Shortly after she told her husband that she wanted to end their 10-year marriage, Sam Brindle would sit on the sofa drinking six beers she had bought from the shop. She was wracked with guilt about how this might ruin their four children’s lives and leave her husband broken-hearted.
Fast forward five years and Brindle is helping women like herself pick up the pieces and find a new life post-divorce. The 43-year-old former trade emissary for the British Consulate in Barcelona has reinvented herself as a divorce coach for expats living in Spain.
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Brindle believes there are more expat women leaving their marriages. “It is very anecdotal,” she says. “The women I have met through work seem similar to me, and getting divorced does not seem impossible to them. For a lot of local women, it seems alien.”
Last year, divorces in Spain fell by 11.7 per cent compared with 2024 (this decrease has been blamed on a lack of money trapping couples in unhappy relationships), but this is in sharp contrast to the global expat community, who face a significantly higher risk of divorce. Some estimates have found that divorce rates among expats are 49 per cent higher than couples who do not relocate.
They might be more emboldened to file for divorce, but the emotional shock leaves expat women more vulnerable than they would be at home in Britain; they are left without family to offer support and living in an unfamiliar country can make trying to negotiate a fair separation tricky.
Brindle knows only too well the journey these women are on. When she moved out of the family home in 2021, she felt isolated. “I did not know who to tell,” she says. “I just wallowed in my own self-pity for a while. When I met my husband, I had no idea who I was. I was a party girl, the life and soul of the party. It wasn’t necessarily the happiest time of my life. I wasn’t at peace,” Brindle remembers. “When you grow with someone, you change. I never really discovered who I was. There was never time for me to sit down [and reflect].”
“Our partnership was great as a family but not as a couple,” she says. “It was the first time that I thought, ‘This is not what I want any more’. But I thought, this is crazy, ‘You have four children, you will ruin their lives, what will people think?’”
Brindle, who lives near Barcelona but is originally from Lancaster, moved to Spain in 2007. She married Dani, who is Catalan. The Catalan divorce law differs from the UK system, where a couple’s homes and other possessions are usually split 50-50. In Catalonia, what counts is what is in a person’s name legally: “If a house is in the name of the husband, it stays with the husband.” In Brindle’s case, she only owned a car outright. The couple had a lot of things in common, which they divided as equally as possible.
“The logistics were literally an Excel sheet [from which] we added and subtracted. It was one of the worst parts of the divorce. It was painstaking, and it felt ridiculous,” she says. “It was nitpicking over bunkbeds and kitchen appliances.” Like a majority of expats, Brindle had no relatives nearby to support her.
“The other point is you don’t have your family around you. If you live in the same town or even if you have moved to the UK, there is a sense of ‘I understand this world’. It is like speaking your own language,” Brindle says.
Lesley* is also battling with the end of her 20-year marriage to her British businessman husband. The 47-year-old designer said the legal system in Catalonia is weighed against women. “Catalonia works on a ‘separation of goods’ scheme, which means assets are individually owned unless jointly acquired. From what I see, this is not the case in the UK. There seems to be much more emphasis on fairness principles and equity,” she said.
“From what I have experienced, even though I worked part-time and did most of the childcare through our 20-year marriage, this ‘work’ is not deemed equal to working full time and bringing in a larger salary,” she says. “Despite the fact I brought nearly €750,000 in capital to the marriage, which was not taken into account at all in the division of assets and I was not entitled to half of my husband’s assets, which were in his sole name.” Had they not relocated, it’s likely Lesley would’ve been entitled to a fair split of the couple’s assets.
She was unable to reclaim her inheritance, which was used to buy a property in both their names. The only way to get this back would have been to battle through the courts, a process that in Spain can drag on and be costly. Lesley was denied spousal maintenance as she was not sufficiently dependent on her ex-husband. “It seems the UK is more flexible and Catalonia more structured,” she adds.
Catherine* faced very different challenges when she went through a difficult divorce. The 38-year-old plumber, originally from Bristol but has lived in Spain for 10 years, married her husband two years after meeting him near Barcelona. The couple has a five-year-old son. “I felt like I really lost who I was or what I wanted in life. My mission had become to try to keep the peace. The more I tried, the more I failed,” she remembers.
“We attended therapy for two years. It was hard to leave as I was locked into what I now know to be a trauma bond. Just as I reached my limit, the most charming and fun version of him would return and I was left feeling positively crazy. Had I imagined the last two weeks of hell? In the end our therapist helped me break free by making me see I had to leave.”
A fluent Spanish speaker, she could navigate her way through the legal process, but other challenges were harder. “We had a young child. I would be trapped in a Spanish village for the next 18 years. I would lose my freedom to live anywhere else, and the thought paralysed me,” she says. She could not move back with her parents, and her support network was limited.
“[Being an immigrant] can feel like jumping without a safety net. Being self-employed in Spain is expensive and I feel financial pressures intensely now,” Catherine admits.
Thankfully, her friends became her family in the worst moments. “My one piece of advice to anyone divorcing abroad: lean into your friends and community before you decide to leave,” she says. “I did this in those two years of ‘trying’, which meant by the time I did leave, I had much deeper, richer friendships around me.”
*Names have been changed