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Recently went through the process. Mediation is certainly cheaper and less adversarial but that requires both good faith on both sides, and the ability to work

by dpweb 5y ago

Recently went through the process. Mediation is certainly cheaper and less adversarial but that requires both good faith on both sides, and the ability to work together. Which has already been demonstrated is a problem since the marriage is breaking up in the first place. Some divorces are going to have to be adversarial. But, speaking as someone who had to pay both lawyers sides, and substantial alimony and child support. My best advice - get it over with as soon as humanly possible! Time is the enemy. Not X percent. Lawyers will take it all. You gotta treat it like your future is on fire. I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married. We need to be grown ups and recognize at least half these marriages will break up. It would make the couple confront the possibility and have to state their expectations beforehand. Prenups aren’t 100% but having gone through the process I saw. Legal contracts matter! This prob won’t happen cause it would also break up a lot of couples before the marriage but that would actually be for the best.

Arainach 5y ago
Prenups only matter when you have significant assets pre-marriage. With the price of housing these days, most people won't have any significant financial security until they're borderline infertile; how do prenups benefit these marriages?
- bitcharmer 5y ago
  Where I live prenups cover assets both: pre and post marriage. There is no such thing as co-owning anything unless both sides explicitly make it so. From what you are saying prenups are not a very good tool in your legal system but I assure you it works differently in many countries.
scotty79 5y ago
Or just skip marriage altogether.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  In many jurisdictions, common law relationships after a certain period of cohabitation are very similar to marriage when it comes to splitting up. I'm guessing you're not advocating not staying with someone for more than, say 2 years.
  - scotty79 5y ago
    It might be worth swapping jurisdictions. Some places seem just bad for having any prolonged relationship.
    - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      or depending on your gender swap jurisdiction when you see it's going pear shaped. France sees quite a bit of divorce tourism from UK and other European countries because they're "less progressive". So if you have a lot of money to lose move the whole family to France and after 2 or 3 years get divorced there.
  - suifbwish 5y ago
    So you can’t be a room mate with the opposite sex without being considered common law married after that time period? I feel like any decent lawyer could blow that to pieces.
    - kristjansson 5y ago
      Usually part of the definition is holding yourself out to not married
    - diordiderot 5y ago
      same sex a applies as well in CA!
      - dragonwriter 5y ago
        CA doesn't have common law marriage, so it is more accurate to say that it doesn't apply to same sex couples in the same way that it doesn't to oppozit5-sex couples.
- david38 5y ago
  Cold comfort if she gets pregnant and now you have no say.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Don't make her pregnant.
    - vkou 5y ago
      Unfortunately, that requires exercising your say ahead of time, through contraception, vasectomy, or the radical step of making sure that your long-term goals are aligned with those of your partner.
  - forty 5y ago
    You don't have to be married to the mother of your kids in many countries.
  - goodpoint 5y ago
    Huh?
chrisseaton 5y ago
Don’t prenuptial agreements only cover prenuptial assets? Most first-time married people obviously aren’t bringing many assets in the first place.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  Nah, depending on the state, the law permits them to cover nearly anything.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- treis 5y ago
  It's not usually the assets that cause a problem. It's future income that's the issue and usually in the context of a woman who raised kids and a man that worked.
javchz 5y ago
You're 100% right. Most functional divorces I have seen, are those where process end up quickly, especially if there are children. For the sake of their kids it's the best thing that can happen. The movie "Marriage Story" it's a great reflection of your point, in how the lawyers weaponize resentment in relationships (affairs, deadbedrooms, chores neglect, etc) to get the process going for as long as possible with the promise of getting the best %... but in the end, their funds are eaten away by legal fees. #NotAllLawyers of course, they already have (with some exceptions) an underserved bad rap, and I have meet some with an ethic code of steel. But it's better the be aware that can still happen.
- dpweb 5y ago
  Yeah, certainly not trying to bash lawyers. I'm a billable consultant myself. I don't think our lawyers were trying to do anything wrong. This was the process. Exchange information, Negotiate, if negotiation fails - meet w judge for pre-trial opinion (what they would rule with current information). If still contested, Discovery building up to Trial. If they were milking us, they'd be pushing for the trial, cause the discovery is the real billable hours killer. But, I had to take the responsibility when it looks like the negotiation is going badly - let's get this in front of the judge NOW. Discovery/trial legal bills would have wiped out most of our assets at the time.
  - unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
    No, as a lawyer who personally just completed this process, my faith in my profession will never be the same after witnessing the toxic mix of bad faith and incompetence of the opposing lawyer, collusive ineffectiveness of the retired judge we hired to act as mediator, and virtually everything else about the process. The first 10 months were wasted with those two failing to read past page 1 of a critical document to find the operative language and being unable to craft a coherent plan as a result. That was just the start. The lesson I learned was it doesn't matter how high-minded your rules, principles and processes are, the matrimonial bar and bench seems to be a magnet for just craven incompence, mean spiritedness, and, when you get past all of that, in the best case, indifference to the unnecessary suffering they cause. So while I appreciate the optimism of the article, and in general I agree with the principle that lawyers are unnecessarily "bashed", when it comes to the matrimonial bar some higher level of regulation, self regulation or other form of redress is required.
invalidname 5y ago
This is great and important advice. You made a very smart move. Parents went through a 20 year divorce and indeed the lawyers bled them dry.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  A divorce after 20 years of marriage, or a divorce that took 20 from initiation to conclusion? (In normal context, I’d read it as the former; in this specific context, it seems ambiguous.)
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    No one has enough wealth to hire divorce lawyers for 20 years. Even Bezos would be on the streets.
silisili 5y ago
> You gotta treat it like your future is on fire. I rather stupidly wrote my experience without reading all the comments, but wish I'd read this quote first. This is exactly how I'd sum up how to treat it!
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
> Prenups aren’t 100% but having gone through the process I saw. Legal contracts matter! this. The whole point of making a contract is to agree how to disagree. The best contracts spell out the edge cases. If both can be mature enough very early to talk about these, then it's a basis that predicts the ending to be civilized in the first place. In reality motivation for marriage is a lot more complex than what can be spelled out in a contract. In my case how would I have put on paper the edge cases that came with wanting to get married to a manipulative, deeply broken, drama queen which was the only reference model my bi-polar, suicidal and abusive mother equipped me with. Or how would a young woman from a wife-beating father chose her spouse. In my case marriage accelerated my own demise (a path that I was already on) but I needed that crash (without knowing it back then) to figure out the problem in the first place. I've seen in myself and many friends (both smart and dumb, poor and rich) no matter how intelligent, prudent and sensible in other areas of life, people abandon all reason with love. Like it's the most powerful and destructive drugs of them all when taken by people who haven't fixed their own issues. Like women who go into it as a way of "fixing him" or guys who need somebody to "complete them" (or a million other ways to destroy themselves). No amount of risk management can help you when your goal is to jump off a cliff. Oddly couples never see it themselves. It's always the friends or a stranger who can tell with shocking accuracy by looking at the couple for only a few minutes why their dynamic is f'ed up.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
> I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married. Isn't this basically what happened everywhere in the civilized world? People used to just dump their families so now you're legally required to support spouses and children (even if not legally married). This then leads to shock headlines like "Billionaire forced to share unearned fortune with the person they agreed to legally conjoin themselves with" What are you proposing that's different from that?
- ceras 5y ago
  Maybe pre-nup has a different meaning where you live. I'm in the US, and here a pre-nup is an agreement that defines custom rules for a marriage and divorce that are override, add to, and/or clarify the rules of the default marital contract. So, not everyone has one. Wikipedia defines it well: > Couples enter into a written prenuptial agreement to supersede many of the default marital laws that would otherwise apply in the event of divorce, such as the laws that govern the division of property, retirement benefits, savings, and the right to seek alimony (spousal support) with agreed-upon terms that provide certainty and clarify their marital rights. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenuptial_agreement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenuptial_agreement
- sokoloff 5y ago
  What places have mandatory pre-nuptial agreements?
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Everywhere? The point of an explicit pre-nuptial is to opt out of what would happen by default. It's opt-out, not opt-in. If you don't have a pre-nup, then you get the standard pre-nup terms which have usually been established over a long period of time, with detailed rules about homes, children, property etc.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      Do you think that’s what GGP meant (or others would most naturally read) in the phrase “I’d be in favor of mandatory pre-nups”? I do not.
vkou 5y ago
> I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married. Everyone already gets a mandatory pre-nup when they get married. It's <whatever the default divorce law of the land in your jurisdiction> is. IANAL, but as I understand it, having a pre-nup, in most jurisdiction is not a great shield against vindictive litigation. There are other good reasons to get one, though.
- jefftk 5y ago
  Being required to agree on something in advance with your prospective spouse would be different from agreeing to go with the default. It means learning a bit about what is standard, and putting some thought into whether what you want is different from that. It would also remove the negative signal of asking for a prenup: if everyone is required to talk and agree on something, then you aren't doing something that indicates low confidence in the success of your marriage.
secondaryacct 5y ago
I did a prenup with my wife. Wasnt easy because im an immigrant in China and she s Chinese, so when I proclaimed that a good mariage prepares for divorce, like we do now in France where separation of wealth is a trivial matter my family did for generations, I was met with defiance. How big a fortune must I have for being so protective :D But in the end we did it, it made total sense to her: what she works for and buys with her money is hers, and vice versa. Now we never have money issue or anything: she bought an appartment I have no stakes in nor claim to and she loves this financial independence. If we divorce, Ill prob pay an alemony since we have a child, but we wont tear each other over splitting possession: it s dealt with since the get go. I think it helps mariages to do that. Especially multi cultural ones like ours where there's a lot of small traps along the way.
- gedy 5y ago
  Different strokes I suppose, but my wife and I went all in when we married, with combined bank accounts, credit, car and home titles, etc. Our marriage feels stronger for that by signalling the commitment. (Married >20 years)
  - ThunderSizzle 5y ago
    I got married a year ago. That's what we do. There's no reason to "prepare for divorce" when both my wife and I made a vow before God to each other til we die. The problem is that alot of people don't mean it. They don't mean their vow "for worse, for sickness, for poorer until death do us part". People forget there is a 100% chance of worse, sickness, and poorer.
    - eatonphil 5y ago
      Of course I can't comment on your particular situation nor do I wish you bad luck, but religious couples are as likely or more likely to get divorced compared to non-religious couples [0]. Or at least the majority of divorces in the US are among the religious (according to this particular poll). Maybe "biased" because marriage is something more encouraged by religions in the first place. [0] https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/marital-status/divorcedseparated/ https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/marital-s...
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
anovikov 5y ago
I know a few people here in Cyprus who are here because they did not want to divorce (the other side made it clear it won't be amicable for them, with full intention of taking over all property). Instead, they just vanished to surface here :) (legal loopholes due to collisions between church vs civil marriage enables it to marry again while being married elsewhere). Of course, after that you got to be very careful about safeguarding your assets, but the infrastructure offered by this place - a former offshore tax haven - makes it easy even in much harder cases than "some dude who owes his wife an alimony".
IgorPartola 5y ago
Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married. Why are you involving the government in your love and sex life? Why complicate your financial situation so? If you want to publicly declare your love and commitment for your partner you can still have a ceremony and a party. Model it after hand-fasting ceremonies of old where you commit to each other for a year and a day. Then you can have a renewal party once a year. But soon as you sign a marriage license you are on the hook. Now sure some will say that there are benefits for marriage such as tax breaks, etc. But the expectation value is against you: what you save on taxes for a few years you will lose in divorce to the lawyers. Ending a romantic relationship is hard. Don’t complicate with marriage/divorce.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married. Lawyers (except maybe divorce specialist) love that, at least from a driving business point of view. It’s kind of like avoiding the problems that can arise with the a fallout between business partners by not creating a formal legal arrangement at the outset (except every US jurisdiction backstops that with what amounts to “common law partnership” [0], while marriage coverage is more spotty.) Marriage is, for people in a committed relationship of the type it is designed for, a shortcut to things you would need lots of legal documents drawn up to kinda sorta approximate without it. Including, messy as divorce can be, the relatively easy, straightforward, and predictable unwinding of the partnership compared with one that isn't a marriage but involves the same kind of long term mutual support and resource sharing that marriage is designed to deal with. [0] mostly, though, for the benefit of predictability for people who might want to sue you.
  - novok 5y ago
    Only 9/52 US states even have common law marriage : https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/living-together-book/chapter2-4.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/living-to... and only one of them, texas, is a top 5 state as far as population goes. So it's definitely a minority.
zapdrive 5y ago
When I got divorced, I would have happily paid a huge one-time settlement payment to my wife to avoid going through the whole process. I had a lot of high value assets from before, that did not appreciate much during our marriage. (In Canada, you only have to pay 50% of the increase in asset value from wedding day to separation day). I intimated this to my wife. She took that as a sign of weakness and dragged me through the courts (with encouragement from some social workers). At the end of the legal process she ended up getting a paltry sum (as compared to my initial offer). Also since our marriage lasted very small period of time, her alimony came out to be zero. My initial offer was 5x the amount she got in end. But I had to pay the lawyers a lot. I would have rather given that money to her. Also, by the time the whole process ended, my assets had significantly grown in value, so I had to liquidate a smaller amount to pay her share.
askonomm 5y ago
When I got married the prenup was just a checkbox (yes/no) on the application form. I ticked yes of course, because I don't know anyone in Europe who in their sound mind would want to lose half of what they have (or more?) during a divorce. It's an archaic system leftover from a time when women did not work and so it served as a lifeline for them, but that isn't the case anymore, at least not in Europe as far as I've observed. And so while yes I am aware that most marriages will fail, and mine might just be one of them, I'm not afraid for the divorce process at all.
cplusplusfellow 5y ago
Mandatory prenups that have to be approved by a judge along with the marriage license. Mandatory coursework on what divorce looks like. Affirmative renewal of the marriage every 7 years. Marriage is nothing more than an implied legal contract, whose terms are set upon dissolution, and a lawyer would be disbarred for advising their client to enter into such agreements.

by dpweb 5y ago

Arainach 5y ago

Prenups only matter when you have significant assets pre-marriage. With the price of housing these days, most people won't have any significant financial security until they're borderline infertile; how do prenups benefit these marriages?

bitcharmer 5y ago
Where I live prenups cover assets both: pre and post marriage. There is no such thing as co-owning anything unless both sides explicitly make it so. From what you are saying prenups are not a very good tool in your legal system but I assure you it works differently in many countries.

scotty79 5y ago

Or just skip marriage altogether.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
In many jurisdictions, common law relationships after a certain period of cohabitation are very similar to marriage when it comes to splitting up. I'm guessing you're not advocating not staying with someone for more than, say 2 years.
- scotty79 5y ago
  It might be worth swapping jurisdictions. Some places seem just bad for having any prolonged relationship.
  - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
    or depending on your gender swap jurisdiction when you see it's going pear shaped. France sees quite a bit of divorce tourism from UK and other European countries because they're "less progressive". So if you have a lot of money to lose move the whole family to France and after 2 or 3 years get divorced there.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  So you can’t be a room mate with the opposite sex without being considered common law married after that time period? I feel like any decent lawyer could blow that to pieces.
  - kristjansson 5y ago
    Usually part of the definition is holding yourself out to not married
  - diordiderot 5y ago
    same sex a applies as well in CA!
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      CA doesn't have common law marriage, so it is more accurate to say that it doesn't apply to same sex couples in the same way that it doesn't to oppozit5-sex couples.
david38 5y ago
Cold comfort if she gets pregnant and now you have no say.
- simonh 5y ago
  Don't make her pregnant.
  - vkou 5y ago
    Unfortunately, that requires exercising your say ahead of time, through contraception, vasectomy, or the radical step of making sure that your long-term goals are aligned with those of your partner.
- forty 5y ago
  You don't have to be married to the mother of your kids in many countries.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Huh?

chrisseaton 5y ago

Don’t prenuptial agreements only cover prenuptial assets? Most first-time married people obviously aren’t bringing many assets in the first place.

GavinMcG 5y ago
Nah, depending on the state, the law permits them to cover nearly anything.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
treis 5y ago
It's not usually the assets that cause a problem. It's future income that's the issue and usually in the context of a woman who raised kids and a man that worked.

javchz 5y ago

You're 100% right. Most functional divorces I have seen, are those where process end up quickly, especially if there are children. For the sake of their kids it's the best thing that can happen. The movie "Marriage Story" it's a great reflection of your point, in how the lawyers weaponize resentment in relationships (affairs, deadbedrooms, chores neglect, etc) to get the process going for as long as possible with the promise of getting the best %... but in the end, their funds are eaten away by legal fees. #NotAllLawyers of course, they already have (with some exceptions) an underserved bad rap, and I have meet some with an ethic code of steel. But it's better the be aware that can still happen.

dpweb 5y ago
Yeah, certainly not trying to bash lawyers. I'm a billable consultant myself. I don't think our lawyers were trying to do anything wrong. This was the process. Exchange information, Negotiate, if negotiation fails - meet w judge for pre-trial opinion (what they would rule with current information). If still contested, Discovery building up to Trial. If they were milking us, they'd be pushing for the trial, cause the discovery is the real billable hours killer. But, I had to take the responsibility when it looks like the negotiation is going badly - let's get this in front of the judge NOW. Discovery/trial legal bills would have wiped out most of our assets at the time.
- unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  No, as a lawyer who personally just completed this process, my faith in my profession will never be the same after witnessing the toxic mix of bad faith and incompetence of the opposing lawyer, collusive ineffectiveness of the retired judge we hired to act as mediator, and virtually everything else about the process. The first 10 months were wasted with those two failing to read past page 1 of a critical document to find the operative language and being unable to craft a coherent plan as a result. That was just the start. The lesson I learned was it doesn't matter how high-minded your rules, principles and processes are, the matrimonial bar and bench seems to be a magnet for just craven incompence, mean spiritedness, and, when you get past all of that, in the best case, indifference to the unnecessary suffering they cause. So while I appreciate the optimism of the article, and in general I agree with the principle that lawyers are unnecessarily "bashed", when it comes to the matrimonial bar some higher level of regulation, self regulation or other form of redress is required.

invalidname 5y ago

This is great and important advice. You made a very smart move. Parents went through a 20 year divorce and indeed the lawyers bled them dry.

sokoloff 5y ago
A divorce after 20 years of marriage, or a divorce that took 20 from initiation to conclusion? (In normal context, I’d read it as the former; in this specific context, it seems ambiguous.)
- mensetmanusman 5y ago
  No one has enough wealth to hire divorce lawyers for 20 years. Even Bezos would be on the streets.

silisili 5y ago

> You gotta treat it like your future is on fire. I rather stupidly wrote my experience without reading all the comments, but wish I'd read this quote first. This is exactly how I'd sum up how to treat it!

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

> Prenups aren’t 100% but having gone through the process I saw. Legal contracts matter! this. The whole point of making a contract is to agree how to disagree. The best contracts spell out the edge cases. If both can be mature enough very early to talk about these, then it's a basis that predicts the ending to be civilized in the first place. In reality motivation for marriage is a lot more complex than what can be spelled out in a contract. In my case how would I have put on paper the edge cases that came with wanting to get married to a manipulative, deeply broken, drama queen which was the only reference model my bi-polar, suicidal and abusive mother equipped me with. Or how would a young woman from a wife-beating father chose her spouse. In my case marriage accelerated my own demise (a path that I was already on) but I needed that crash (without knowing it back then) to figure out the problem in the first place. I've seen in myself and many friends (both smart and dumb, poor and rich) no matter how intelligent, prudent and sensible in other areas of life, people abandon all reason with love. Like it's the most powerful and destructive drugs of them all when taken by people who haven't fixed their own issues. Like women who go into it as a way of "fixing him" or guys who need somebody to "complete them" (or a million other ways to destroy themselves). No amount of risk management can help you when your goal is to jump off a cliff. Oddly couples never see it themselves. It's always the friends or a stranger who can tell with shocking accuracy by looking at the couple for only a few minutes why their dynamic is f'ed up.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

> I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married. Isn't this basically what happened everywhere in the civilized world? People used to just dump their families so now you're legally required to support spouses and children (even if not legally married). This then leads to shock headlines like "Billionaire forced to share unearned fortune with the person they agreed to legally conjoin themselves with" What are you proposing that's different from that?

ceras 5y ago
Maybe pre-nup has a different meaning where you live. I'm in the US, and here a pre-nup is an agreement that defines custom rules for a marriage and divorce that are override, add to, and/or clarify the rules of the default marital contract. So, not everyone has one. Wikipedia defines it well: > Couples enter into a written prenuptial agreement to supersede many of the default marital laws that would otherwise apply in the event of divorce, such as the laws that govern the division of property, retirement benefits, savings, and the right to seek alimony (spousal support) with agreed-upon terms that provide certainty and clarify their marital rights. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenuptial_agreement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenuptial_agreement
sokoloff 5y ago
What places have mandatory pre-nuptial agreements?
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Everywhere? The point of an explicit pre-nuptial is to opt out of what would happen by default. It's opt-out, not opt-in. If you don't have a pre-nup, then you get the standard pre-nup terms which have usually been established over a long period of time, with detailed rules about homes, children, property etc.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Do you think that’s what GGP meant (or others would most naturally read) in the phrase “I’d be in favor of mandatory pre-nups”? I do not.

vkou 5y ago

> I’d very much be in favor of mandatory pre-nups when getting married. Everyone already gets a mandatory pre-nup when they get married. It's <whatever the default divorce law of the land in your jurisdiction> is. IANAL, but as I understand it, having a pre-nup, in most jurisdiction is not a great shield against vindictive litigation. There are other good reasons to get one, though.

jefftk 5y ago
Being required to agree on something in advance with your prospective spouse would be different from agreeing to go with the default. It means learning a bit about what is standard, and putting some thought into whether what you want is different from that. It would also remove the negative signal of asking for a prenup: if everyone is required to talk and agree on something, then you aren't doing something that indicates low confidence in the success of your marriage.

secondaryacct 5y ago

I did a prenup with my wife. Wasnt easy because im an immigrant in China and she s Chinese, so when I proclaimed that a good mariage prepares for divorce, like we do now in France where separation of wealth is a trivial matter my family did for generations, I was met with defiance. How big a fortune must I have for being so protective :D But in the end we did it, it made total sense to her: what she works for and buys with her money is hers, and vice versa. Now we never have money issue or anything: she bought an appartment I have no stakes in nor claim to and she loves this financial independence. If we divorce, Ill prob pay an alemony since we have a child, but we wont tear each other over splitting possession: it s dealt with since the get go. I think it helps mariages to do that. Especially multi cultural ones like ours where there's a lot of small traps along the way.

gedy 5y ago
Different strokes I suppose, but my wife and I went all in when we married, with combined bank accounts, credit, car and home titles, etc. Our marriage feels stronger for that by signalling the commitment. (Married >20 years)
- ThunderSizzle 5y ago
  I got married a year ago. That's what we do. There's no reason to "prepare for divorce" when both my wife and I made a vow before God to each other til we die. The problem is that alot of people don't mean it. They don't mean their vow "for worse, for sickness, for poorer until death do us part". People forget there is a 100% chance of worse, sickness, and poorer.
  - eatonphil 5y ago
    Of course I can't comment on your particular situation nor do I wish you bad luck, but religious couples are as likely or more likely to get divorced compared to non-religious couples [0]. Or at least the majority of divorces in the US are among the religious (according to this particular poll). Maybe "biased" because marriage is something more encouraged by religions in the first place. [0] https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/marital-status/divorcedseparated/ https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/marital-s...

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

anovikov 5y ago

I know a few people here in Cyprus who are here because they did not want to divorce (the other side made it clear it won't be amicable for them, with full intention of taking over all property). Instead, they just vanished to surface here :) (legal loopholes due to collisions between church vs civil marriage enables it to marry again while being married elsewhere). Of course, after that you got to be very careful about safeguarding your assets, but the infrastructure offered by this place - a former offshore tax haven - makes it easy even in much harder cases than "some dude who owes his wife an alimony".

IgorPartola 5y ago

Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married. Why are you involving the government in your love and sex life? Why complicate your financial situation so? If you want to publicly declare your love and commitment for your partner you can still have a ceremony and a party. Model it after hand-fasting ceremonies of old where you commit to each other for a year and a day. Then you can have a renewal party once a year. But soon as you sign a marriage license you are on the hook. Now sure some will say that there are benefits for marriage such as tax breaks, etc. But the expectation value is against you: what you save on taxes for a few years you will lose in divorce to the lawyers. Ending a romantic relationship is hard. Don’t complicate with marriage/divorce.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Or here is a neat trick lawyers don’t want you to know: just don’t get married. Lawyers (except maybe divorce specialist) love that, at least from a driving business point of view. It’s kind of like avoiding the problems that can arise with the a fallout between business partners by not creating a formal legal arrangement at the outset (except every US jurisdiction backstops that with what amounts to “common law partnership” [0], while marriage coverage is more spotty.) Marriage is, for people in a committed relationship of the type it is designed for, a shortcut to things you would need lots of legal documents drawn up to kinda sorta approximate without it. Including, messy as divorce can be, the relatively easy, straightforward, and predictable unwinding of the partnership compared with one that isn't a marriage but involves the same kind of long term mutual support and resource sharing that marriage is designed to deal with. [0] mostly, though, for the benefit of predictability for people who might want to sue you.
- novok 5y ago
  Only 9/52 US states even have common law marriage : https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/living-together-book/chapter2-4.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/living-to... and only one of them, texas, is a top 5 state as far as population goes. So it's definitely a minority.

zapdrive 5y ago

When I got divorced, I would have happily paid a huge one-time settlement payment to my wife to avoid going through the whole process. I had a lot of high value assets from before, that did not appreciate much during our marriage. (In Canada, you only have to pay 50% of the increase in asset value from wedding day to separation day). I intimated this to my wife. She took that as a sign of weakness and dragged me through the courts (with encouragement from some social workers). At the end of the legal process she ended up getting a paltry sum (as compared to my initial offer). Also since our marriage lasted very small period of time, her alimony came out to be zero. My initial offer was 5x the amount she got in end. But I had to pay the lawyers a lot. I would have rather given that money to her. Also, by the time the whole process ended, my assets had significantly grown in value, so I had to liquidate a smaller amount to pay her share.

askonomm 5y ago

When I got married the prenup was just a checkbox (yes/no) on the application form. I ticked yes of course, because I don't know anyone in Europe who in their sound mind would want to lose half of what they have (or more?) during a divorce. It's an archaic system leftover from a time when women did not work and so it served as a lifeline for them, but that isn't the case anymore, at least not in Europe as far as I've observed. And so while yes I am aware that most marriages will fail, and mine might just be one of them, I'm not afraid for the divorce process at all.

cplusplusfellow 5y ago

Mandatory prenups that have to be approved by a judge along with the marriage license. Mandatory coursework on what divorce looks like. Affirmative renewal of the marriage every 7 years. Marriage is nothing more than an implied legal contract, whose terms are set upon dissolution, and a lawyer would be disbarred for advising their client to enter into such agreements.