As you may know, my pals at FWW and I are engaged. Yes, we've made a commitment to changing the face of divorce and creating new terms to define this life event.

Divorce is a change that whether you wanted it or not, transitions you to something else. Often that transition becomes a springboard to a new career, a new love, a new way of looking at life and yourself.

It no longer is the end but a beginning.

When I split from my first husband, I never thought of myself as a divorced woman. I just thought of myself as a free woman. Free to do anything I wanted. Free to have a life full of possibility instead of predictability. Free of someone who criticized what I did to keep me connected to him even though his opinion hadn't mattered for a long time. Free to reinvent myself and find someone who was truly compatible with me instead of someone who fit a resume I was programmed from childhood to care about. The liberation was intoxicating.

Oh yes. I was one of those people you rarely hear about. I was someone who settled. Okay, I admit it. I was 30. All my friends were getting married and suddenly it hit me that along with finishing college, finding a paying job, and being single in the city for a few years, it was now time to find a husband as part of a life trajectory that resembled synchronized swimming. But early on in the marriage I knew I was drowning.

So I got out. Despite my friends telling me that I should stick it out because a) I may not meet someone else or b) he wasn't that bad. But something deep inside knew that we weren't in sync as though a VCR tape was shoved into a DVD player. Nor did I want to live my life knowing that I had settled. It felt like cheating.