The Stuff That Divorce is Made Of
Someone recently asked me if I did complicated property cases. I’ve done them, of course; after 25 years of practicing family law, of course most every kind of case has come my way. But I don’t like them. Why not? Well, because they involve fights over stuff.
Nobody should fight about stuff. Oh, come to think of it, they shouldn’t fight about their children, either; but at least children are important.
What’s my advice about “stuff”? Simple. You’ve got to make a detailed list of everything that the two of you own, in order to complete the property statements. So, when you are making that list, break it down into two categories. Those categories are as follows:
STUFF I WOULD HATE TO LOSE IN A FIRE
and
STUFF THAT I CAN EASILY REPLACE AND IS NOT WORTH A FIGHT.
In the first list, you should put things such as “my dead grandmother’s lace handkerchiefs”. In the second list, you should put — well, most everything.
Here’s my message: Stuff is not worth a fight.
Make your list, and then ask yourself this: What’s more important, this stuff, or this person to whom I was married, and for whom I have at some point felt love?
Then offer to give your soon-to-be-ex-spouse first pick over the half of the stuff he or she wants, and offer to take the other half.
You can replace couches, pots, pans and dinnerware. You can never replace your self-respect.
Will I fight for my clients’ “stuff” if they direct me to do so? Yes, I suppose. But I don’t really take cases that are about “stuff”. When there is personal or real property involved in a case that I am handling, I counsel my client to be fair, reasonable, and not to spend their children’s college savings fighting over furniture.
They usually take my advice, and we can usually work out the property issues, and move on to what is really important — the children.
When I represent people who don’t have children, I counsel them to make the argument over the “stuff” as reasonable and easy for both as possible, and I have even been known to send a client to another lawyer if they wanted a widely disparate property distribution without even an arguably justifiable basis.
Because when it comes down to it, there are legally defensible reasons for a disparate property distribution, and those legally defensible reasons are grounded in logic and reason. They include a greater contribution to the acquisition of the asset by one party, a greater financial need by one party, and secondary financial resources that enable one party to re-acquire property more easily than the other party. Egregious fault on the part of one party could also lead to a disparate distribution, though I have always found this provision to be ironic, since the emotional devastation can hardly be assuaged by getting a greater share of the “stuff”.
Absent a legally defensible basis for an unequal property distribution, I usually counsel fairness and as close to a 50/50 share as possible. I encourage my clients to understand that being fair, and reasonable, and civil, will ultimately enable them to heal more quickly than being vindictive and hateful. Most of my clients listen to this, and understand what I am trying to tell them.
Divorce is a hard thing to endure. In the final analysis, divorcing parties should do what they can to make it easier on everyone — because in so doing, they enable themselves to heal. And healing is the real stuff of which divorce, and recovery from its pain, is all about.