Divorce happens.

I'm not going to debate the causes or the moral & ethical implications of that here. Even if you're the innocent one who stuck to your vows & got dumped anyway, you still have to pick yourself up & move on. So let's start from that place.

At some point you will wrestle within yourself & within your spiritual & religious beliefs as to whether or not you will date again.

This article is for those of you who have decided that yes, you are going to date again & maybe even get married again. You've decided to give love a second chance.

In order to improve your odds at succeeding, you need to consider your timing. If your goal is to find true love & to have a wonderful long-term relationship with someone, then for your new partner's sake you must have worked through your issues over the last one.

You may be dying inside, feeling incredibly vulnerable, alone, and needy. That's the time when it's easiest to reach out clutching at the first person who comes along that looks like they might be a decent fit into your world.

Those rebound relationships seldom work out. Even if through your pain & misery you did manage to pick the ideal mate for yourself, you are still going to have emotions around your old partner.

The new partner has to endure watching you ache & hurt for a marriage that's over. If you truly loved your spouse, even if you're the one who asked for the divorce, then you're going to have feelings of remorse & a need to mourn what is dead & gone.

Ideally, you wouldn't have married them in the first place if you didn't truly love them & you have to on some level have expected 'happily ever after.'

Even if you stayed too long & had time to process through the emotions of wanting to leave, you still have a good chance of feeling like you've failed at something so incredibly important.

It can be excruciating to fall madly in love with someone & have to postpone the 'honeymoon' stage of the relationship because your new love is processing through all of this stuff & really isn't able to completely submerge themselves into the beauty of falling in love with you.

If you can't wait until after you've really healed from all of those little triggers & such that keep going off in your head & heart, then at least be honest with your new partner & let them know where you really are in the process. You owe them that much.

Give your new partner the truth as to where you are mentally so they can make an informed decision about whether or not they want to enter into a full time one on one relationship with you at this moment in time. You don't have to be completely alone though either.

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