and Christmas watching for signs of improvement while actively withholding connection themselves. By New Year’s, they’ve confirmed their hypothesis, that nothing is better. But this isn’t data — it’s confirmation bias. You can’t evaluate a system while refusing to engage it. The holidays didn’t prove the marriage is dead. They proved you’ve been relating to your marriage as something to endure rather than something to actively create.
The “Finally Time” momentum riders haven’t necessarily decided their marriage is dead. They’ve decided they need to do something, and they’re defaulting to the most obvious action. These folks are often the most salvageable because they’re operating from energy rather than resentment. That New Year drive could absolutely redirect toward reconnection. They just need to see it as an equally valid option for their action impulse.
All three patterns share the same core problem: none of these people are actually in their marriages during the holidays. They’re observing them, enduring them, or preparing to leave them. The holidays (and New Year’s) become a deadline rather than an opportunity.
The Statistics Tell a Story
Recent divorce data reveals something beyond simple numbers. It shows how we’re relating to marriage itself:
People are marrying later than ever before, with median first marriage ages now in the late 20s to early 30s. This might seem wise. After all, there’s more maturity, better preparation. But it also means less practice with relationship repair skills when stakes were lower. First serious relationships are happening with fully formed adult egos and established patterns.
Gray divorce continues rising. These aren’t couples who suddenly became incompatible after decades. These are people who successfully raised children and built careers while their marriages were on pause, then discovered they were strangers when the distractions ended. That’s decades of drift that didn’t have to happen.
The “quiet divorce” phenomenon — couples living as married roommates, maintaining the structure while abandoning connection — is increasingly recognized not as a stable compromise but as a holding pattern. Eventually, someone decides to make the arrangement official, often in early January.
The thread connecting these trends: relationships treated as stable background elements rather than dynamic systems requiring active creation. Put your marriage on pause long enough, and eventually someone hits stop.
The Change That’s Coming
Performance coach Brendon Burchard puts it clearly: “Only two things change your life. Either something new comes into your life... Or, something new comes from within.” Observationally, bringing something new into your own life is a choice and opportunity. When change comes to you, though, it is often not to your own liking.
Here’s the reality: if you’re thinking about divorce in early January, change is already coming. Disconnection creates instability that will eventually force resolution. You can’t pause indefinitely. The question isn’t whether change happens. It’s whether you architect it or let it happen to you.
Most people contacting divorce attorneys in January think they are finally taking control, making a decision, no longer passive. And fair enough. It feels like agency after months or years of waiting and hoping. But systemically, they lost control much earlier when they stopped actively creating connection and let the relationship drift.
The divorce decision feels like architecture, but it’s often the final surrender to relational drift.
Real Architecture Looks Different
Something new coming from within — that’s the second-order change that actually transforms marriages. Not new communication techniques or date night schedules (those are “something new comes into your life” — external fixes). But accessing a greater level of intention in how you show up in your marriage. Summoning the best of who you are, even when it’s hard, even when you’re working alone initially.
You can’t control whether your spouse chooses to grow. But you can absolutely choose to architect yourself differently within the relationship system. You can work on your half regardless of what they’re doing.
This isn’t about blame or staying in genuinely destructive situations. Some marriages should end — abuse, active addiction without recovery commitment, fundamental values incompatibility that makes coexistence harmful.
But most marriages considering divorce in January aren’t those situations. They’re marriages where both people stopped trying, put connection on pause, then used the predictable lack of connection as evidence the marriage was dead.
The Inoculation
If you’re reading this in early January feeling that New Year energy and wondering if this is finally your year to address your marriage — whether by leaving or staying — you’re not alone. But before you interpret that momentum as a sign you should exit, recognize what you’re actually feeling: transformation energy.
That energy could go toward legal consultations and separation logistics. Or it could go toward the harder, more courageous work of architecting yourself into someone who shows up differently in your marriage.
Divorce attorneys can formalize disconnection. They’re very good at it. But they can’t create connection. Only you can do that work. And if you have enough energy for legal research, consultation scheduling, and exit planning, you have enough energy to work on reconnection.
The holidays didn’t fail you. You’re not doomed to become a National Divorce Day statistic. But you do need to make a choice about what kind of change you’re going to architect.
Something new can come into your life — a decree, new living arrangements, divided assets and custody schedules. Or something new can come from within — a greater level of intention, a commitment to summon the best of who you are in this marriage, a decision to create connection rather than accept drift.
Only one of those options gives you the marriage you actually want.
The other just gives you a different set of problems wrapped in the temporary relief of decisive action.
If you’re facing marriage struggles and wondering whether to work on reconnection or pursue separation, the question isn’t whether you’re capable of change — you clearly are, or you wouldn’t be considering such a major life shift. The question is what you’re going to change into, and whether you’re willing to do that work while still married rather than only after you’ve left.
If you need help on how to move forward with saving your marriage, come visit me at SaveTheMarriage.com