\n<\/p>\n
When 22-year old lumber worker Garet got married after four years of dating<\/a>, he never expected to be a single dad<\/a> in a matter of months. \u201cIt started going downhill after one year,\u201d he tells me, \u201cand we got divorced just after.\u201d With extra free time on his hands and looking to spend more time with his son<\/a>, he downloaded TikTok in early 2018. He spent months on the app watching videos and making a few of his own. Then he had an idea about how to quell the pain of his ongoing divorce proceedings while investing in his new hobby: at the end of last year, Garet took a metal bin out onto the street and filmed himself setting his marriage licence on fire \u2013 posting what would become an iconic Divorce<\/a> TikTok.<\/p>\n Garet\u2019s video, along with seven others, became a part of a viral Twitter thread chronicling some of the best<\/a> TikTok divorcee content back in February. Almost all are lip-synced to emotional music<\/a> and most feature the divorcee pulling off their wedding ring<\/a> and throwing it at the camera. Many Divorce TikToks also feature the divorcee\u2019s children or the divorcee holding old framed pictures of the couple with background music lyrics going something like \u201clook what you gave up\u201d. These bizarre, intensely emotional videos seemed niche to Twitter users, but the popularity of Divorce TikTok cannot be overstated. At the time of writing, the hashtag #divorce has over 60 million views on TikTok and the hashtag #divorced has over 18 million. While some of the videos using the hashtag are simply memes about having divorced parents or skits about divorce, swathes of them are people announcing and documenting the details of their dissolving marriage.<\/p>\n Arguably, though, the most confusing element of this trend is that it\u2019s happening on TikTok at all \u2013\u00a0an app that, as the Twitter thread author @_wildmilk put it, is infamously a place for 12-year-olds. But Nicholas, a 33-year-old managing director living in Milton Keynes who posted his own divorce video, explains that a lot of divorcees are on TikTok because so many parents use the app to connect with their kids. \u201cMy little ones saw an advert for TikTok on their tablets so I downloaded it,\u201d he tells me. \u201cIt became a part of our routine towards bed to watch five TikToks and go to sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n Nicholas tells me that it took almost three years for him to finally leave his marriage after hitting an inescapable rough patch. Dealing with anxiety<\/a> and depression<\/a>, he was initially cautious about posting videos of himself on his TikTok page.\u201cMy early posts were just kid-related or joke based,\u201d he says, \u201cBut I wanted to be able to get my divorce story across and get the emotions of it out… Posting the video allowed me to express things that maybe I hadn’t felt I could do previously.\u201d<\/p>\n Ryan, a 35-year-old truck driver and photographer from Kansas, started posting to TikTok purely for fun \u2013 discovering it just a few months after his marriage officially ended. After making a few videos here and there, Ryan had a moment of inspiration that moved him to post about his divorce.<\/p>\n \u201cI came across a sound clip and it really touched me,\u201d he tells me, \u201ca song by country artist Murphy Elmore called ‘Whoever Broke Your Heart’. So I just made the divorce video in my work truck and when I posted the video it took off with likes and views and comments.\u201d<\/p>\n Ryan\u2019s \u201ctake off\u201d is entirely common for divorce videos \u2013 they are massive number draws almost without fail, rarely getting less than a thousand likes. Users who post divorce content even get typically ten to fifteen times more views on their Divorce TikToks than they do on their non-divorce videos, and some accounts \u2013\u00a0such as Nicholas\u2019 \u2013 have pivoted to divorce content because it pulls such a large audience.<\/p>\n When it comes to gender, Divorce TikToks are relatively diverse; a search through the hashtag will yield about a 50\/50 split between men and women. However, the tone of a divorce TikTok does tend to reflect the gender. \u201cA lot of the women making these TikToks are really happy they\u2019re getting divorced,\u201d YouTuber Kurtis Conner notes in his video about the trend<\/a>. \u201cBut all the guys are [the ones] making these sad TikToks.\u201d<\/p>\n Nicholas says that his seemingly dour videos aren\u2019t necessarily \u201csad\u201d, but \u201ca large open therapy<\/a> session\u201d with his single parent-heavy followers. \u201c[It feels good] to get it off my chest,\u201d he says of posting about his divorce. \u201cA lot of men don\u2019t talk about their mental health<\/a>, but I\u2019m not the same. I realised I could post what I\u2019m going through, get support from hundreds or thousands of people going through the same, and generally be able to feel better from the situation.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDivorce made me feel less of myself,\u201d he tells me, \u201cand TikTok views, likes, follows, and creative trends allowed me to feel human again and relieve a lot of anxiety.\u201d<\/p>\n