6 days Ago By Yahoo Life
“I’m 35, and I’m starting over.” Julia Yorks , a New York City screenwriter, often begins her TikToks with this declaration. Yorks built an online brand sharing her writing and entertainment industry journey, which included bits about her personal life.
Until one year ago, that life included a husband and an imminent plan for children. But as Yorks declared on TikTok in the fall of 2024, she had been “ejected” from her old life — everything was different now, including her marital status. Yorks’s marriage ended in March 2024, but she concealed this life change from her TikTok followers for a while.
Instead, she made videos just for herself — usually when she was “on the floor” in anguish, something she didn’t realize “wasn’t just a movie trope” until she spent nights on her bath mat. At around the six-month mark, Yorks rewatched a video from the early days. “I don’t even know who that person is,” Yorks tells Yahoo Life.
“I just thought, ‘I learned so much — I have stuff to share that could be helpful for other people.’” That included “life lessons that I never thought I would learn or that I could learn,” Yorks says. So, she started sharing them and officially revealed she was getting divorced in a December 2024 video, when she announced her script The 7 Guys You Date Before Marriage made the annual Black List of best unproduced screenplays.
(The script, written before the end of her relationship, also featured a woman navigating a breakup.) These lessons included learning to detach from outcomes — something she only thought she mastered as a worker in the erratic entertainment industry. “If a door is not opening, you shoving it open will ultimately result in you getting kicked out of that room at some point,” says Yorks.
But the writer also created content around postdivorce joy. She went to Paris by herself. She’s learned to “self-soothe” with long walks and wonderful friends.
And while it’s bittersweet, she’s also taken charge of her reproductive health by freezing her eggs. And sharing her story has prompted others to tell theirs — whether it’s an acquaintance pulling her aside at a party (“I’m also getting divorced!”) or people commenting on her posts. (“My marriage ended suddenly/dramatically when I was 35,” one wrote.
“With enough time you will be able to talk about this without crying — that’s when I knew I was really starting to heal.”) “I’ve always said that being divorced at this age really feels like you’re on an island, but it is an island that a lot of other people are on,” Yorks says. “And I think putting this out there online has really helped me to see that.
” In 1970, the median age at first divorce was 30.5 for men and 27.7 for women.
By 2020, it had risen to 42.6 and 40.1.
And with more people getting married later in life , it can be hard for people who are divorcing in their 30s to find peers — something that can make the end of a marriage particularly difficult. “Divorce in your 30s often means grieving not just the relationship, but the vision of the future you once had,” Claudia Giolitti-Wright , a New York City marriage and family therapist specializing in therapy for young women, tells Yahoo Life. “You might grieve the life you thought you’d build together, the idea of growing old with someone, or even the loss of mutual friendships and family connections.
There’s also the emotional weight of ‘starting over’ when you expected this relationship to last. But grief and growth go hand in hand. Acknowledging the loss while embracing the possibility of something better is key to moving forward.
” That’s why it’s significant for social media creators, especially those in their 30s and younger, to share their divorce stories: Seeing others going through the end of a marriage cuts through that stigma that there’s some kind of a failure in divorce or that it’s an impossible hurdle to overcome. For social media creator Cora Lakey , connecting with people online made her feel less alone in her own divorce journey. Like Yorks, she was planning for children with her spouse and had even left her corporate job to pursue content creation under the assumption that she would be partially supported by her husband’s income.
When the marriage ended, her life changed overnight — and sharing that experience with others has been cathartic. “I’ve really talked about all of these ‘shameful’ topics that I’ve experienced in real life online, and so I didn’t think my divorce would be any different,” says Lakey, who began posting on social media a decade ago about her experience with the drug Accutane and has spoken up about her father’s death by suicide . Still, she was nervous about how her followers might react to the end of her “shorter” marriage and knew that commenters could sometimes be “ruthless” over sensitive topics.
What made her take the leap? The divorce rate in the United States, which hovers at around 33% , per data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We need to talk about these topics so that we're more prepared for what marriage looks like,” Lakey tells Yahoo Life. “There’s an unspoken societal script that by your 30s, you should have life figured out, career, marriage, possibly children,” Giolitti-Wright says.
“Divorce disrupts that narrative. And for young women, it can carry a sense of failure or judgment. The stigma can make women feel ashamed for prioritizing their well-being, staying in unhappy marriages longer than they should, or fearing how others will perceive them.
” Like Yorks, Lakey doesn’t get overly specific about why her marriage ended, but she does chronicle the emotions she’s experienced in the wake of the end of her relationship. That includes discussing the financial strain of having to find a new place to live and the challenges of not being on the timeline she thought she would be when it came to kids. Turning to the internet allowed her to find a community, which was especially important as no one in her real life could empathize with her situation — they were either her age and “happily married” or older and divorced for a longer period of time.
“Talking to people who are actively going through it too and sharing emotions has been so helpful for my healing,” she says, noting that her early videos also “provide a benchmark” for her. “I want to look back at these videos as a diary and think, ‘Wow, I got through this traumatic experience.’ If I can do it, anyone can.
There’s nothing special about me except that I decided to document it online.” Phlur founder and fashion and beauty influencer Chriselle Lim knows what it’s like to come out the other side. In 2021, she decided to walk away from her marriage.
She publicly shared the end of that relationship in 2022, a year later, because of the “online platform of women” she had nurtured beginning in her college years. These women had watched her start a business, get married and have children — so ending her story without acknowledging her divorce didn’t feel right. For Lim, that included posting a photo of her “divorce cake” to celebrate her separation being finalized after more than two years.
“I do, I did, I’m done, I’m free,” read the icing. The dessert went viral and inspired others to create their own. She also wanted her followers to know that divorce isn’t easy — that it comes with very real financial and emotional implications people may not be prepared for simply because it’s so rarely discussed.
Lim felt a “huge responsibility” to her audience, of mainly young women, as “there’s a lack of financial education around what it takes to go through a divorce.” But Lim still says she was “nervous” about potential backlash. She hadn’t seen many influencers speaking up about their divorce, and since she built a platform sharing her life as a wife and mom, she was worried about how the people who followed her content would view her in the next phase of life.
“To my surprise, they were so incredibly supportive,” she tells Yahoo Life. “The positivity outweighed the negativity. It showed me that the community really wants me to win.
They said things like, ‘We’ve been through all the life phases with you, and you’re a smart woman, and we’ll never judge you, we know you’re an authentic person. So thank you for sharing your real life and your truth with us.’”.
