Running Away from Your Divorce to Mexico
Updated November, 2023
My first home in Mexico
Lessons from an expert on divorce settlements
One winter a few years ago, I left the tropical paradise of a house on the beach in Mazatlán, Mexico to make some repairs on my condo in Snowshoe, West Virginia.
Once I’d moved to Mexico, the condo had become an albatross around my neck. To sell it, I needed to spend one last winter there and get it fixed up for potential buyers.
Snowshoe Resort provides a little pocket of economic relief in the midst of a state chock full of passive aggressive behavior (a trait relating back to coal mining boss/miner dynamics passed down from generation to generation), rural poverty and drug addiction - all of which I was blissfully unaware of during my interlude as a ski instructor there.
I had purchased the tiny place as a roof over my head for the weekends I taught. Very much at the bottom of the instructor totem pole, I was assigned the dubious task of giving first lessons to Floridians who’d never seen snow, and might arrive to class wearing garden gloves and bandanas on their faces as if preparing to rob a 7/11.
You encounter all types of skiers at “The Most Popular Ski Area in the South” from the hillbilly to the West Virginia mining multi-millionaire with a runway in his backyard. I met Ross, a semi-retired, self-proclaimed “organic farmer” on the shuttle. We quickly became skiing buddies for the last winter I’d ever spend there.
Ross greeted lift operators and resort workers like a benevolent Roman emperor, as you’d expect from someone who has made millions of dollars as an expert witness in company valuations where swagger is the most important qualification on the curriculum vitae.
You may ask, “What does an expert witness on company evaluations have to do with living in Mexico as a single person?”
Many of his valuations were of companies involving companies worth million of dollars that were being evaluated as part of high profile divorce proceedings. Ultimately, the ex-wife usually received a sizable settlement. Often, he shared with me on the lift one day, the wives would immediately began to spend the bounty away on jewelry, new homes and cars. "Over 34 years of doing that work, I've seen it played out time and time again,” A lot of money’s gone and no one seemed to learn much from spending it.”
Divorce recovery
Great loss is like a meteor. It produces a crater and changes everything around it much more than the banality of the life event itself. Loved ones die, people stop loving other people and people get sick. Everyday events with catastrophic individual consequences.
I've have never seen anyone emerge from loss successfully and whole without spending a great deal of time in private sober introspection. Drinking, over spending and the destructive behavior that my friend Ross described only delay the process of growing from it - in addition to making you poorer
What I learned from my own divorce is that only good thing that can come from it is that we might emerge from the loss as better people. Loss cracks us open, but with the pain comes the hope that we can emerge as someone new, someone better, even as pieces of the shell are still sticking to us and we protest the whole transition like birds in a pie.
Changing the environment
Therapists often recommend that a person grieving a loss like a death or divorce change things in their environment. Even superficial changes like painting rooms of your house a different color or making a guest room a study can help.
The best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love, in which the author travels to several countries during an extended period of time after a break-up, makes the idea sound exotic idea. (It’s really not that hard - I was struck by how brave readers seemed to think she was.). But sojourns and relocations are common. Out of the eight couples I know who divorced, all had a member relocate to a new city and two left for another country.
After my divorce, I changed neighborhoods, then when that was not enough, changed cities. When that wasn't enough, I moved to Mexico. In Mazatlán, single people I met joked that half the expats in town were recovering from a bad break up.
For one man I met, by the time he got divorced, Mexico was the only place he could afford to live and maintain a decent lifestyle. He’d found a large airy apartment in El Centro where he could stack his art, roam the markets and galleries, and being a big guy, generally make a scene wherever he went.
Unlike the domestic move, sojourns go deeper. You are alone more. Sojourns have an established history in literature as a way to get away, to think alone in a new environment without the old cues.
As Camus described it, travel robs us of refuge. “Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn’t know the fare on the streetcars), we are completely on the surface of ourselves.”
Travel to foreign sojourns can be conduits for the deep meditation required to determine where your heart wants to go next, without the distraction and input of well-meaning friends, rebound lovers, and therapists who can only scratch the surface of who you really are and who you want to be next - the questions only you can answer.
About the author, Kerry Baker
Hola, I am a partner with Ventanas Mexico and author of "If Only I Had a Place" on renting well in Mexico as an aspiring expat. My third recent book is “The Mexico Solution: Saving your money, sanity, and quality of life through part-time life in Mexico.” The best guide to moving to Mexico part-time, both instructive and entertaining. My most recent book is “The Lazy Expat: Healthy Recipes That Translate in Mexico.” In Mexico, to maintain a healthy diet, you must cook. This shows you how to cook healthy from any bare-bones kitchen in Mexico.