No-Fault divorce did not ruin your marriage
War of the Roses (A Dirty Shame, Part 2)
Irreconcilable Differences
Divorce lawyers are killers of dreams; they are murderers of hope. Their sheer existence is built on heartbreak. They are debt collectors of the soul coming for the physical payment of your spiritual cheque. Often, they are blamed for the death of your passion, but on that, they are just the pallbearers, ushering you to the end of things. You started this yourself, or maybe the other started it, but now they are here to end it – to throw the final dirt on the pile, some flowers maybe. Lawyers can do nothing about your pain. Lawyers make terrible psychologists because you cannot litigate or legislate someone into loving you. They do not deal with the feelings of the thing; they cannot. That is a job for the shrink or the priest or your mother. They deal with the details of the end; the break in the contract that you never knew you had signed.
In a way, divorces and wars are the same. Both parties are atrociously aggrieved by something. They believe the other is wrong and they need to fight to the very end. Rarely, they do, as settling on the courthouse steps is the only real option unless you have a lot of money. Like wars, there is symmetrical and asymmetrical warfare. In the latter, one side overpowers the other, mostly because they come from a rich family or are crazy. The second carries on in battles of attrition, until finally they are too spent to fight. There can be violence. Sometimes, although much more rarely, someone dies.
Almost everyone is the same. If you get a divorce, you will cling to things that are already gone, the house, the sex, the car, the bank account, the retirement fund, the feeling of comfort, and sadly, sometimes, the love of your children. You will bargain and argue and get angry and get drunk. You will, probably for the first time in your life, come face to face with the court, with the government with whom you have an agreement you never knew you had. You see, a marriage isn’t an agreement with two people, it’s an agreement between two people and society. It is society that will want to be bought out, and this will be a complete shock. You may never do it again for the rest of your life, or you may do it many times. When it fails, it will always hurt. There is no prenup for that.
You may remain friends or not. If you have children, you will have to contend with that. My advice is to be as affable as possible. To quote the movie referenced above, “Be generous to the point of night sweats.” Your children will know who is in the wrong even if you never tell them. They are like horses that way – and they are unforgiving in a way that will cut you to the core. It is better that you agree with the other, “we loved each other once enough to deserve civility and grace now.” That will not be easy. A divorce is the summation of many little vicious stabs. They will still hurt like nagging, nasty papercuts. It will be impossible to hide, but maybe you can mitigate it with compassion. I assure you, no matter what happened or who started it, the other is just as afraid as you are.
The lawyer’s job is very simple. For the law, it’s a question of math. When did it start? When did it end? Who had what and how much is it now? Who can move forward and who cannot without some help? You see all that support you pay, that’s not for you or the other or even the kids, that is for me. That is for everyone who would have to pay if you don’t. Because, again, the agreement is not with each other; it is with us, the taxpayers. We don’t really care whose fault it is. We don’t care. We don’t even know you. Why should we pay for your kids? It doesn’t matter, really, so stop crying and pay up.
How much is this going to cost? That is always the first question, and the lawyers never know until it’s all over. It may not cost you anything, or it may cost you everything. It all depends on how long you cling to what was and refuse to see what is. How expensive would you like it to be? There is no shame on making it cheaper. No one will think you are any braver for coming out on the losing end after you have fought so hard. Sometimes people just lose wars. But it will be cheaper if you don’t fight a war at all. Often, one party has already made up their minds and there’s little you can do to change that. Some will think it was your fault, some will not. People see what they want to see. It probably won’t matter; they’ll all abandon you anyway. You taint the world view; you spoil their happily-ever-after dreams.
Only the lawyers will know the truth and only know it partially. They cannot read your mind; they cannot read your spouse’s mind. After so many years of experience, I can only tell you how this ends which is like how every other one ends. It is always the same, only the time it takes is different.
Disclosure
I am not your lawyer. I say this like lawyers say this because now you are in my wheelhouse, I do not want you to take this as legal advice. Despite my considerable experience with both Canada and the USA, divorce rules vary greatly depending on the jurisdiction. Some will have no-fault, some will have fault. Some will cap alimony and child support, others won’t. Some will have different rules about how property is divided and distributed, and these could be VERY different depending on where you are. Do not take anything said here as advice, even if you live in British Columbia, Canada and are desperate for help. What I say, I say in broad strokes, so you understand why the government is involved in the first place. This *is* a philosophy of law blog – sort of. (Well, whatever it is, it keeps me from screaming profanities on X so onward we go.)
Most people conflate two ideas: a marriage of love under God and the government interest in the actions of a married couple. They talk about bonds, they talk about duties, they talk about things like what they owe each other emotionally. They talk about chores and work and who picks up the kids. They talk about what their spouse does that annoys them. They talk about the other person they could have married. Yeah, you went to city hall and got a certificate, but what does that mean anyway? Big deal. Who cares? It took ten minutes. The clerk was nicer than usual because it’s a rare occasion that someone comes to city hall because they are happy. Usually, they are there to complain about the potholes, or the sound of construction or the mayor. They never come there for anything good until they come there to get married.
That moment you got the license, that’s not the ‘real’ marriage in most people’s mind. The real marriage is the ceremony. It’s the party afterwards. It’s the honeymoon. It’s every day, all day, until the day your spouse wakes up and goes, “I don’t want to do this anymore and there’s nothing you can say or do to stop me.” At that point, the marriage does become about that license. There’s no ceremony to part ways, no big party, no “bittermoon”. (Well, unless you count that three-day bender you went on after you realized this shit was getting real.) No one, not a single person in this scenario is happy. Not your spouse, or your family, or the judge that’s telling you what you have to pay, and certainly…certainly not you.
It is then you realize that license came with a whole bunch of new rules. You never read these rules. Why, you didn’t even know there were rules. “You mean that one fight where I left and went to the hotel, that matters?” you ask the paralegal. You never imagined that when you made your spouse a co-owner of the business to avoid the taxes that she would get half of it walking out the door. You never thought that they would be able to claim half of your inheritance, or that house your mother gave you when you got married. That was YOUR mother. THAT’S YOUR MONEY! Well, maybe.
These rules in British Columbia, Canada, are known as The Divorce Act, The Family Law Act, and the rules of court for the provincial and supreme courts. They may be called something different where you are, but they all have the same purpose: to fiscally and physically separate two people in the way that most benefits the children first, and the taxpayer the second. The spouses come off a distance third. And when they do get what they get, it should leave them both off roughly in the same place. Impoverished spouses will wind up on the government dole and we can’t have that, can we? That’s why the government cares so much and it made up a bunch of rules. It doesn’t care that you found your “soul mate.” Nor does it make a difference that you “grew apart.” The government’s ONLY interest is that regardless whatever happened in the marriage, if it ends, neither spouse nor the children should fall onto the taxpayer’s purse. And that’s why those rules exist. It was never about you or your spouse or your broken heart.
Grounds
There are basically two types of divorce: fault and no-fault. Fault is usually restricted to a discreet set of actions (cruelty, abuse, cheating, and abandonment) and no-fault is simply based on the couple living apart for a set period of time. In BC, this is a year exactly. For most of history, you had to have a “fault” to divorce someone, if you could divorce at all. However, that “fault” was much easier for men to obtain than women. Adultery was the most common grievance on which one could mount a plea, but illness, desertion, insanity, cruelty and impotence could also be a means to get out of marriage. Certain religions refused to allow divorce at all, most notably the Catholics, but in all cases, divorce was seen as undesirable and often the spouses were forbidden from marrying again. This meant that women would fair poorly after a divorce, but there were, in some religions, ways to ensure that she didn’t fall into total poverty or could still pay a dowery for another husband.
You can see the seeds of modern divorce in this history, waiting periods, grounds, and post-divorce support. Very few ‘religious’ sacraments commanded the interest of the sovereign like marriage, and that’s because in the time before DNA tracing, there was no way of tracing whose child belonged to whom. More importantly, it was often inevitable that a woman would become pregnant “somehow” so better to pair her up as soon as possible with a man who could get stuck with the bill.
Whether this was a happy arrangement or not was irrelevant, and one can read plenty of stories about the lives of unhappily married (mostly female) people. These “Streetcar Named Desire” marriages might have been miserable but that was still less risky than the alternative of being alone. It hasn’t been until recently that a woman could be born, live and die never needing the assistance of men or children. Our societies have made the world so safe, at least here the west, so full of food and chattel, that women can live their entire lives peaceably without having to choose between being married or suffering a terrible end. This “de-risking” of singlehood probably explains the lack of babies better than any other reason. Why should a woman make herself financially, physically, and emotionally vulnerable for the rest of her life on some man going, “Trust me, bro.” No wonder they burned all those bras the second they could.
Aside from needing protection, pint-sized farm hands, and a variety of skills necessary to make things like carriages and cast-iron skillets, societies universally made the cost of out-of-wedlock births very high on both the man and the woman. This manifested through fines, ostracization, shaming, threats of violence, stagnation of careers, or banishment. Whole families got involved, and the man who had offended the honor of this family could be murdered in a duel. He might even be hanged if he raped the wrong girl.[i] Sure, this was less protective of women than our modern-day justice, but it did exist. In all cases, the laws sought to take care of the children so they did not fall on the public purse. I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that paying child support in the 700th year of our Lord elicited just as much bellyaching from men then as it does today.
To prove a fault, or anything in court, you need evidence. Courts will listen to what the spouses say and may even believe one or the other without proof, but of course it helps A LOT if they can prove it. Anyone who has watched any legal show ever (Suits, Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, Law and Order) is probably somewhat familiar with the idea that evidence can make or break a case, but the final moment of running down the aisle with this or that smoking gun doesn’t happen in a real court. Most courts have strict rules of evidence as to what can or cannot be allowed shown at trial. What is coming in is usually well known long before you are standing in the witness box. Hearsay (what a third party said about what the person said, like the game “Telephone”), evidence acquired illegally or unfairly, evidence that is “prejudicial” (which means there’s something about it so shocking that it might affect the judge’s or the jury’s ability to be unbiased) or conversations between the client and their lawyer can all be totally excluded under these rules.
All that goes out the window in a family law court room. The “rules,” as they are understood are relaxed and sometimes ignored entirely. There may be hard and fast rules about experts to avoid a “battle of the experts” and certain kinds of disclosures about money may be mandatory, but since these fights often involve things that are hard to prove like domestic violence and child abuse the court will want to hear everything it can. Lack of proper disclosure in a family law case is referred to as a “cancer.” And the court’s only job, in the case of children, is “the best interest of the child.” If one or both spouses get legally or fiscally gored in the process, it doesn’t matter.
Clients are always shocked that their spouse can just say things and the judge may believe them. Can’t the judge see they are just lying? Why is he even listening to him? She only knows that because she went through his phone! Surely, there’s some law against search and seizure??? Complainants often want complete fidelity to what they think are the rules, and the poor family lawyer is left trying to explain to them, “I’m sorry, friend, but this is just not how anything works.” Also, there’s no “plaintiff” or “defendant” either. All that stuff stays in criminal law courts where it belongs and where I don’t have to deal with it. Rules of evidence are complicated. There isn’t enough coffee in this world for that.
That’s if they can afford a lawyer at all. Lawyers are expensive. They require cash up front. They can never tell you how much it’s going to cost, and if they do, they are probably ripping you off. Even if you can afford to hire a lawyer in the beginning, you may not be able to in the end. Filing is expensive, serving the summons is expensive, attending the mandatory mediations with a lawyer is expensive, having an emergency hearing to get back your kids or force the spouse with the money to pay the bills is expensive. Moving out of the house is expensive, buying a new car, a tv, a set of dishes, another computer, a new cellphone, and a bed to sleep on all cost money.
Transporting the children from house to house can be expensive and having two of everything because she never packs a toothbrush, or he never returns the raincoat is expensive. Your life was expensive before; now take every expense and double it. Somehow you both are going to have to be able to afford it. Most couples can’t remain in the same house together for very long. Inevitably, their resentment and pain build up. They snipe at each other, they argue. They do petty things to take revenge. They may not wind up swinging from a chandelier, about to fall to their deaths, but I wouldn’t put it beyond some of my old clients. Someone will have to move out.
And that’s before you even get to the actual fight, the discovery, the demand for particulars and the notices to admit, the list of documents and the paralegal that organizes it, the preliminary meetings with the judges, the interim applications for conduct of sale on the house or demanding a psychological evaluation of the family, the exchange of numerous affidavits, and of course, the trial…the goddam trial….and about a thousand binders…. It all adds up.
A lot of people try to do it by themselves, and courts encourage this by trying to make justice accessible. I don’t know how it works in other jurisdictions, but it doesn’t in British Columbia. Approximately 50% of all family law cases are conducted by self-represented litigants, but they win only 14% of the time. Sure, not all cases can be won by everyone all the time, which means it’s going to be 50% no matter what – someone has to lose – but at 14% that’s still a tiny fraction of all the cases overall. The deck is stacked against someone trying to do their own lawyering. If this “pro se” or “lay litigant” can’t keep it together, or is just dumb, it complicates the process in a myriad of ways. Lawyers and judges are required by codes of conduct to assist these litigants in the hearings at court, even if the lawyer is representing the other side, but these litigants are in a legal trial by fire. They’ve been thrown into a pool to learn how to swim. Often, they just drown.
These cases can drag on for years. Clogged courts, changes in venue and representation, job loss or stress related illnesses, children who still have a long way to independence, spouses who are old or are infirm, unrealistic expectations and frivolous litigation can slow things down to a crawl. In 2021, the pandemic ground the BC courts to a dead stop. Both ancient judges and lawyers, supposedly the most skilled among us, had to figure out how to use that newfangled box on their desk called “a computer.” It was not pretty. Any divorce lawyer not figuring out how today to use AI to bring down the cost, or worse, refusing to use email and digital signatures is committing a grave sin against their social license. In British Columbia, they actually had to make a judicial rule (this has the force of law) to make lawyers accept documents by email. It should have been embarrassing.[ii]
Spouses are not good at moving on. They have to accept that this is happening and that there’s no stopping it. It takes two people to make a marriage, but only one to break it. By the time the lawyers get involved though, it *will* happen. The speed at which it happens is going to depend on how long it takes the client to process that grief. The marriage may have ended on paper, but the divorce is only really finalized in the mind. Some fight it to the bitter end. Trying to prove there was a ‘fault’ is hard enough when your estranged spouse is a schizophrenic or murdered someone; try doing it when they are just covering up that one night in Bangkok.
Even when the reason is as plain as the nose on the judge’s face, he or she is limited on what they can decide without something “more” in a “fault” case. (Although to be fair, a judge can do anything. Just try to pull a fast one on a judge who has been on the bench longer than you have probably been alive and you will find that out. An angry judge is the ultimate FAFO.) Proving all of this “fault”, adultery, abuse, cruelty, just adds an abusive layer to an already fraught process. A 2003 study found that states adopting no-fault divorce laws experienced a roughly 30% decrease in intimate partner violence for both men and women, a 10% drop in women murdered by their partners, and an 8-16% decline in female suicides.[iii]
Fortunately, there’s another way and that way has a time limit on the pain.
Vexatious Litigants
There is a certain type of man who fights a divorce. All kinds of men get divorced, of course, but it takes a certain type to go scorched earth, thereby providing an endless supply of billable hours for the divorce lawyers of both parties. I know you are going “don’t women fight it?” and yes, they do, but usually only because they’ve been boxed in a corner and have no other choice. They are situational fighters, not usually the ones that do it out of rage or spite. I know that might come as a surprise to any man out there who has been through a messy divorce, but overall, it’s the women who are trying to walk away and the men are making that as difficult as possible. I’ve never heard a single female client say, “the lawyer is making us fight.”
Maybe that has mostly to do with how men and women fight differently. Men will run straight at an opponent, wanting to overpower him until he gives, until he acknowledges their superior strength and prowess. Women, on the other hand, seek to exclude, to ostracize, to cut off contact. They do this because they know that other women will feel that and they can’t just run at them straight. Direct confrontation will just get them laughed at. The odd girl out will feel that more than any uppercut to the jaw. That’s what hurts. I know I’m speaking in wide generalization, but this leads to this lopsided effect where the man seeks to engage over and over and over again, and she just wants out. If she has enough money to get out, she’s gone, baby, gone, and the fight is over. Thanks, feminism.
The problem (well, he might see it as a problem) is that the justice system as it pertains to family law is not set up for this gladiatorial system where the parties fight or demand restitution. It is set up to separate the parties, as much as is feasible, without leaving the children or the public to pick up the pieces. These men never realize that their fight isn’t with their estranged wives, it’s with the state itself, a thing that is too big and too powerful to ever overcome. They will always wind up humiliated because they went in expecting a boxing match only to find a firing squad.
Usually, this type of man is very successful. He has the money to continue fighting; he is used to getting his own way. A bully in the rest of his life, he’s never met someone with more force of will, and the ability to impose it, than he does when he first encounters a judge. If the judge is a woman, she’s even more reviled by him, convinced that some kind of sisterly love passes from the court to the wife, even though this judge may have given this man wide leeway to avoid being overturned later. Even if the judge has let him drag on the case for months, or even years, change lawyers multiple times, given him plenty of time to comply with orders, which he still refuses to do, and heard him in live hearings on multiple occasions, this man curses the system because he can not get the one thing he wants: her. He wants her humiliation and the acknowledgement that he “won.” This type of competitive man will drive himself in to bankruptcy, only blinking when an angry judge threatens to throw him into jail, something he never considered was even possible. Sometimes he even kills himself, or someone else. He is, by far, the most frightening of clients, and the most in love.
And it’s a certain type of marriage that causes the most conflict. I call them “The Grand Bargain.” Grand Bargain marriages are the marriages where the standard contract is implied. The couple never consciously thought about how to be married. Why would they need to? People have been doing this for centuries. The man marries the woman; she has the children. Because she cannot make the money he can, she stays home with the kids or maybe works little, meaningless jobs to wherever they moved for his job. Either way, he is the breadwinner. As the kids grow up and get out, she goes back to caring for him as he grows older and more vulnerable. He dies, she gets everything, and the kids remain to care for her until she also passes. That’s it. That’s the deal. Most people don’t even realize that’s the deal they’ve struck until it starts to unravel. They just did what their parents did, what they thought they were supposed to do. They never considered what they would do if things went wrong. But life rarely works like that. And when things unpeel, they can do so in the worst possible way.
She has the baby but she has no other friends in the neighborhood because they are all at work. She is left to fend for herself all day, alone, until he comes home. Everything she has goes to care for their children, which drains her. It’s *never* enough money to be comfortable, and all he does is complain about it, asking her what “did she do all day.” She resents him, the way he spends their money, the way he doesn’t even begin to understand her pain or struggle. If she does work, her job allows her some kind of outlet but still stresses her just as much as his job does his. If then she’s late because of him and she comes home to see the one thing she asked for him to do is not done, the sheer lack of genuine respect grates on her.
He feels ignored because now her focus isn’t on him and won’t be until the children grow up. Maybe it will never come back. All he wanted was some pussy and a project, but she doesn’t appreciate how he fixed that thing she'd been asking for. She used to want him, all the time, now it’s just freezing cold in that bedroom. Or maybe she’s gotten too fat or stopped dressing like she used to. What is wrong with her? He doesn’t understand. Maybe he won’t ever.
Or maybe it gets even more serious, he gambles, she has an affair, they both drink, their kid has serious accident – whatever. The strain is there. If it gets bad enough, if they don’t know what to do and get caught in the cycle of resentment and contempt that poisons every interaction, the marriage will fall apart. There’s practically no stopping it. And without the constraints of geography, family, community, church or economy, there’s nothing strong enough to bind them together to weather that storm. They just feel alone and betrayed. Before they realize what’s happening, they fucking hate each other.
“Grand Bargain” marriages will start to crack along gender lines. She’s not really worked and now has no skills. Maybe she’s too old to get them. According to a study in the Harvard Business Review, the longer a woman takes off to take care of a family, the harder it is to regain her earning power when she goes back. In the span of three years, she can come back to expect a pay cut of 37%, making her even more dependent on her husband.[iv] If she leaves him, he will of course demand she get a job now, no matter how realistic that expectation is. Any job she can get will not even come close to paying for the childcare she provides for free. And she will need more because her job will require overtime or have odd hours or even just think she’s “lesser” for being a mom that sometimes has to jet at 3 pm to get the kids because the nanny got sick or doesn’t hang around on a Friday to get drunk with the c-suite. God help you if you tell anyone at work, “sorry, but the kids come first,” even though they absolutely should and everyone knows it.
That is how “division of labor” divorces happen. It might lead to affairs, or abuse, or addiction, all “grounds,” but often there is where it starts. Like bankruptcy, it happens slowly, then all at once. It was just something wrong that was little bother in the beginning but now is a gigantic, unsolvable problem. If the couple can’t reconnect and stop the spiral they are in, or even if they wait too late, it’s the end of the marriage in spirit. Often, no one even understands what went so wrong.
Sure, it could be some big thing that a spouse can point to. Maybe there’s a sickness, or a difficult kid, or your spouse decides to change gender, but those are easy. And even with grounds available, it’s expensive and time consuming to get that kind of divorce. Mostly, these kinds of breaks are still handled as if they are no-fault. By the time the parties get around to actually ending a marriage, a year or several may have passed. The divorce certificate is almost an afterthought.
They never even talked about money at all. She knows she won’t have as much money at her disposal, but since he was the boss, she may have not gotten to decide what happened with it anyway. Any money, or at least some relief, will be a bird in the hand. I don’t know how many women I’ve watched relax when I inform them that he can’t just leave her with nothing –even when he earned all of it. The money is never what people seem to think it is – as if they haven’t just cut their income completely in half – she’s just grateful to be out with something. It’s going to be so much better this way. And for her, it is.
Sometimes these men will sue for full custody, an attempt to cut her off from her child support. But the court looks through the children’s eyes: mommy was always the one, she was always there. You can’t take her away from me now. She gets custody or as it’s referred to in BC, “the primary residence” and his ploy just wastes money and never works. He still has an automatic right to see his kids, but men hardly have the bond that women have. I have seen men simply walk away from their children, frustrated that their powerplay to get out of support didn’t work. They’ll complain bitterly about it, but no one should feel sorry for them. More importantly, his kids will feel that, and they will never forgive him.
Gay couples have an easier time of this because there’s no gender divide to automatically fall into. Plus, they fight the same way over the same things. Men fight over money; women fight over the kids. I’ve seen a few battles, but without children to fight over, or the subconscious acquiescence to the power imbalance inherent in the gender disparity, they never quite have the same feeling of betrayal. “The Grand Bargain” marriage promises the man a life free of piddling issues like if there’s enough milk in the fridge or if the bathroom has enough toilet paper or the towels are clean. SHE PROMISED HIM THIS and all he had to do was make the money. It just wasn’t enough money.
Interim Applications
It is often said that women file for divorce more than men, but of course she does because she has to. Like all the mental labor in their marriage, she’s the one stuck with doing it. Typically it happens like this: he walks out hoping she’ll change her mind when he stops paying the mortgage, or the insurance, or the cheerleading fees, or for the lights. He maxes out the credit cards and takes out a second and a third mortgage. Can’t get blood from a turnip, he figures. He buys a sports car and gets a new girlfriend, then goes out with their friends, hoping she’ll realize what she lost. He won’t come and take care of the kids, or he won’t bring them back on time or at all. He drags his feet to pay her. He spoils the children to entice them to love him more. That is the worst for her. He’s found her soft spot. Finally, not knowing what to do she'll break down, go to the lawyer's, and he'll say to her, "We can get you money today, but you will have to file something to get a judge to do something."
This isn't to say that women are complete angels. They are capable of doing shitty things when hurt, too. In response to his provocations, she, in turn, will threaten to take the kids and go her mother’s. She’ll get a new boyfriend and show him off to their friends. She’ll fight over the house. Where is she supposed to live anyway? In a rental??? She’ll have it declared her “exclusive residence” and he’ll have to move out. She’ll move the boyfriend in. She’ll say he’s an abusive jerk. She’ll try to tell him he owes her every penny he’s ever made, or he will “never see your kids again.” That will piss him off. Maybe she’ll call the ministry (Child Protective Services in the USA) and accuse him of abuse. Maybe she’ll call the cops. She'd better have a reason because if she doesn't, everyone will catch onto it really quick.
Men suffer worse too. He tries to hang out with the boys, but they have to go home to their wives, and he winds up drinking alone. He begs her to come back, he threatens to kill himself. Maybe he threatens her, maybe he threatens the kids. He blames the lawyers, “they are MAKING her fight. They just want MONEY, they don’t care,” as if it’s the lawyers who told the woman to leave or who are doing the deciding and not the judge. Divorce isn’t great for women, but it’s horrible for men – even the ones that have it coming. They don’t understand what is happening to them or why. They struggle, they ask themselves what did I do that was so wrong? She did this to me! I do feel sorry for them, barring some terrible action on their part. Men are limited. It is a rare one that goes, “oh yeah, I’m an asshole and now I’m paying for it.” Usually, those men are fabulously rich. To them, this is just business. To the poor ones, she was all they had.
If the lawyer can’t get through to him, finally a judge somewhere, somehow, will explain to him in no uncertain terms that he has to pay out his “business partner.” Child support is the right of the child, at least here in BC, so she can’t contract out of it even if she wants to. The reality of economics and welfare rules will force her to try and collect. There will be a whole code of law that he didn’t even know existed about who has to pay what. The judge will order it paid, and he will pay it – if he doesn’t want to go to jail.
Both parties may say how horrible the other party is and how unfair it is to anyone who will listen. And I believe they believe that. They aren't intending to lie, but only the parties and lawyers will really know what is happening. In most jurisdictions, court records for family matters are completely sealed. You won’t be able to check your friend’s story because you will never see the affidavits or the pleadings or how they behaved behind closed doors. Even as the lawyers, our sight is still limited. Despite often believing that clients believe what they are saying is true, lawyers are best to regard their clients as unreliable narrators until they get on the stand in the courtroom. You say your friend’s wife took him for everything? Well. Maybe.
In BC, in order to stave off these kinds of fights, there are more rules. She can get her portion of the money she’s obviously going to get from their savings and from the house before any other legal action is taken. Either party can get exclusive control over the sale of the house. There are emergency interim orders for visitation and support, which often is the crux of the argument. There are mandatory meetings with judges, called judicial case conferences, where the possibilities are laid out long before the trial. Often this is a dose of reality of what is to come. Orders can be made here that end the process at that meeting as there will be nothing left to fight over. There are independent experts, considered officers of the court, that act as neutral arbiters on issues like who is the better parent and what the house is really worth. There are requirements that both parties seek unconflicted legal counsel and the lawyers themselves have an obligation to stop silly arguments or risk their ability to practice law.
Trust Funds
Being a family law lawyer is not the safest of legal jobs. Every single divorcing person I’ve ever met has been a little bit crazy, racked with grief, sometimes bewildered, and no matter who started it, absolutely terrified. They are watching the plan they had for their life come apart at the seams, and now they are going to have to face the future alone. Many will be older and not as capable as they were when they were young. However, they still feel that way – only to find out in the dating pool they are exactly as old as they are.
You have to have a certain type of spine to practice in family law. Most other lawyers won’t do it, and the typical reaction you get is, “Gawd, I would never!” but if you are a family lawyer there’s nothing more exhilarating. This isn’t the pushing of paper or cold filing in the registry; these are people with things that matter. These are children who need you to explain to their parents that whatever happened, their kids are what is most important. You need to reassure them that no matter what their estranged spouse claims, they aren’t going to be able make good on silly legal threats, nor should they make them.
If the court has a reason to prevent a client from seeing their children, you will have to help your client to make peace with it. Maybe they can write a controversial rap song about it.[v] These kids grow up, but just because they are children doesn’t mean they don’t know things right now. They will know who did what to whom on an instinctual level. There’s nothing you can do to change that. Act too rashly, or out of control and the kids may blame you forever, driving a split between you and your children that has nothing to do with your spouse. Often, lawyers are the ones trying to stop angry people from breaking their own hearts.
The idea that an estranged spouse will become enraged, and kills the other spouse, the children, the lawyer or the judge is the stuff that keeps you up at night. Many people think that divorce lawyers will continue to spur on arguments in order to claim more billable hours than necessary. They think that there is some lack of supply of unhappy marriages, so this one divorce is taking so long and costing so much because that’s what the lawyer wants. But most lawyers have an obligation to reduce conflict as much as necessary. Certainly, they don’t want to stir the pot so much they get killed in the process. To “milk” a file is grounds for disbarment, and in my twenty years or so of practice, I only met one lawyer that I suspected of doing so – mostly because he was an alcoholic.
In any case, the other lawyers, judges and the law society won’t stand for it and will call it out whenever it appears. It is not hard to catch. Sometimes even the lawyer will be charged with costs if they aren’t discouraging enough to their clients who are insisting on some silly action. In a case where the client is determined to bring a “faint hope” or “no hope” or worse, “vexatious” pleading, the lawyer has no choice but to withdraw. These types of clients, mostly men, will continue on until the court has finally had enough and bar them from bringing any more actions without seeking permission of a judge.
But the lawyers don’t even have the most dangerous job because to get to them you have to go through the gatekeepers who man the reception desks. These are the legal assistants who answer the phone, set the appointments, and receive the documents. These are the paralegals that organize everything and maybe do the actual legal work that no one ever knows about. These people are the front line, and these are the people who could wind up with a package in their hands that explodes or poisons them or have to face an angry man with a gun. It’s not work for cowards. Nevertheless, family law offices can be armed. It is perhaps fair to say that working in Canada in this capacity is better than in the USA, but things happen.[vi]
Despite this, family law support staff neither get the pay nor the prestige of other types. Corporate paralegals regularly rake in six figures for knowing how to use a mail merge, and real estate LAAs are in high demand when the housing market booms, but family law paralegals have to be content with middling wages and too much overtime to have a life outside of the office. Families don’t stop being families at five o’clock on a Friday. While it may not feel like it to the litigants, it is a labor of love. No one is getting rich on your divorce so you can stop complaining about that. You never had any real money anyway. (Well unless James “I’m too sexy for my shirt” Sexton is your lawyer. Call me.)
Maintenance
You won’t know when it happens, that it happened. You will simply leave the house, maybe frustrated and angry. Maybe she threw all your clothes out the second story window. Maybe it was quiet, one day there, the next day gone, but however it happens, this day is important. It starts the clock.
The “date of separation” is the first day in the span of a year where the couple lives “separate and apart.” The hope is that by a year past, whatever hurt has been mollified, the parties have taken a sober look at their marriage and have finally asked themselves, “Is this really worth it?” Maybe they’ve had that affair, and it ended, badly. Maybe they never found anyone who was quite the same…quite as in synch with them. Maybe they got treated for some subtle illness that was pressing on the marriage like a tumor on the brain. If everyone comes back, moves back in and reconnects, the clock stops and rewinds. It’s as if it never happened.
But by the time the lawyers get involved, the marriage is good and well over. the fight is on because lawyers are weapons. Whatever repair that could have happened has been tried and failed and it’s all done but the crying. A year may have passed and finally divorce is available to the parties. They may simply need a lawyer to process the paperwork and sign off on the advice which they, by law, have to get. In British Columbia, gone are the days when one lawyer could represent both parties. Now, before any divorce is granted, both parties have to go see separate lawyers and be advised of what their legal rights are. The lawyer has to sign a special certificate saying that they’ve told their client if the client was entitled to spousal support or the family home.[vii]
Sometimes this is the moment when the conflict comes to light because one or both parties assumed they could walk away with whatever is in their names. When one party, who assumed they’d just scrabble by with the pittance they had, finds out they are supposed to get half a house, they often rethink this and then the battle begins. This, of course, can extend the time it takes to get divorced, but it is effective at ensuring that women in particular, don’t just give away the farm in an attempt to get out of the marriage – impoverishing themselves in the process. Again, another attempt by the state to prevent dependency on it. This realization may take a year or more, however, when there are children involved, this tends to come to a head much more quickly. Kids are the fastest way to a person’s heart as well and when spouses go to war, the kids can become collateral damage if someone gets careless.[viii]
And this is another thing that no-fault divorce provides; it protects the kids. Sure, you could spend oodles of money proving your spouse cheated on you or has a gambling problem. You could go to court hearing after court hearing arguing that because this asshole broke your heart, he should never see his children again and the divorce needs to happen RIGHT NOW! You could send fifteen million emails to your lawyer DEMANDING that your spouse be disallowed to take the children to Disneyland, which all have to be read (by the paralegal) at $500 an hour. You could do all that. Or you could just wait.
See, that’s what no-fault divorce is. Waiting. None of those emotional things, like who didn’t do the dishes and who didn’t get a blowjob or the mean words you said to each other changes anything about the money. Child support is the right of the child in BC and in many (maybe all) states in the USA. In BC, this amount is based solely on the income of the “payor parent” and has nothing to do with your spouse’s income, their style of living, or the cost of life. In another attempt to reduce conflict, and the expense to the public, there is a grid that dictates what the payer pays based on their income alone. Period.[ix]
If you don’t pay it, there are government agencies in both Canada and the USA that act as your spouse’s collection agency, and they have vast powers. They can garnish the parent skip’s wages or tax returns. They can suspend driver’s licenses and passports. And they can chase any lead on any income they want. Unless you want to get paid in perpetuity in cash under the table, they will probably find the money. Men, (who are usually the payors, but not always) try all kind of tricks to avoid paying. They quit their jobs, max out the credit cards, or take out loans thinking they can then cry poverty in court. None of these things work and the obligations will remain, piling up and accruing interest. In extreme cases, this deadbeat dad can be thrown into jail, although now they cannot make money if they tried. It is estimated that one in five people incarcerated in American prisons owe child support, but there’s no hard data as to if it’s whether for lack of payment or something else.[x][xi]
It's not always the man who pays. Sometimes it’s the girl boss of the family. It probably never occurred to aspiring female lawyers and senior executives that the man they married could become a divorced albatross around their necks. They were told they could go to work, he could be Mr. Mom, and it would be great. Women could have their cakes and eat them too. That’s what modern feminist thought has brought us to. But men make terrible housewives. By the stats, men do more housework when they are working full-time than when they are at home. And often, it’s not by choice. They’ve simply lost their job and are now expected to pick up the slack, and like any job you are suddenly thrust in, you have no idea how to do it, and suddenly here’s this woman you thought loved you, bossing you around like your old asshole boss. There is something about not being at work, not being in the workplace, with other men, that can eat at a man’s soul. To compensate, he has affairs; he plays too many video games. Even if she kicks him out, the lazy bum, she may still pay. Welcome to equality, ladies. You should have been more careful about what you wished for.
That’s not the end of it. There’s spousal support aka alimony. Usually this is not unlimited, the spouse has a certain period of time to find a job and take care of themselves before they get cut off. However, this is based on the judge’s (not the spouse’s, not the lawyer’s) assessment as to how realistic that truly is. An older woman, with small kids to take care of and illnesses is going to be entitled to a lot more support than one who is childless and still healthy and young. This never satisfies the husband of course, desperate to punish her for leaving him, but the government and more importantly, the taxpayer does not care about this other than avoiding any welfare obligations the wife might incur if her work search doesn’t pan out. Considering how stagnant wages have been over the last three decades, it does not bode well for even a very skilled person; for her, it’s a disaster.
Of course, if he insisted on her suspending her life so she could stay home and take care of the kids, it gets even more difficult for her to find profitable work. Now she’s ten or twenty years in, having risked any alternative future career, her body, and the invisible but powerful bonds with her children, hoping he wouldn’t be a complete asshole – and she was wrong. Maybe he doesn’t think he’s an asshole - maybe he’s actually not - but it doesn’t matter because whatever she’s left with after the divorce she believes is better than staying put. It doesn’t matter to her how it got that way. Whatever half she gets, she will have total control over. No more having to hear, “I make the money, I deserve to get to spend it on this dumb thing.” Now she can invest it in her children, or herself, or whatever she wants. Fuck that guy. Oh, right, she doesn’t have to do that either anymore.
You could say that’s the problem with no-fault; the spouse, most often the wife, does not seem to have to pay the same dollar price as the husband. But she also cannot recover as easily and is more fragile than the man, feminist or not. The general public did not promise anything to either of these people. It did not promise that it would pay the salary of a judge to do a line-by-line-item accounting of the marriage as to who did what, and who paid what, and who owes whom on an emotional level. Nor did it promise to use state money to mitigate the risk to the parties if the marriage didn’t pan out.
No-fault is just more efficient for the taxpayer. It reduces abuse and cuts off the worst of people before they go too far down in the hole that they’ve already been digging. It is offensive to the concept of freedom that the state can make a spouse stay imprisoned in a marriage because they may not be able to prove someone cheated on them or abused them – even though they know it on a gut level. If the only reason someone is stuck with you is because they can’t afford to leave, you don’t have a spouse; you have a hostage and the second they have enough money they are going to be gone anyway.
Property
So, there’s this old joke, what does a wedding ring and the ring on a hand grenade have in common? Remove it and the whole house is gone.
Sorry. Believe me, I have more.
Here’s where things are going to go really pear shaped because I can’t tell you how this breaks out. How it happens depends on where you live. A main difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada, marriage is a federally regulated power, whereas, in the USA, it’s state by state. The different provinces have different rules sometimes, true, but they hardly have the variety of American states. Generally, whether you are getting divorced in New Brunswick or in British Columbia, the process and the outcomes will be roughly the same. Not true in Texas, as compared to California where Texas has a cap on spousal support in amount and years and California does not. Up until recently, no fault divorces weren’t even available in New York. Rules of court can differ and punishments for non-compliance of orders vary widely. The Constitution of the United States does not reference marriage, so it’s left up to the states to decide on what the rules are for any divorce. Or even to recognize the marriage at all, a central debate at the heart of the gay marriage debate. After Dobbs, this is why the decision on gay marriage in the USA, Obergefell, may be on slightly shaky Constitutional ground.[xii]
British Columbia has the most progressive marriage and divorce laws in North America. Marriages don’t require an actual agreement, ceremony or certificate; you just have to shack up for two years. After that, you may qualify for spousal support along with child support, a major difference between Canadian law and the states. Unlike the grid for child support, where the courts are strict and rarely deviate, guidelines for spousal support, or alimony, are just suggestions and the awards can be lavish in comparison to the child support. You can even have one or more “spouses” under the BC regime, but the first person to separate officially is by default entitled to half of the family’s assets, regardless of how many other spouses there may be, or what name the asset happens to be in. A spouse can preserve the value of assets at their original value at the advent of the marriage, but any increase is divided between the two spouses – unless there’s a reason not to. It gets complicated.
Different states treat spousal support differently and only Colorado, Washington and California have “common-law” aka palimony statutes that would allow a spouse to collect support without all the brouhaha of a marriage or some kind of agreement. In that way, those states mirror the older manner of deciding if couples were married or not. These laws look to not what a person says, but what the couple does to establish a “relationship” that is like marriage.
In any case, it’s almost always the house that’s the main property to be divided. It can’t be divided up in half; it’s a whole house. Too many people hang on to the house, a symbol of a past they cannot let go of; but after six months it becomes haunted with the ghost of the old marriage. The new paramour sees it as a remnant of old love that doesn’t include them and they hate it. It’s almost a mercy to force a sale of the house, where one spouse bails and neither can afford to buy the other out. Often, it’s the only real asset the couple has, and the only way out of debt if they’ve spent too much money on it. Sale of the matrimonial home can be a major turning point in the divorce, pivoting the couple away from each other to calm down. It’s such a common thing to fight over, they made a major movie about it.
The dispensation of assets is just math. In BC, it doesn’t matter whose name is on the deed and the bank account, so no more stripping one spouse of all the assets and all the money. Specifically, the couple only split any gain in value if the property pre-existed the marriage, but I’ve seen many a foolish spouse try to dissuade creditors and the tax man by putting their spouse’s name on an asset. Now the whole thing has to be shared. Again, the state intervenes, even if that bungalow on the lake belonged to your mother. It doesn’t care and that gift you got from your parents becomes an “our” gift. You dad won’t get over it. For your next marriage, he'll insist on a pre-nup if you want to get your inheritance.
Agreements
When the young get married, there’s a certain assumption of risk. People grow; people change. Sometimes the person you think you are getting isn’t the person you actually get. Without a family or the community watching the new spouses like hawks, hurrying them into parenthood or a second child, there’s nothing to stop the natural drift of attention that most marriages endure. Those institutions no longer hold an intractable grip on the culture and so now there’s nothing to mitigate the risk of marriage. The spouses will have to rely on their fickle hearts. And hearts are especially fickle in a world where you can reach in your back pocket, pull out a small device, and find your next job or soul mate halfway across the country. Maybe you find them even in another country.
Women, of course, risk more. There is always the risk of domestic violence and marital rape. Nothing much has to be explained on that other than it can be very difficult to prove if the abuser is clever. One time I worked on a divorce where, on paper, it looked like a fine marriage. There was nothing in any of the emails or text messages or anything that said to me, “Oh, this is why.” It’s usually not hard to understand why a divorce is happening because the parties give themselves away somehow, but this one was a mystery. I thought, our client, the wife, was being really foolish until she recorded a phone conversation with her now estranged husband.
It was subtle, and he couched his message in one of care. He insinuated, he gaslit, he was clearly trying to manipulate her, but underneath it was contempt. “You don’t know what you are doing, honey. The lawyers are so much smarter than you and so am I. You are just being misled. You are too dumb to understand what is going on,” he said to her in not so many words. And it was working; you could hear the doubt in her voice. You could sense her caution. Had she never recorded the conversation, why she was getting divorced would be a mystery still. To be fair, he probably doesn’t even know what’s happening and he’s in the marriage. He probably thought it was totally reasonable to basically call his wife stupid. I would never assume, even if I worked on the marriage for years, that I know what’s actually happening in the marriage. Outsiders like you or I simply can’t know what it’s like behind closed doors. People who talk about their friend’s divorce are only getting half the story, so I would take Pearl Davis’s and the MGTOW group with a grain of salt. The truth is usually much more complicated.
But she also takes other risks. As she ages, her mating options will narrow. Her ability to even find a new mate will constrict, now that she’s saddled with the bulk of the childcare as so many mothers are. If she does not work, she will enter a workforce that will show her no mercy, or even respect. She can have three degrees, years of experience, or low maintenance kids, but she will not be able to insist on their care in the moments she needs to. The other women will consider her a betrayer of the sisterhood, of the team, of the “work family” (gag-save me), if they are that sort of place that prides itself on how many high-powered women they can shove into the one office. Even so, there can only be one queen, the rest are drones.
If she does not have just the right combination of spouse, looks, skill, political acumen, and luck, her career will go no where, never quite good enough to be the best. Her salary will reflect that. Despite this, if she needs support, she will be accused, by her now estranged spouse and all his friends, of being a golddigger.
The worst divorces are the ones of the old. There are by then, only two reasons that people that age get divorced. The first one is that the man wants a younger woman. Usually, he is rich and has found some slag online or elsewhere. It may last or it may not, probably depending on how rich he actually is, but he’s out of there. She will loath his being until the day he dies and want every last penny. In her opinion, that is *all* of them. If it’s a long-term marriage with children, she’ll probably get it. Again, whether the girlfriend sticks around after that depends on how rich he is. I wish Bill Belichick the best.
The second kind is worse. The kids are gone, and she can’t fucking stand him. She’s listened to him complain for decades, she was done with the marriage a long time ago, but now with nothing to bind her to him, she is out of there. Mostly, she will be fine. The neediness of her 20s and 30s is now gone. The hormones that drove her in her 40s and 50s have abated. She can find company in her friends or grandchildren; she doesn’t need him. She needs to garden or go to Mexico with her friends or just not have to clean up after him all the time. She can paint the house any color she likes, live where she likes. She doesn’t need much in the way of money, she’s not trying to buy a new companion.
He, on the other hand, better find a new girl and fast. Men who divorce in their old age fare very poorly. He never learned the skills he needed to take care of himself like she takes care of him. If he’s not rich, he goes out and tries again and again, never understanding that his rage radiates out of him like gamma rays, poisoning every girl within a 100-mile distance. If he can’t forgive his ex-wife, if he carries that resentment to the end, it often ends very badly for him. Hopefully, he is rich or finds himself gay. Or maybe he finds a girl who needs a visa. It worked for my late spouse.
The court is not blind to any of this. They know that when looking at a marriage, they will never really know who is right or who is wrong. Even if she did marry for the money, and maybe especially so, the state is indifferent. Family law courts are not interested in justice; they are interested in balance. Leaving the children to sort out the damage by allowing them to become impoverished or depriving them of the person who has been their main, or maybe sole caregiver since the day they were born, because that’s what would be “fair” to the spouses, is not a goal. It is not a thing. And that is always a shock to the person who is going to get stuck with the bill. Without the support of the coercive society that used to ensure that woman who became pregnant had a place to go, whether they wanted to or not, this is the only option.
This idea of "fairness" insinuates a worldview that women are the gatekeepers to marriage. This is wrong. Sure, woman could, if they all held out at once, force men to marry them or never have sex again. But prostitutes exist, girls with low self-esteem and daddy issues exist, aging women who just want to feel beautiful for a hot minute exist. It was never the girls; they never had any real power. That was society itself that created marriage to begin with. It had the power with its churches and its parents and its community that couldn’t just be left by someone who found a job on the internet. It is impossible to shove both men and women back into that box where if they didn’t get married, it was like they were dead. And they wouldn’t want it anyway. That’s why women burned the bras and went and got jobs. That’s what you don’t understand. That’s why marriage is riskier now than it was back when women could die in childbirth. That’s why no one is getting married. Despite admonishments from people like Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager, it is not possible to legally force a man to get or stay married no matter how much the woman wants it.
Reconciliation
If the GOP, Elon Musk and all the men at the Daily Wire want more marriages and, supposedly, more children, society is going to have to find a way to de-risk marriage. Certainly, making it harder and more expensive to divorce might have some effect, but none of it will be good. It won’t repair what is already broken. In BC, fault or no-fault changes almost nothing about property division, spousal support, or child support and it shouldn’t – it’s the public that’s going to get stuck with the bill if the richer spouse doesn’t keep paying it. As single parent households increase, spurred on by vast technological and legal changes, society will have re-examine how it has designed marriage. It is an obsolete technology designed for a world that does not exist anymore except in places like Pakistan and Tehran.
And because humans invented it…just stop with the God shit already…it *can* be redesigned. Why shouldn’t two people be considered married who have been living together for years in a marriage like relationship? What if one has made considerable sacrifices like moving across a country, selling their house, quitting a job or having a baby? Why is a couple not considered “married” because there was no white dress, no honeymoon, no father of the bride? In the face of personal sacrifices, why don’t they owe each other something? In the rest of law, we have a concept of a “constructive trust” or “implied trust” where the behavior of the litigants indicates if they’ve made a promise to each other.
There’s no reason why that same legal logic cannot apply to marriage. In the meantime, we sign prenups and co-habitation agreements that outline, in detail, what we owe each other and what the state will tolerate. Gay marriage changed none of that. We did. Extending the definition of marriage to contain pairings that may be fleeting, or "situationships" may be the only way left to fix the “problem” of single mothers. As it is now, they are scrambling to make ends meet just because they could never convince their sires to get in front of a judge or a priest and society did nothing about it.
Despite this, never a party to forgo snatching defeat from the mouth of victory, Florida Republicans have decided that appealing to women is for libtards, and have passed a new law, making it hard for old ladies to collect spousal support – which was ordered so long ago it’s barely enough for groceries. They killed the last gasp of the old world they claim to want to go back to so much. [xiii] Stop blaming feminism. There would have been no need for it if girls didn’t sometimes have to take care of themselves because society won’t do it. Blame the libertarians for that.
A few years back, I had a friend visit me from the interior. She admitted to me during the trip that her husband and her had separated. He had rented an apartment across town, bought a BMW because he “deserved” it and had hooked up with a new girlfriend. She pretended to be blasé about the whole thing, but it was clear she was dying inside. I asked her, “He deserved this new car?”
“Yes”
I didn’t need to read any affidavits or financial statements to know what would happen. She had two young boys with this man, and they had recently moved to the area where they were now living. They had married as kids. She had barely worked in twenty years, sometimes running a daycare out of her home. He had risen in the ranks of a large corporation and was raking in six figures. It was just enough to get him completely screwed. If they divorced, she would have gotten half the house, schedule child support, extraordinary child support for sports or whatever the kids were into, and a whole lot of spousal support, most likely forever. He would have had to pay 100% of any college for the boys and shared his retirement accounts and pension. He would have paid for all of the BMW and probably would have had to drive until it fell apart. There would be no way he could afford another car. The high life he was living was going to come a screeching halt and as the saying goes it’s not the speed that kills you, it’s the sudden stop.[xiv]
“Are the boys’ college funds completely paid for?”
“No”
“Is the retirement fund for both of you complete?”
“No.”
“Well than he doesn’t deserve shit. Okay, so here is what you do, and I’m assuming he would never hurt your children?”
“Oh, no. No, he would never.”
“Okay, so next Friday I want you to go pick the boys up from school. Pin a note to the older one’s shirt saying, “Here are the boys for your regularly scheduled access visits.’ And then I want you to spend the weekend going to Coachella or something. Do that every week for a month. We’ll see how much the new girlfriend likes being insta-mommy every weekend.”
He was back in under three months and she’s a better woman than me. He never thanked me for the favor. The clock set back to zero.
Footnotes
[i] I am convinced that this is the genesis of designer clothes and purses that would signify to men and women alike, “Don’t mess with me or my family will kill you and is rich enough to get away with it.”
[ii] BC has tried to allow paralegals to represent clients without oversight, in an attempt to have more people have some type of representation, but the lawyers have fought this tooth and nail. They seem to think their profession is just as complex as a brain surgeon’s. Apparently, they’d rather have people, who would have never been their clients anyway at $500 an hour, go without any representation at all than just allow a skilled legal professional, who knows more about the job than they do most of the time, help these people out. The selfishness is stunning.
[iii]
https://www.nber.org/digest/mar04/divorce-laws-and-family-violence
[iv]
https://hbr.org/2005/03/off-ramps-and-on-ramps-keeping-talented-women-on-the-road-to-success
[v] I feel sorry for Ye. He’s obviously ill and that has affected his ability to be with his family in a very negative way. Often, the most aggressive and difficult divorces involve people with bona fide mental illnesses that compromise their ability to cope and be reasonable. If you are trying to also make a living being creative, suppressing your emotions with drugs is going to make that difficult. Hopefully, his kids come around when they are older and they don’t need mommy and daddy to interface.
[vi]
https://globalnews.ca/news/4688492/guido-amsel-letter-bomber-divorce-lawyer/
[vii]This is not true in the United States. No state requires anything like a “Certificate of Independent Legal Advice” like many provinces in Canada. However, it is strongly recommended, especially in cases involving children. If Americans would like to limit the number of estranged wives and mothers that fall into the welfare system, this is something they could consider changing.
[viii] I would advise the teacher’s union and the trans-activists, that if they don’t want to find the quickest way to actually die, they should stay out of getting between parents and their children. See, these people are very invested in what happens to their kids, and if what is happening is something that they think is dangerous, well, let’s just say they are FAR more committed to the cause than you are. Someone will kill you. The legislation weaving its way through Congress and the presidential EOs are the least of your problems. (Frankly, I think it’s for your own protection because you are too stupid to know what is good for you – but I digress.)
[ix]
https://www.calgaryfamilylaw.ca/bc-child-support-calculator
[x] Social benefit programs however will push the mother to name the father or possibly forgo welfare, housing and food. In an attempt to punish mothers by making millions of children as miserable as possible, we continue to pretend to live in a society that cares about motherhood, making it as difficult as possible.
[xi]
[xii]I don’t know how hard it would be to overturn Obergefell, however in a post Roe world I wouldn’t eliminate the possibility completely.
[xiii]
[xiv]Credit: Jeremy Clarkson, “Top Gear”