Getting reliable information and advice is the best thing you can do to get a better divorce — just as you are doing right now by reading this Short Course. The next most important thing is to get prepared. This means preparing yourself and preparing your case. It’s not hard, and you have to do it sooner or later, anyway.

Preparing your case means you gather and organize the facts of your case. If you prepare your case and gather supporting documents before you visit an attorney — if you ever do — you will save hours of time and many hundreds of dollars. You will impress the attorney as being well-informed and prepared — someone who knows what they are doing.

Preparing yourself includes getting information about divorce — just as you have been doing in this Short Course — and, if necessary, legal advice about the issues in your divorce. The real-life issues you face can be hard to work out and may take a long time to resolve. But the issues of the legal divorce are much more specific: what do you want to do about property, custody and support?

Here’s how to proceed:


Deciding what you want requires an understanding of what you are entitled to under the laws of your state and whether or not those laws amount to a clearly predictable outcome if your case should end up in court. Then there’s the matter of your values: what’s most important to you: security, property, money, revenge, peace of mind, your children’s well-being, cooperative parenting, fairness, forgiveness, and so on.

Attorneys generally work on the premise that getting the most you can is what is important. But you might have different values that you prefer to legal ones. Maybe getting every last cent isn’t as important as other things. Or maybe it is.

Getting your hands on the nuts and bolts of your own divorce might be something you would rather avoid, but it is very important that you do it. Making your life decisions is not something you can safely or wisely leave to someone else.

Besides, even if you get an attorney, you will still have to do this work, and the rewards for dealing with it yourself far outweigh the effort. It is practical, constructive, useful work. It helps you to organize your thinking and it saves you a pile of money and loads of aggravation. It feels good to be in charge of your own life.

To get a divorce, you have to decide how to divide your marital property, how to arrange for the shared parenting of kids, if you have any, and how much support, if any, will be provided for a spouse or children. Maybe your case is very simple or maybe you are already clear about what you want and what’s fair. If so, just go right ahead. But in most cases you will want to learn if it is clear what a judge would do in your case before you make any final decisions.

Don’t make long-term decisions when you are upset — your judgment isn’t sound and you don’t want to build the rest of your life on decisions based on anger, guilt or fear.

Slow things way down and put off making permanent decisions until you are on a more even keel. Try to create short-term, temporary solutions instead of long-term, permanent ones. Be careful that you don’t give away too much out of fear, guilt, or just to get it over with; you’ll probably regret it later. Be equally careful not to pressure your spouse with guilt or fear. Experience shows that this kind of thing is very likely to backfire later.

Go on to Lesson 4. The real divorce is free!