While a legal divorce is an event, occurring when a judge signs a marital dissolution decree, an emotional divorce is best viewed as a process that occurs minimally over several years and maximally over the course of a lifetime.

Da lucidez:

"For example, imagine a household in which a 10-year-old child, Bobby, gradually stops doing his school work (perhaps because of an overly critical teacher whose impact on Bobby is largely out of Bobby's conscious awareness). This gets Bobby's mother and father to argue over how to discipline him. Father wants to spank Bobby, and Mother wants to support and understand Bobby. Mother and Father's arguments begin to upset Bobby's 14-year-old brother, who, in response, begins to pick on their little sister, who cries and complains to Mother. Mother responds by coddling and comforting the sister, making Father angrier. In response, Father gets harsher and more punitive with Bobby, who, in turn, produces even less school work, and so forth. Indeed, all inter-active combinations within a family can create dysfunction within anyone else in the family system. Moreover, while the source of the original distress is frequently intra-familial, it can also be extra-familial, when, for example, a child is influenced by a neighbor child or a teacher, or when a parent is influenced by an employ or a relative."

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"During this stage, which takes place before separation is even contemplated, one of the spouses (more often, the wife) typically is experiencing feelings of dissatisfaction, alienation, loneliness, and despair. She engages in a long period (up to several years) of deliberation regarding how to resolve the uncomfortable feelings about her marital relationship. Typically, she attempts a variety of ways to cope with these feelings before the decision to separate and/or divorce is reached. These coping attempts may include getting angry at, confronting, and quarreling with her spouse in hopes of provoking him to change; sulking and crying; withdrawing from her spouse as a way to avoid experiencing the pain of noncommunication; escaping into work or into excessive time with friends; extra-marital affairs; drugs or alcohol; or, in extreme cases, physical abuse. If none of these tactics works and her husband will not go for counseling, or if counseling is ineffective for relieving these feelings of despair and she is unable or unwilling to accept the status quo within the marriage, she may decide to divorce. It is then that a point of inevitability is often reached, a point when the wife has emotionally removed herself from the marriage. Having no other alternatives, she announces that she wants a separation. This declaration triggers the first significant emotional reaction in her husband, who initially may respond with denial, but also may pull back emotionally for self-protection."