This paper examines the identity and stress process for women who lost a spouse through death or divorce. The matched sample drawn from death and divorce records consisted of 173 widows and 156 divorcees interviewed approximately 4 and 18 months after the end of their marital relationship. It was expected that widowhood would be more disruptive and consequently more distressing than divorce. For both groups, we predicted higher psychological distress for (1) women who had higher subjective evaluations of their (ex)husbands, (2) women who had higher identity relevance, or salience of a coupled identity; and (3) women who had experienced higher levels of identity disruption. Widowhood was more distressing and disruptive than divorce as a life event, however, multisample analysis indicated that adjustment process was similar in terms of identity and stress.