What if we celebrated divorces more like weddings?

There are few life events where a person might feel as loved and supported as they do during their wedding. A bride or groom and their new spouse are fêted with a full calendar of celebrations, from engagement parties to destination bachelor and bachelorette trips, bridal showers, rehearsal dinners, and of course, the Big Day itself. They’re showered with gifts — money toward a honeymoon, a good knife set, a hand drill for DIY home projects — to set them up for a successful start to blissful matrimony. 

What if we did the same for people going through a divorce?

Increasingly, some are doing exactly that: They’re throwing divorce parties, signing up for divorce registries and asking loved ones to pitch in, and even going on “divorcemoons.” These trends bookend the growing list of traditions surrounding matrimony, filling in the gaps at the other end of the journey and bringing a little bit of the $70 billion wedding industry to the modern divorce. After all, a divorce is arguably a time when someone needs more assistance and well wishes than ever.

Some 40 percent of first marriages end in divorce, with the rate shooting up even higher for second and third marriages. “Yet we still don’t talk about divorce in a very realistic way,” says Olivia Dreizen Howell, who started the Fresh Starts Registry in 2021 with her sister Genevieve Dreizen. The company provides pre-made divorce registries and a host of other services helpful for when you’re ending your marriage. The divorce bundles contain many of the same quotidian household objects you’d find on a wedding registry, except this time they’re intended to help you turn over a new leaf after you’ve split up the furniture, the houseplants, maybe even half the household stock of toilet paper.

Howell got divorced in April 2019. “Half my things were gone … and everything else that was left were very emotionally charged items,” she says. “The sheets that we slept on together, the dishes we got from our wedding registry — we donated a lot of those items, and then my house was really empty.”

In June 2021, Dreizen ended her engagement, and later that year Fresh Starts was born. Dreizen didn’t take any furniture when she moved out, only clothes and heirlooms. Friends asked what they could do to help as she sat in a mostly empty apartment. After going through their own breakups, they officially launched Fresh Starts in 2021 to host a cornucopia of pre-made divorce registry bundles that are organized by budget, the room you want to furnish, and even decor style. The cheapest, at $99, includes the basics like a set of sheets, towels, some cutlery, and a toothbrush holder — the things you might need for your very first night in a new place — while the most expensive basics bundle contains about $500 worth of stuff. In the kitchen-specific bundle there’s an easy jar opener (a must-have when you don’t have another adult to help loosen lids), and a single-serve coffee maker. 

“It’s kind of the things that you touch every day, so your sheets, towels, utensils, cups, plates, dishes,” says Howell.

For a bundle to furnish a child’s room, Howell made sure all the furniture could be assembled solo by one adult. “I just thought that was such an incredibly thoughtful thing from a single mom to other single moms,” says her sister. 

For Scarlett Longstreet, a 36-year-old writer and influencer who posts content about divorce on social media, the concept of a divorce registry was foreign at first, and yet it made practical sense. “It’s so sweet that we’re showered with gifts when we’re getting married, but I didn’t have three little girls to take care of when I was getting married,” she tells Vox. She chose not to take much from the home she’d shared with her ex-husband. “I really did want a fresh start,” she says. Using the bundles on Fresh Start, in all she put about $1,500 worth of household products on her registry to start anew. 

For comparison, the average value of a wedding registry last year was about $4,853, according to The Knot. There’s nowhere near the same pageantry and well-wishes showered on people exiting a marriage, even though they’re arguably more financially strapped than a pair of people joining households. Even if you’re scrimping, furnishing a one-bedroom apartment on your own is likely to cost several thousand dollars at least, not including rent, security deposits, and any other lease signing fees.

“I think the biggest hurdle is to say, ‘I’m going to do this registry,’” Longstreet says. “I would encourage people to do it, because that’s a way that your loved ones can show up for you.”

Fresh Starts’s primary revenue stream comes from offering vetted experts who can walk people through their entire process — divorce lawyers, coaches, therapists, even hair stylists. Experts pay $55 per month to be listed on Fresh Starts, and the site currently has around 120 professionals it connects with interested clients. What people often find surprisingly hard about divorce is taking care of the minutiae of life that add to the creaking emotional weight on their shoulders: how to find a rental, how to separate a bank account from an ex-spouse’s, how to refinance a mortgage on your own, or how to ensure your child can stay in the same school district. Fresh Starts’s coterie of experts, Howell says, can help.

Beyond the practicality of a registry when you’re newly single, there’s a growing group of people who choose to celebrate divorce with a splashy party. The end of a long legal process can be something to cheer — no one who’s seen the paparazzi photos of Nicole Kidman after her divorce was finalized could disagree.

Marina Hoffmann, a 49-year-old publicist, threw her divorce party at the same venue where she got married 15 years earlier. She used the same event planner, the same cake designer, and invited (using proper paper invites) many of the same people who had attended her wedding. There was a taco station, a 10-piece band, and flowers adorning the event space. She wore a pink dress. Calling it a “next chapter” party, Hoffmann spent between $25,000 to $30,000 on the blowout divorce bash. “I had 100 people, and it was an amazing party,” says Hoffmann. 

Savanna Pruitt, a 26-year-old in digital marketing, was getting a divorce right as her best friend was about to get married. The two enjoyed a joint bachelorette-and-divorce beach weekend. Pruitt and her best friend both wrote their Venmo accounts on the back window of the car they drove, following a bachelorette party trend where people display Venmos so passersby can buy the bride a drink. “We both got probably $10 a piece,” she recalls. Her friend had a “white sash that said ‘Bride to be,’ and then I had a black one that said, ‘I do, I did, I’m done.’” In all, the weekend cost Pruitt and her friend about $500.

Christine Gallagher, a former divorce party planner and author of The Divorce Party Handbook, says there are a lot more people in the business of divorce party planning today than when she first started. “A lot more party companies are branching out and offering this, which is great,” she says.

Throughout her career, Gallagher estimates having planned somewhere around 450 divorce parties. Certain themes were especially popular, like divorce parties based on the cutthroat reality show Survivor. “You survived a shipwreck marriage,” Gallagher explains. Sometimes the events weren’t joyful, but more somber observances — like a ring burial ceremony, complete with ring caskets — but it was crucial for a lot of people to have some tangible ritual to mark the end of one part of their lives so that they could usher in the next. “Most of our big events in life, we have some sort of public ritual or ceremony,” she tells Vox. “It’s a way to bring your friends around you to help you make a transition, and that’s primitive.” The only bad divorce party she recalls is one that was planned as a surprise. 

Everyone Vox spoke to had experienced some degree of negativity because they talked publicly about their separation — to be anything but downtrodden and ashamed about divorce was seen as tacky, or even ungrateful, to the people who had spent time and money on the wedding. “I get a lot of people who say, ‘Oh this is just distasteful. You shouldn’t even talk about it — you’re airing your dirty laundry,’” says Longstreet. Gallagher remembers seeing online comments calling divorce parties “the kind of thing that’s ruining our country.” 

“I think it’s healthy to work stuff out and not sit around suffering,” Gallagher says. “My grandparents were horribly unhappy, but they were Catholic and couldn’t divorce.” 

Because of the stigma, there’s a great deal of self-consciousness around asking people for support as a person going through a divorce. Most people don’t bat an eye at a few splurge options listed on a couple’s wedding registry — but Longstreet recalls feeling sensitive to what people might say if she didn’t list only the most essential, budget-friendly items on her registry. “It was like, ‘I can’t really ask for that, right?’ I tried to really focus mostly on stuff for my girls rather than me,” she says. There was no Vitamix blender, no Balmuda toaster oven, and definitely no 157-piece Le Creuset cookware set.

For Longstreet, a divorce registry was a way for her to say out loud that she was getting a divorce. “It’s okay for me to be public about this,” she says. 

For now, the Divorce Industrial Complex remains limited in scope. But divorcées are learning from the wedding: It’s okay to find some joy (or relief) in the act, and it’s okay to expect your loved ones to be there for you. The end of a marriage doesn’t mean it was a failure. As the poet Jack Gilbert put it: “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.”