Divorce Is Not A Happy Event

If you take a look at the website of the IACP, a professional association of professionals involved the practice of what is called collaborative law or collaborative practice, you might get the idea that divorce is just dandy. At least to me it looks like they are saying that if you do it right divorce is just another step in your life.

Check it out for yourself if you like HERE. See if you get the same sense from the pictures and the text that I do.

If I just have a hang-up on the issue, post a comment and I'll reconsider.

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I am divorced and as far as I am concerned it was a failure. I do not think that one should expect to move through life without one's fair share of failures. I am trying to accept my failures as normal parts of life (which I believe they are.)

But, I do not accept the notion that we are in any way better off by papering over our failures, by saying that they aren't so bad really, by re-framing them as the first step to new and better things. They are markers along our life pathways from which we are intended to learn something.

I could probably cobble together a pretty convincing bunch of reasons why it was inevitable that my marriage would fail, reasons that it wasn't really my fault. They even might be mostly true, but PLEASE don't offer to wrap it up and tie a bow around it as a great learning experience. And don't institutionalize my excuses through your ad campaign. I am too good at excuses without any help from anyone else.

A few more of my limited thoughts on divorce can be found HERE.

Leave Divorce Out of It!?

Recently one author on the subject of saving your marriage, stopping divorce, etc (click here for more on this) noted that whatever you decide to try, from going to couple counseling to just talking about it to reading books, etc. will work a lot better if you take divorce off the table as one of your options.

Good idea. Glad to read someone else saying it.

Especially because when we are in the midst of relationship problems they seem so insoluble that "there must be something/someone better out there somewhere," (the seductive call of the sirens sitting on the rocks just waiting for a crack up if there ever was one.)

This is even more seductive for us in the over 50, over 60 set. Most likely there aren't children to think about and the end of the trail is getting more real, maybe for the first time in our lives. "I'd better do it now or never" is the classic distortion here.


Social scientists have known for decades that people whose parents were divorced are much more likely to get divorced themselves than those whose parents stayed together. (I can't remember the exact number, but I think it was by a factor of two or three!) Why? Because it feels like an option.


Even in the divorce business where there is a kind of divorce called Collaborative in which everyone works together to get the best possible settlement for everyone involved, the process requires that each party sign an agreement that they will not go to court. It has been likened to closing the gate of the corral or Hannibal putting his army ashore and then burning the boats leaving no way to go but forward.


Back doors don't lead to the best problem solving in marriage or in divorce apparently. Why not close and lock the back door while you're still married and seeking a solution so you don't have to do it to get the best dissolution?