Woman Explains How She 'Soft Launched' Her Divorce On Social Media To Drop Hints To Her Friends & Family
She was saving all of this up for her hard launch, this TikTok post.
TikTok In order to avoid the awkward conversation that would come with announcing your divorce to your family and friends, one woman on TikTok found the answer by posting about her divorce on social media.
However, it’s not what you think — she didn’t make a Facebook or Instagram post saying “Hey all, me and husband are getting divorced!” No, instead, she decided to leave little hints around over a span of time to see if her nosy friends would figure it out.
The divorced woman explains how she 'soft launched' her divorce on social media.
The recently divorced woman, named Sierra, made a post two days ago on May 17, 2023, doing a “hard launch” of her divorce announcement. In this nearly 3-minute long “hard launch video she posted on TikTok (@sierraontiktok), she explains the soft launch she did in order to clue her friends and family in.
“I’m going to show you how I’ve been soft launching my divorce,” Sierra states, and immediately gets into what everyone is thinking. “Am I a celebrity? No. Am I an influencer? No. Do my followers care? Probably not.”
What she does share, however, is that this process was fun for her, even claiming that it helped her cope a little bit — which is great! As long as she’s not hurting anyone, no one can tell her how to cope with her very recent divorce.
She started off by excluding her ex from her New Year’s Day post.
“So starting January 1st, this picture was posted to My Story with no evidence of my husband, and I also posted a ‘January Top 5’ with no pictures of him,” she explains.
After these two things were posted, she believed that the “nosy people” would think that it was weird of her not to include her husband in her “top 5” post, but not only that — in the “top 5” post, she included a screenshot of a comment that read “I’d take away men’s rights so fast.”
Photo: @sierraontiktok/TikTok
Sierra made sure that she didn’t come off judgmental and even admitted that she “respects it” because she’s a part of that nosy crowd, claiming she’s “constantly looking at other people’s pages to see if they’re still dating their significant others.”
Also on New Year’s Day, she posted a picture of her dog, claiming that this hint comes from the fact that she never posted a Christmas family pajama photo — something that she and her ex had been doing every year with their dogs.
Photo: @sierraontiktok/TikTok
A month later, she posted a selfie for the first time in years and changed her profile picture.
In February, she made a post about how she accidentally bought men’s jeans for the first time but was ecstatic about it. This was also the first time, she claims, she has posted a photo of herself in years.
It was an informational photo, confident, and she says she thinks she looked good, but that’s not all. She also changed her profile picture on Facebook too.
Photo: @sierraontiktok/TikTok
“I changed it from our wedding picture to a throwback picture of me in 2019,” she explains. “I didn’t upload a new picture because I didn’t want it to be in the News Feed.” Another “soft launch” method from her, trying to make it look more subtle than obvious that she was no longer attached to her ex.
For the widely recognized romantic holiday that falls in February, she made no post about her husband either, but posted a meme instead that reads “Time isn’t real, but my back pain is.”
Photo: @sierraontiktok/TikTok
She continued dropping hints here and there before eventually making it obvious.
She made her Facebook relationship status private, started posting divorced memes, and even left comments on other people’s videos actually vocalizing that she was getting a divorce.
The final straw was deleting and archiving old photos and posts on Instagram to remove him from them until she eventually blocked and unfollowed him from the social media site.
If this was the strategy that worked for her, then by all means, she did the right thing. Psychotherapist Babita Spinelli told YourTango in 2021 that one of the most important things you could do to cope with a divorce is to invest in yourself.
“One of the hardest things about divorce is the newly empty space, but little things like these tell you that you love yourself,” she said. “Whatever fills your heart and makes you feel at peace — do it! Now, more than ever, you should take some time for yourself.”
Isaac Serna-Diez is an Assistant Editor who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics.