A Story of Divorce and Real Estate in New York City

My then-husband and I separated on the second day of 2016: I kissed him good-bye and left him to pack his things in our biggest suitcase. I walked over my favorite bridge and then back, thinking as though I was listening — waiting to hear what I really thought, or felt, or knew. We had moved into the sublet, a large one-bedroom in Clinton Hill, five months earlier, thinking that once we were settled, we would take over the lease. Now it was my first apartment alone. I sent out a tepid invitation to a few friends who lived nearby for a half-hearted housewarming party: Come over, hang out, maybe I’ll order a pizza or something. Without furniture, we sat on the floor and occasionally went to the kitchen to, as the previous tenant had shown me, pop out the window screen and blow cigarette smoke into the alleyway below. Later, unable to sleep, I remembered smoking by that open window in front of all my friends and realized how dangerous that was: The window was so wide and tall, and without the screen, there was nothing to protect me, not even an assumption of safety. She could lose her balance and fall at any moment, I imagined everyone had been thinking. And then what if — now I was just pretending to be asleep, eyes closed — I really did fall out the window that night and died and everything since had been a hallucination? How much would that explain?

The first place one lives after a divorce lends itself well to dramatic narratives: Is it pathetically abject or a rapturous sanctuary? Do our newly separated couples, now on their own two feet and with their own set of unshared keys, find depths of strength and resources they never knew they had, or do they sink to unchecked levels of squalid depravity? Some essential relief, or perhaps even a slight disappointment, to realize that unmarried life is kind of normal? (Which is to say, it is all of those things.)

When the apartment was my own, I loved it. I also could not afford it. The day I signed the lease in my name was a thrill and a terror. The landlord had almost refused to let me after learning it would just be me on the lease, no husband included. “Can you really live there by yourself?” he asked, a question that somehow did not seem tied to my income. I could. I would. I probably shouldn’t, but that was none of his business.

Getting married can provide an immediate material benefit. Rents might become halved, utilities can be split, and if you are having a specific kind of wedding, you are free to send out requests that someone buy you the really, really expensive salad spinner that you want but could never justify paying for yourself. Single people rarely, if ever, get to demand their friends and family furnish their new homes.

But perhaps it eventually evens out. If those relationships end, the benefits gained and accessories given might be lost too. For months, I worked sitting on a bright-orange plastic folding chair better suited to patio decks than home offices; weeks could pass without me buying enough groceries to fill even one shelf of the fridge. Wendy Paris, a contributor to Psychology Today, described her own move after a divorce as reducing her to “a mass of indecision, laced with longing, topped with regret — all while shopping in Home Depot.” And the location of that Home Depot often makes all the difference. In 2020, LendingTree published findings from divorce data, using it to rank the “best places to recover from a divorce.” New York City came in last for the twinned and cursed reasons of “dating pool prospects” and “economic outcomes” — crucially, median rents are, as of 2024, hovering around $4,000.

Arsh Raziuddin, a 33-year-old creative director who currently lives in Fort Greene, divorced her husband of five years (they had been together, in total, for 12 years) in December 2022 after separating in the summer of 2021. When the marriage was over, Raziuddin left their one-bedroom “not abruptly, but I didn’t necessarily have a plan.” It was an awful day — “15 tote bags in an Uber, sobbing, while one of my best friends helped me lug them up the stairs,” she says. “She was also going through a divorce.” This was also Raziuddin’s first time finding and living in a place all on her own while not in a relationship. “I had half the money I just had,” she says. She found a sublet in Clinton Hill on Craigslist — it turned out to be the opposite of the divorced dad cliché, completely unlike the ones we’ve seen in Noah Baumbach movies. “It ended up being the most beautiful place I’ve lived in thus far,” she says. “Maybe it sounds corny, but there were a lot of plants in the apartment,” she remembers. “A lot of things to take care of. It kept me busy, and it felt very warm. The bed was just beautiful. Huge windows, beautiful artwork.” The next one wasn’t as nice — another short stay, this time with a meddling landlord. But the one after that, “that’s where I still am three years later. It’s a brownstone with the landlord on the first floor, and I kind of just told her how awful my situation was. I was like, ‘I just got divorced,’ and she was like, ‘Girl, I get it.’”

The recently divorced have their own baggage to contend with, for better or worse. To be a recently divorced parent or caregiver is an entirely other set of serious concerns. The pressure to find a more permanent living space after a divorce increases if one is responsible for children or dependents; custody is determined by a number of factors, stability and security in a child’s living environment being an important consideration. A temporary or unsettled living space is practically a given for most people, and yet it can be just another opportunity for judgment rather than support. Once, when I was a kid, my mother pointed out a short apartment building we often passed on drives to and from a nearby shopping plaza to say she had many clients from her divorce-mediation practice — men, fathers — who stayed there immediately after their divorces. (In one episode of The Simpsons, “A Milhouse Divided,” Kirk Van Houten, Milhouse’s dad, gets divorced and moves into a shabby apartment complex seemingly populated entirely by divorced dads. While trying to show off to Homer, he boasts that he “sleeps in a race-car bed. Do you?” “I sleep in a big bed with my wife,” Homer responds.)

Divorce is both a state and a status: You are going through a divorce until you simply are divorced. So, too, is the experience of making a home after a marriage. The first or second or even third place a divorcée lives in after the marital home has the potential to be interpreted as meaningful, but usually, it is brief and transitional. According to Sharon Sassler, a professor of Public Policy and Sociology at Cornell University and the co-author of the 2017 book Cohabitation Nation: Gender, Class, and the Remaking of Relationships, the post-divorce apartment is as tied to class as the decision to move in together. “There is a lot of couch surfing among people whose relationships have ended. Then there is often living together apart — staying in the same apartment or house until one can another place,” she explained. Both arrangements are common enough in New York City, where a daunting market often makes moving on a fixed timeline impossible. Though living together apart is, at least according to brokers, the more acrimonious option. (“The husband put white surgical tape on areas such as the double vanity in the bathroom,” one told this magazine in 2023, “to visually show separation.”)

Raziuddin’s story reminded me of Jenny Diski’s first contribution to the London Review of Books, an essay called “Three Whole Weeks Alone” in 1992. She wrote about the three weeks she spent alone in her apartment after her ex, a man she calls her Live-in-Lover, or L-i-L, moves out and her daughter goes to visit her father in Ireland. “I have a scratchy feeling of excitement in my head as I anticipate the next 21 days,” she described. “Is this true? There must be sadness at the break-up; am I telling myself lies? No. The sadness is there, all right, but in a different compartment from the excitement. I put both on hold until the clearing out is done.”

The first morning, her cat throws up by the foot of her bed; he ends up needing an operation, and the vet becomes the only person she speaks to for several days. Every 36 hours or so, she orders a pizza. “I do nothing. I get on with the new novel. Smoke. Drink coffee. Smoke. Write. Stare at ceiling. Smoke. Write. Lie on the sofa. Drink coffee. Write. It is a kind of heaven.” In the whole experience of her L-i-L moving out, she mentions only one moment of conflict, one that “echoed the tension there had been all along. There was always an inequality of certainty about the project of us living together. He spoke easily about forever. I did not consider the week after next a safe bet.”

The same night that my ex-husband moved out, after I was done pacing bridges in the cold, I went over to my friend’s apartment to be with him and his girlfriend. I had introduced them just a few months earlier. While my marriage was ending, they had fallen in love and were now moving in together. I watched them make a home and only sometimes thought of a fight in my marriage that seemed inconsequential in the moment and now, in comparison, changed. Late at night, I walked back to my own apartment, holding my gloved hands over my ears against the January wind, feeling the blood close to freezing under that thin skin. When I got there, I looked around, as I thought my husband might have on his way out: the piles of books and the low, long couch my only concession to interior design. I remembered the way he had said, in between other, more serious injuries, “We never even decorated.”

I wanted to fight him at the time. In the years when I was taking note of where my mother’s divorced clients lived, our family did have a number of moves and mortgages that took us to new neighborhoods every few years. The smell that evokes home is, for me, fresh paint. With each bedroom, I would try to re-create the same collages on new walls — photos from Caboodles or Candie’s ads, images of Sarah Michelle Gellar and Aaliyah torn from stolen issues of Teen People and CosmoGirl, the elastic pull of bright-blue Sticky Tack close to ripping the thin pages with their coated gloss. I wanted to remind him that all the apartments we’d lived in had been similarly plain, that my style could most generously be described as sparse. He was implying that I had never decorated, I thought, that I had left multiple boxes unpacked, full of things I must not have needed or, at least, didn’t miss. I didn’t fight him. I felt what he meant. I had not made an attempt to make a home for us. I had hoped that just getting married would mean a home would follow. I held on to that fight, not because the absence of decor didn’t matter but because if I could answer now, I would say the truth: I thought I had more time.

The last morning we spent together, everything seemed to count. We woke up an hour before his alarm. He was a visitor now. The apartment was my own, so I could stay in bed and he had to leave. We asked each other how we had slept, out of habit, and the man who had been my husband said he hadn’t, really, that the sun coming in my windows was too much too early. “You should get blinds,” he said. After he left, I poured coffee in the same mug I used every day. I decided I would not get blinds. I liked the light more than sleep. The day passed, and I don’t remember how I got home with much clarity, but I do know that when I arrived, it was sparse, clean, empty, quiet, lonely, and wonderful.