Your own perception of what you deserve in a divorce is likely skewed. It is either higher than realistic, or lower, depending upon your own perception of yourself, your friend’s support, your understanding of what others got, and what you read in the news or online. Do not rely upon any of these ways of finding out what is fair and what you might get in terms of alimony!
To begin with, we have a growing problem in society of demanding that “friendship” means “blind support”. In many groups, you get together for a chat with friends, and whoever of the friends has bad news expects the others to rally around with supportive contributions to the conversation. “He’s a jerk”, or “good riddance to her”, are expected. Group-thinking prevails, and any thought which disagrees with the main force of the group is suppressed. "Support" is blindly re-defined to mean "agree with whatever the upset person wants to hear", and as long as everyone follows this social code, everyone will be happy. So when you tell your pals about your financial situation, you expect them to be similarly supportive. You expect any unsupportive persons who maybe telling you something different, will be run out of town on a rail. Even if you want your friends to give you a realistic appraisal of your chances, you can expect them to be overly optimistic, in the mistaken belief that you need to keep a positive attitude.
This kind of support can hurt you. While it feels good, this kind of groupthink rarely reflects what is really going on the world. Just because someone suffered through their own divorce and made a killing off of their ex, does not mean you will. You need to meet with an attorney to get the real story. And if one attorney does not agree with you, go ahead and get a second opinion. Be careful to find a smart opinion, not just one that will agree with you. If you get your advice from an attorney who has never seen this issue in court, and their advice is different from what every other attorney has told you, there may be a very good reason for that. Look for an attorney who has handled this kind of issue before, successfully, and ask them for a realistic appraisal of whether you can win in your case. One frequent refrain in family court is that family cases are like fingerprints in that no two are exactly alike. Do not think that because your bests friend married for 15 years to an engineer with 3 kids got a bazillion in support, that you, also married to an engineer for 15 years and with 3 kids, will get the same. Other factors could be at play here that could totally change your result. You need to be prepared for this possibility.
Let me give you an example of how your friends or family’s blind “support” can lead you astray:
I had a client who arrived on my doorstep with a horrifying situation. After an annulled teen marriage and a brief first marriage right after college, both of which ended amicably, she spent 25 years with her second husband, sticking through thick and thin. He was a lazy jerk, but she was embarrassed about picking so badly and having 2 divorces under her belt by the age of 25, so she was not going to have a third divorce! Unfortunately, her husband took advantage of this. He kept getting himself fired from one job after another, forcing her to work harder and harder if they were to make ends meet. She would come home to a full slate of parenting duties, because he chose not to be engaged with the children. She did the cooking, cleaning, took the kids to the doctor and everything. All he did was play guitar and work out with weights in the basement. About 15 years into the marriage, she started talking about divorce. He had done some research online and talked to pals about it, and he felt he had positioned himself perfectly to be supported by her, for life. So he told her this. She sought advice from friends who were divorced, most of whom were stay-at-home mothers who really did do the work of staying at home. These friends confirmed that a stay-at-home parent with 2 children would most certainly get alimony after a 15 year marriage. Terrified and fully aware that she could not support two households, she remained until it became unbearable.
Luckily, her next move was to hire me. Many people in her place would try to save themselves a few bucks by trying to do it for themselves. especially after hearing from everyone they knew, that they would lose their argument in the divorce. I explained that he and her friends were wrong.
While everyone was right about the courts trying to be less sexist about their decisions, his fantasy of what defines a “house-husband”, was mistaken. He could NOT refuse to be a parent and ignore the kids so that they'd insist on leaving when their mother left, and then get child support. He could NOT, as an able-bodied man, choose not to work just because he had a spouse who would pick up the slack while she was married to him, and expect that a judge would make her pay him to continue. He had missed some essential elements to positioning himself for a good result. He had assumed that there are "tricks" that he could exploit to bring him a result that was unfair to his ex and his kids, and allow him to continue to be lazy in life. He was wrong.
And bringing in 500 pages of automated applications to menial jobs, generated by sending his resume to Monster.com, followed up by nothing, would not change that. He could NOT convince the judge that he had made a reasonable effort to become self-supporting.
After I laid out the situation for the judge, the judge actually turned to him and said, “I hear Circle K is hiring”. His attorney was embarrassed. My client nearly fainted in relief. He had spent years, online and learning about the purpose of alimony, intentionally positioning himself for becoming the winner of the “alimony lottery”, and having buddies pound him on the back in congratulations about what a brilliant strategist he was. And he missed the simple guiding principle… that every adult needs to work at something, and if your joint choice of how to divide labor within the marriage makes it tough for you to get back up to speed in your own career choice, THEN … MAYBE… you will be supported until you can revamp your career.
If you spend your time positioning yourself to look like a lazy bum, and you show up in court with that record… well, your friends, your internet research, and your own fantasies have steered you wrong. There are legitimate "tips and tricks" out there, none of which are very "tricky", to help you position yourself in a divorce or separation. For example, getting copies of all the financial documents and keeping them in a separate place, closing access to accounts for the purpose of keeping EITHER of you from spending all the spare cash and wasting it before separating, sitting down when you have both come to a conclusion that you can't stay together, and before you have decided to be evil to each other about it, and separating all the personal property and heirlooms, removing them and putting them in separate households so that you can't get evil and start having bonfires with each other's things once the amicable stage is over... those are great tips. But trying to find a way to trick the system into giving you more than you deserve, letting you be an adult who does not pull their own weight... these are bad tricks and tips to take, and if your friends are urging you into doing that, they're wrong.
Hollywood may have given us the wrong impression of what is appropriate... from "Odd Couple" and "First Wives' Club", where ex wives receive ample support to live on, no matter what the pre-divorce situation... to various shows where the main characters' separation is a side issue and we merely witness them being evil to each other by doing things like telling the children that the reason they can't afford this or that is that the support is too high, or not high enough... these are NOT the appropriate places to get our strategy. Please, consult with a reputable lawyer, a mediator, an economist and/or a therapist, for legitimate help with your separation and divorce. DO NOT rely upon Hollywood or your best pals for good tips and tricks!
If you spend your time positioning yourself to look like a lazy bum, and you show up in court with that record… well, your friends, your internet research, and your own fantasies have steered you wrong. There are legitimate "tips and tricks" out there, none of which are very "tricky", to help you position yourself in a divorce or separation. For example, getting copies of all the financial documents and keeping them in a separate place, closing access to accounts for the purpose of keeping EITHER of you from spending all the spare cash and wasting it before separating, sitting down when you have both come to a conclusion that you can't stay together, and before you have decided to be evil to each other about it, and separating all the personal property and heirlooms, removing them and putting them in separate households so that you can't get evil and start having bonfires with each other's things once the amicable stage is over... those are great tips. But trying to find a way to trick the system into giving you more than you deserve, letting you be an adult who does not pull their own weight... these are bad tricks and tips to take, and if your friends are urging you into doing that, they're wrong.
Hollywood may have given us the wrong impression of what is appropriate... from "Odd Couple" and "First Wives' Club", where ex wives receive ample support to live on, no matter what the pre-divorce situation... to various shows where the main characters' separation is a side issue and we merely witness them being evil to each other by doing things like telling the children that the reason they can't afford this or that is that the support is too high, or not high enough... these are NOT the appropriate places to get our strategy. Please, consult with a reputable lawyer, a mediator, an economist and/or a therapist, for legitimate help with your separation and divorce. DO NOT rely upon Hollywood or your best pals for good tips and tricks!
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