I never planned to get divorced in a country where I could barely order coffee without pointing at the menu. But life, as it turns out, doesn’t consult your five-year plan.
My wife and I moved to Medellín in 2021, chasing the same dream half the expats here are chasing: lower cost of living, eternal spring weather, and a slower pace after two decades of grinding in Brisbane. We’d done the reconnaissance trips. We’d watched the YouTube videos — all of them, I think. We’d made spreadsheets comparing Envigado to Laureles to Sabaneta, weighing walkability against noise levels against proximity to a decent gym. We were, by any reasonable standard, the prepared ones.
And for the first eighteen months, it worked. We hiked in Arví on weekends, found our favourite bakery in Laureles, learned enough Spanish to argue gently with taxi drivers, and told everyone back home we’d cracked the code. Our friends in Australia were envious in that polite, slightly disbelieving way people get when your Instagram feed becomes a highlight reel of mountain views and two-dollar lunches.
What the highlight reel didn’t show was that we’d been quietly growing apart for years, and the move had only papered over it. New restaurants and new routines are a wonderful distraction from an old problem. But distractions wear off. Somewhere between the residency renewals and the Spanish classes, the silence at our dinner table stopped being comfortable and started being the loudest thing in the apartment.
By early 2023, we were sitting across from each other at our kitchen table agreeing, with a calm that surprised us both, that it was over.
Divorce Abroad Is a Different Animal
Here’s what nobody tells you: getting divorced in a foreign country isn’t just an emotional challenge, it’s a bureaucratic one. Our marriage was registered in Australia. Our savings were split between banks in two countries. We owned an apartment in Medellín together, purchased with money we’d wired down in stages, and we had precisely zero idea whether Colombian courts even had jurisdiction over two Australians who happened to live in El Poblado.
My first instinct — and I suspect this is most people’s first instinct — was to handle everything from Australia. Familiar system, familiar language, familiar rules. A lawyer friend back home quickly talked me out of it. Because we were both legal residents of Colombia, and because our shared property was here, the practical path ran through the Colombian system whether I liked it or not. Trying to run everything through Brisbane would have meant an Australian divorce that Colombian authorities wouldn’t automatically recognise, followed by a second round of paperwork to deal with the apartment anyway. Two processes, two sets of fees, twice the misery.
So we did it here. And to my genuine surprise, the Colombian system turned out to be far more humane than I expected. If both spouses agree on the terms — the division of assets, any support arrangements, all of it — the divorce can go through a notaría rather than a court. No judge, no hearings, no standing up in a courtroom recounting the death of your marriage to a stranger. A notary reviews the agreement, the paperwork is signed, and it’s done. Ours was finalised in a matter of weeks, not the eighteen-month horror stories I’d heard from friends divorcing in other countries.
The catch — and it’s a significant one — is that none of it works if you don’t have someone who understands both the local system and the reality of being a foreigner inside it. Every document mattered: our Australian marriage certificate had to be apostilled and officially translated, the property transfer had to be structured correctly, and the settlement agreement had to be drafted in legal Spanish that both of us could actually verify we understood. We ended up working with family law lawyers in Colombia who handled everything bilingually, walked us through each clause in English before we signed anything, and coordinated the Australian documents with the Colombian requirements. I genuinely don’t know how people attempt this with Google Translate and optimism. That decision saved what was left of our sanity, and probably a good deal of money too, because mistakes in notarised property transfers are not cheap to unwind.
What I’d Tell Anyone in the Same Boat
First: start the document work early. Your marriage certificate, wherever it was issued, will need an apostille from the issuing country and an official translation before anyone in Colombia will touch it. That process alone can take weeks if you’re requesting documents from overseas, and it’s the single most common bottleneck. Get it moving before you’ve even finished deciding who keeps the couch.
Second: if you and your spouse can stay civil enough to agree on terms, the notary route is dramatically faster, cheaper, and kinder than litigating. I understand that “stay civil” is easy to type and hard to live. But every disagreement you escalate converts weeks into months and hundreds into thousands. Fight only over the things that will genuinely matter to you in five years. Almost nothing on our original list of grievances met that bar.
Third: expect the emotional lag. The efficiency of the process is a blessing and a strange kind of whiplash — you can go from married to legally single before your heart has processed the first week of it. Find your people. The expat community here is unusually good at showing up for each other, perhaps because everyone is far from their default support networks and knows what that feels like.
And finally: don’t let anyone tell you that starting over at 47, in a second language, in a city you chose together, is the end of something. Two years on, I’m still in Medellín. I kept the bakery in Laureles. She kept the hiking group, and by all accounts they summited Cerro Tusa last month without me. We’re both, improbably, fine.
The city didn’t break us. It just showed us who we already were — and then, with unexpected grace, gave us a humane way to go our separate ways.