Thinking Divorce? Think Again

By Laurie Fowlke

No one gets married believing that they will get divorced. No matter what our life experiences, no matter the statistics, no matter the fears we may have, we all believe that when we get married, it will be different and our marriage will last. Otherwise, we would not get married.

Then the problems come, the inevitable challenges created whenever any two people try to meld their lives together. The honeymoon is over, children come, money goes, and real life stress begins. Can we handle it? About half of us do not, statistically. Is marriage really so hard that so many of us cannot make it through successfully?

Yes, marriage is not for the faint of heart. It is not always about flowers and romance. As many of you know, it is more about hard work, loyalty and commitment. It is about providing a safe place for our children to grow, and about providing a stable base for our communities.

So how bad, how difficult should things be before we decide that enough is enough? A few couples really do need a divorce, and only they can make that determination. Sometimes the decision is taken from you, if, for example, one partner leaves the relationship and refuses to return. Sometimes there is egregious physical abuse or substance abuse, or other addictive behaviors that are intolerable or present safety concerns for you or your children. However, my observation, during decades of divorce law practice, is that many people give up too soon.

Most people divorce because they see the problems in their relationship as insurmountable. They have tried and tried, but things just do not get better. I believe many people think about divorce for a significant period of time before they actually make the trek to the lawyer’s office. However, what I see missing is that most people do not understand the problems they create for themselves by obtaining a divorce. They are thinking of solving the current problem, i.e. the relationship, but rarely understand that trading marriage for divorce is usually trading problems. Sometimes the problems created by a divorce are preferable to the ones required to maintain a marriage. But you have to know what those new problems will be, before you can make an educated choice.

Studies show that, years after divorce, after people have lived through the problems created by their divorce, if they had the choice to make over again, many would have put more effort into their marriage instead of choosing to divorce. Think of the tragedy of so many lives and families broken, if they had just understood the consequences of that choice. The next time you consider divorce as a way out of your current dilemma, do your homework. Be sure you understand the consequences of the fire you jump into, before leaving the frying pan. Maybe it is necessary in your situation; but maybe it is not.

A divorce is a major life trauma that will impact every area of your existence. Even the most amicable divorce will have repercussions throughout the rest of your life, some subtle and some, very direct. Any decision in this area should include careful deliberation of the following concerns.

1. Divorce Means Money

Any consideration of divorce must involve serious planning regarding finances. Most divorces involve a significant amount of money. There is the money required to obtain the divorce, and the money it takes to maintain the bills while the divorce is pending.

How much money you need for a divorce can vary by thousands of dollars, depending of how many issues are in dispute and how long the two of you want to fight about it. It is always interesting to me to observe how surprised my clients become when they discover that their spouse is being so “unreasonable” about the terms of the divorce. If they cannot get along well enough to stay married, it should not be surprising that they cannot get along well enough to get divorced amicably.

Unfortunately, the longer the divorce takes, the more it costs. My standard answer to people when they ask me how long the divorce will take is, however long it takes for either the two sides to agree, or for us to take the case to trial, so the judge can decide.

Like many areas of professional services, there is a wide variety in the competence of domestic relations attorneys. If you have children, real property, and other considerations that make a divorce more complex, it is important to have competent counsel. Competent counsel usually requires a substantial retainer. Attorneys know that divorce is financially devastating and they have heard every sob story you can think up, so they will not usually budge on this demand. Retainers start at a couple thousand dollars and go up from there. It is not uncommon to spend $10,000 or $20,000 for a divorce. This money could send children to college or pay for a lot of piano lessons.

Meanwhile, as the months wear on during the divorce process, the electric bill does not stop coming, the mortgage is still due, and the kids still need to be fed and driven to all those soccer games. While one parent may still reside in the marital home, the other parent has to find, and pay for, accommodations elsewhere. Since most people manage to spend all the money they earn, this situation creates an additional financial stress at a time when you are both looking for money for attorneys, custody evaluations, property and business appraisals, and other specialists involved in the court process. The conclusion is that your living expenses go way up at the same time you need more money for obtaining the divorce.

2. Reduced Lifestyle

After you finally obtain the divorce, property, debts, support, and the children have been divided, so much as possible, you begin your new life. This is what you choose so it should be better; otherwise, what is the point? In making this decision, you must be aware that usually your life style will be reduced from what it was during the marriage. It is simple arithmetic. Two households cannot live on the same income as one. Where Mother and Father joined their efforts into one home, now each parent must support a separate household. They even have to duplicate the services in the home, i.e. two sets of beds for the children, two washers and dryers, two sets of kitchen goods, etc.

This results in one of two situations. Either the family will have less money per household, or both parents go to work, [or work longer] where one did not work before. Both of these will result in a significant change in the life style of this family.

Besides the strictly financial impact on the life style, there is a change in the personal dynamics in the family. While you may be personally happy to be rid of the “jerk” or “witch”, your children usually are not. Both parents will spend significantly more time alone, and both will run a household without the assistance of the other, whether this is help with emptying the garbage and fixing the cars, or doing the laundry, grocery shopping and cooking. This results in less time with the children, which is an additional loss for them, besides the loss of time with the non-custodial parent.

3. Emotional Pain

Most people underestimate the emotional toll a divorce will take. Even the most amicable divorce involves significant pain. The trauma of a divorce is measured second only to the loss of a child. It involves the acceptance of a “failure”, at a minimum, and total rejection, at its worst. There are few clients in a divorce that will not benefit from some type of counseling or therapy to deal with these issues. When people do not deal with these issues, they take them with them, often into the next relationship. This is why, in part, divorces in second marriages, are higher than in first marriages.

The emotional pain in a divorce is three-fold. Initially you have the pain that led up to the divorce. This can be something that has gone on for years, with the wounds being re-inflicted over and over, so that you have become dulled to the pain in order to survive. Of course, that “dulling” de-sensitizes you to other feelings as well.

Then you will have the pain that is inflicted by the divorce process itself. Unfortunately, our justice system does not handle family dissolutions too well. There are obvious differences between dissolving a business and dissolving a family, but not in the court process. In some areas alternatives like mediation and collaborative law are beginning to take hold, and I would recommend considering them, so long as you have competent legal advice as well.

Finally, you have the pain and loneliness with which you are left after a divorce. This varies depending on the circumstances for the divorce. However, for many, this is significant and often unaddressed, since most people “got what they were asking for”, so why should they be unhappy now. Even the ones who sought the divorce often have an adjustment period with significant emotional after effects.

4. Negative Workplace Effects

There are few individuals who go through the divorce process without a negative impact on their employment. Even if you are emotionally able to stay focused and productive during this time period, which is a minority, you may still need to be absent from work for various court hearing, evaluations, and meetings.

When beginning a divorce process, consider having a meeting with your boss and explaining your situation. Besides impact on productivity, and excessive absences, you may also be looking at new problems with child care or in communicating with your soon-to-be ex-spouse. Do not underestimate the stress involved in going through this process and its impact at your job.

5. Children’s Trauma

Books have been written about the effect of divorce on children. It is the rarest of circumstance where children are happy about a divorce. Usually children are not only not happy about their parents’ separation, they are affected by the divorce in many ways that are not revealed for years. Studies of adult children of divorce have shown even children whose parents thought were doing “fine”, were negatively impacted in many ways. This may explain that many children fantasize about their parents reuniting, even after a subsequent remarriage.

For example, children of divorce are more likely to have a divorce themselves. Children of divorce are less able to deal with dispute resolution constructively. Children of divorce are less trusting and therefore have more difficulty in forming and maintaining positive relationships with others. And children of divorce are more often raised in homes below the poverty line, thus having less access to the advantages that prosperity offers, like computers, lessons, tutoring, and recreation.

6. Life Gets More Complicated

Many people choose to obtain a divorce because they imagine that life would be better than it is now. They will be able to move on with their life without living with “that” person any longer. This must mean that life will be simpler, right? No more fights or arguments, no more sleepless nights, and no more negative atmosphere at home. That is what is often anticipated.

However, the reality of life after divorce is usually much different. If you share children with your spouse, the connection with that person is never severed. While you divorce your spouse, your children do not divorce their parent. This dynamic requires that you will deal with their other parent for many years, at least. If you love your children you will want to be part of all the special events in their life from dance recitals and football games to high school graduation and weddings. Most children will want both their parents to participate in these activities. Meanwhile, if you live in the same community, you also get to transfer children back and forth on a weekly basis. This on-going contact creates its own set of problems.

If you had trouble agreeing on values for child-raising while you were married, this gets much more difficult when you are divorced. When children are told one thing by Father and another by Mother, their natural confusion in figuring out what life is about is compounded. This is part of the reason many children of divorce have more problems.

Added to the problems you encounter now as a single parent, dealing with an ex-spouse, statistically, you will probably begin dating again. Dating after divorce is another world many find difficult to navigate. You now get to consider things like how to deal with your dates’ children. When do you let your children meet your date? How attached do you allow your children to become, to a person you are dating, before you have decided on the seriousness of your own relationship with that person.

If or when you remarry, these issues become more complicated as you learn to deal with your new spouse’s ex-spouse, step-children, extra sets of grandparents, and all the problems and dynamics of those relationships. I remember my mother, a child of divorce, telling me she would never remarry after my father died, because she refused to deal with these additional relationships and the complications they bring with them. This is often when many people begin to think maybe they should have put more effort into their first marriage to make it work.

7. The Community Loses

Finally, the break up of families is a terrible loss to our communities. We are all impacted by divorce. Because the available time of individuals who are divorced is limited, since everyone has to work to earn the badly needed financial resources to make the new family dynamic function, volunteerism becomes extinct. No one has time to help at their daughter’s school, or to act as coach soccer.

As families disintegrate, the values and problems historically addressed by the family disintegrate as well. When parents disagree about values, children often grow up taking the values of neither parent. The children only want peace and figure that neither parent’s set of values has brought that, so they must have little merit.

Families are the structure in which we teach our children to be responsible adults. It is a system created by God for this purpose and we should only cast it aside with extreme caution.

For my information about marriage and divorce, please feel free to review my website at www.thinkingdivorce.com.

Lorie Fowlke is a practicing attorney specializing in family law and domestic issues. She also serves as a state legislator, court appointed mediator and mediates EEO complaints for the U.S. Postal Service. She frequently represents children in divorce and abuse/neglect cases as a Guardian ad Litem. Lorie served as a past president of her local Bar Association and is active in family law and alternative dispute resolution issues.