Figuring Out How To Proceed With A Divorce
The idea of sitting down at a divorce attorney services firm to discuss how to end your marriage can be intimidating. A lot of questions will come up. What's your level of confidence that you want to end things? How do you move forward with your life? What kind of divorce will you pursue? When you consult with a divorce attorney, these are the concerns you have to address.
Are You Really Ending It?
In most states, there are options for breaking up without divorce. Legal separation is the most common one, allowing you and your partner to live separately while you figure things out. This can buy time to make sense of the situation or to give marriage counseling a chance.
You should only proceed with a separation or divorce if you mean it. It's unwise to threaten divorce, for example, in the hope of scaring your partner straight. If you wish to remain married and deal with issues, consider couple's therapy.
Types of Divorces
There are two primary kinds of divorces: fault and no-fault. A fault divorce is a case where one partner believes the other should be held accountable for some specific set of actions, such as infidelity, drug use, physical or mental abuse, alienation, or extreme financial misconduct. No-fault divorce occurs when neither side assumes blame and the two parties are simply claiming irreconcilable differences, meaning they can no longer make the marriage work. Most of the time, a divorce attorney will encourage a client to seek a no-fault divorce unless there are major assets worth pursuing within the fault model.
Moving Forward With Your Life
The terms of a divorce will likely set the parameters for how the next few years of your life, at least, will proceed. Where will you live? How will you pay basic expenses? If you have a child, how will you and your ex divide up custody, educational responsibilities and medical expenses for your kid? Who gets what property?
This is where the serious horse trading in divorces occurs. In fact, if you both have horses and like them, you may end up actually trading horses. Usually, it's cats and dogs that people fight over. One big question that has to be asked about each piece of community property is: is this worth fighting over? Revenge is a terrible idea in divorce, so focus on getting what you need, such as a place to live.