‘I thought we were happily married – then she left me for her boyfriend a few streets away’

Runaway husbands, walkway wives… The unwelcome shock of Sudden Divorce Syndrome can leave you reeling

Vikki Stark was so stunned when her husband said the words “it’s over” that she assumed he was talking about the fish she’d bought for dinner. Their 21-year marriage was, as far as she was aware, happy and loving. In her recent birthday card her husband had written: “You’re my rock, my life.” 
Yet it turned out he’d met somebody younger – one of the students he taught at the university, in fact – and was ready to close the door on his wife and two grown-up stepchildren and start a new phase of his life. “I wondered if he had a brain tumour as this behaviour was so diametrically opposed to my sweet, loving husband,” Stark adds. “He’d become a stranger overnight. From the moment he left he made no sense to me anymore.” 
In the months of tearful soul searching that followed, Stark, who’d been a widow with two small children when she married her ex-husband, discovered that she was not alone in having divorce sprung on her out of the blue. Runaway husbands are remarkably common and walkaway wives even more so – up to 70 per cent of divorces are initiated by women. Therapists and lawyers refer to it as Sudden Divorce Syndrome, a shock breakdown of a relationship which leaves one side reeling. 
There are also various subsections, the two most common of which are “wife abandonment syndrome”, where the husband moves on to a younger girlfriend, as was the case for Stark, and “neglected wife syndrome” or “walkaway wife syndrome”, where the wife feels they are no longer being heard by their husband and seeks validation elsewhere. “Gone is that feeling that you have to stay in a marriage if you’re unhappy,” says Clare Webb, a partner at law firm Clarke Willmott. 
Stark has heard of spouses asking for a divorce on a Post-it note on the fridge and in a message delivered via their children. Tom Chelsham’s* wife of 11 years told him it was over while he was packing away the Christmas decorations. He describes the break up as so traumatic it was as though she had died. “One moment we were having Christmas with our young sons and their grandparents; the following week she told me she was moving in with her boyfriend and that I would hear from her solicitor to sort out the child arrangements. It came from nowhere. I’d lost my wife but I couldn’t mourn her as she was living happily with someone else a few streets away.”
Yet Melissa Froud*, who walked away from a marriage of 18 months when she was 33, argues that it “never comes from nowhere”. Her sudden divorce wasn’t a snap decision but “a measured response to a profound realisation”. Her ex-husband was abroad on business when it struck her that she’d be happier on her own. It wasn’t meeting someone else that made her realise this, as is often the case for couples, but time spent in her own company. “I just suddenly saw everything – our wedding day, our holidays together, every conversation we’d ever had – for what it was. There wasn’t anything particularly wrong with our relationship but there wasn’t anything right,” she says. From that moment she couldn’t imagine staying with her husband for a second longer. She told him she was leaving when he returned the following week, by which time she’d already rented a flat and resigned from the company they both worked at. “It was hard for him because he had no warning. But what was I supposed to do, let him down slowly over the next five years?” she says.
Most sudden divorcers will have mentally moved on before they make their announcement,  explains Stark, who is a trained therapist. “They’ve been building a case for leaving in their head and now it is complete,” she says. Her husband, a professor, had been with his mistress for six years before he suddenly called time on their marriage; prior to leaving he’d moved her into the family home for three weeks while Stark was away on a book tour, which she believes was a test run. “I’d found a spatula in the wrong place and the sugar bowl was somewhere different but these were the only clues,” she says. “I trusted him so much.” It can take time to pluck up the courage to ask for a divorce, Webb adds, which is why it often seems like a bombshell. “They know that breaking the news that the marriage is over will be a devastating blow, so they hide it before suddenly announcing it’s over.” 
Since her husband left, Stark has supported numerous women in her situation and written a self-help book, Runaway Husbands: The Abandoned Wife’s Guide to Recovery and Renewal. She maintains that it takes a particular personality type to walk away from a lengthy and seemingly loving marriage; her clients’ ex-husbands are often what she diagnoses as narcissists, which means they have high self-regard, lack empathy and do not form deep attachments, even to those who are supposed to be closest to them. “Once they don’t need you anymore, they wonder why you’re still clinging on to them,” she says. “The attachments they form are thin and fragile.” 
According to Webb, some sudden divorcers are so deceitful that they might speedily yet strategically hide assets, arrange their finances or even start proceedings in another jurisdiction before they drop the bombshell to gain a tactical advantage. “Particularly in these scenarios, it’s very important to get legal advice as quickly as possible,” she says. “For example, in the case of a jurisdiction race, speed is of the essence, so it is important to act quickly to give yourself the best chance at securing a favourable position without being prejudiced by adverse factors that might be prevalent in a particular jurisdiction.” 
In Stark’s experience, more often than not a runaway husband is moving on to someone else, often someone younger or with less status. Women, meanwhile, often go for someone older or more powerful; Chelsham’s wife fell for a senior colleague when she started a new job in finance in May last year. “If anything she seemed happier in our marriage; there was more spark. I assumed that going back to work after having our two sons had given her a spring in her step. She’d lost some weight and was looking good.” After revealing she was leaving, she went outside and lit a cigarette, which was totally out of character as she’d always been vehemently opposed to smoking. “The children watched in astonishment from an upstairs window,” Chelsham explains. “It was as if I was already talking to someone else’s girlfriend.” 
A change of personality is a common trait of Sudden Divorce Syndrome; the departing spouse no longer associates with their marriage or the person they were within it. Stark’s husband used to joke that he loved their family home so much he’d be carried out feet-first, yet once they’d separated he maintained he’d always hated it. It was the same for Chelsham’s wife, who abandoned all her clothes at the family home when she left, claiming she’d never wear them again. “Everything about her changed when she left me: her make-up, her figure, her taste in clothes, even the way she spoke. She’d become a different person to the point where I didn’t know how to be around her. She belittled everything about the life we’d built – when she moved out, she didn’t even want to keep any of the paintings we’d bought together, claiming they weren’t the kind of art she liked.”
Froud can relate to this, though. She says that once she realised her marriage was a sham, she honestly couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t working to suppress a niggling doubt about the relationship. “It sounds crazy but I don’t think I was ever truly in love with him. In love with the idea, maybe, but not in love like I am with my new partner now.” She quickly found herself almost repulsed by the things she’d bought with her ex-husband and says their wedding photos make her cringe.
Once a person has changed their mind like this, there is no reasoning with them, Stark continues. After her husband left, she wanted an explanation and an apology but he blamed her for the marriage breakdown, accusing her of being controlling. After he walked out, he never saw his grown-up stepchildren again, despite having brought them up as his own. “One of them wouldn’t have wanted to see him but the other has suffered terribly,” she says. 
Chelsham’s ex also accused him of being controlling and unreasonable. She instructed lawyers straight away and insisted that their children now spend half the week with her and her new boyfriend, which he says has been one of the hardest aspects of the break-up to accept. She communicates with him on WhatsApp in a pleasant business-like manner yet avoids any kind of confrontation. While this seems cold and calculating, Froud sympathises – there’s no nice way of letting someone down. “It’s about damage limitation – you want to work through the thorny stage as practically and fairly as you can.” 
Yet Stark maintains that many sudden divorcers don’t do this. They cast themselves as victims to justify their departure to themselves and those around them. “They can’t say, ‘You’re a very good wife, I love you very much but I’ve met someone younger and sexier who I prefer’, and still look like a nice person. So they create a narrative.” 
During research for her book, Stark discovered that there are different Sudden Divorce danger zones for men and women. While runaway women tend to be in their mid-thirties to mid-forties, men are often older – between the ages of 50 and 60. “With women it often happens when children are young and their husband is working hard and not paying them attention – they meet someone who is interested in them and makes them feel less alone,” she says. Men, meanwhile, reach a point where they worry about their virility and start chasing their youth. “They’ve been a good husband, employee, son and father and now they want to be James Bond; they often go for a younger woman who makes them feel like him.”
She now runs courses and seminars throughout the year for abandoned wives and hosts a Facebook group with tens of thousands of members. There’s no easy way of getting through a sudden divorce, she says; it’s impossible not to obsess over things your runaway husband or wife said to you and to wonder if you ever meant anything to them. “You suffer complicated grief; you’ve lost your marriage and also your role. The sense of betrayal and mourning takes a long time; it’s not a normal divorce.”  
Contrary to the departing spouse’s wishes, there will most likely be nothing sudden or quick about divorce proceedings, adds Webb. “If you have assets that need to be shared, it’ll take time and could turn into a lengthy process.” It can be particularly gruelling as one spouse is further along the grief cycle, while the other is still coming to terms with the situation that has been sprung on them, she continues. “In an ideal world, it’s best to address many of the issues arising from a divorce when sufficiently through the period of immediate pain in the aftermath of a separation, to be in a better position to make decisions with clarity and less raw emotion, which can cloud judgment,” she says. “If you are facing a divorce, remember that honesty, cooperation and compromise are key to ensuring that there is minimal damage to any children of the family.”
Stark is often asked if there are warning signs for Sudden Divorce but in most cases you only recognise the signs when it’s too late. Both Froud and Chelsham maintain, however, that the writing was on the wall if only they’d stopped to look at it. Froud says she and her husband had stopped having sex several months before and had started to plan their lives separately, while Chelsham believes his wife fell out of love with him while suffering from postnatal depression after their second child. 
Stark likes to remind her clients that whatever a runaway spouse says when they leave, they were in love with you once. “Eventually you understand that yes, he did love me; yes he changed; he put me down as a way of justifying his actions,” she says. Her clients always long for a sense of justice yet legally there is none – the family law courts do not take into consideration a husband or wife’s betrayal. “You have to find your own closure. Turn the page, open the next chapter and work out what you’re going to do with it,” she says. “And remember, you’re not crazy and you’re not alone.” 
*Names changed to protect anonymity.
Vikki Stark’s book Runaway Husbands is available to purchase here