[cafard]

In one of his books, Gerald Weinberg said that his sister decided that it was time to give up divorce work when one of her clients (or the client's adversary) produced a list of goods for partition including a partly used container of dish soap under the sink. And my brother (a lawyer) told me of an attorney in the Mountain West who gave up divorce work as too stressful and went on to defending clients on capital charges.

I hope that the new app will help divorcing couples to work through the divorce with less pain on both sides. But is what every party thinks that he or she wants?

[pyuser583]

I just watched friends divorce. They brought a lot of unnecessary suffering in themselves. They didn’t want an app.

The number one thing to know about divorce with kids is that you lose control. They couldn’t stand that. The idea that the other person was 100% in charge of the kids.

They began making extremely vague allegations of how the other parent does unspecified “bad things” that need to be “reported.”

They eventually ended up believing their own propaganda and are convinced the other parent is abusing the kids on their days.

It’s a total mess.

[notch656a]

Once you understand child support payments, and thus the ability to be jailed and eventually charged with a felony and have your civil rights revoked, are tied to custody you'll understand part of the reason for the high stakes. If you end up with <50% custody, you have to keep a job that pays at least as good as your current one for 18 years, pray a judge believes you when you have trouble with work, or expect to end up in a jail cell with your license, property, passport, and civil rights revoked.

The only debtor's prison there is in the US is the one for people with <50% custody. Therefore if the other parent makes claims of abuse, it's imperative you have counterclaims to make sure the other parent is in just as bad light to make sure you won't be subject to imprisonment at the whim of a judge at any misfortune you have.

[ransom1538]

"The only debtor's prison there is in the US is the one for people with <50% custody."

The amount of people in county jail due to failure to pay child support is shocking. It is one of the best kept secrets in the jail system. The numbers are hidden since they are often bailiff arrests not integrated with sheriff stats [operates jails] under civil contempt. Once you are caught into this system and serve jail time you will most likely lose your current job. Thus begins a debtors spiral: Appear in court, can't pay, jail, release, appear in court, can't pay, jail - you will face ever increasing penalties and bizarre state punishments like having your drivers license suspended.

This system is particularly cruel to High cost of living / High paid individuals. EG. If you make 100k per year and finalize your divorce [lose house, 1/2 savings, 40k in lawyer fees, begin renting in high cost area, forced private school tuition] - alimony with child payments could be ~3k per month post tax. You might be able to swing this a few months. However, stress from the divorce could result in job loss. In the state of Florida for example, just being behind $2500 is a felony (they haven't updated their law). If you attempt to go to another state to find work it is considered fleeing (another felony).

It's hard to find evidence or tape of anything I said since cases are buried in confidential family courts, here is one example of an unrepresented person in the debt spiral. Watch until the end: jail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvOIdhJg1As

[pyuser583]

There was a case near where I live where a guy with severe mental illness - not understanding where he was - was arrested for failing to pay child support.

Fortunately it encouraged reform.

But neighboring states still issue automatic arrest warrants, and out state is required to serve then even though we are disgusted by it.

It’s always: young, impoverished black male with a warrant from a neighboring state.

Many local police are disgusted by it. But they don’t have a choice: warrants are warrants.

[notch656a]

They'll even imprison you for late child support if you were brutally and publicly held hostage overseas and physically have no possible way to pay. (the whole reason he was overseas was in part to perform contracting to pay his child support).

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19901216&slug...

[pyuser583]

The sort of rational thinking you are describing was completely absent from this process.

Neither party cared about child support or alimony. Or money, at all.

Also, you’re not accurately describing how things turned out.

One of the parents wound up having very little custody time, and very little child support.

[jquery]

> The sort of rational thinking you are describing was completely absent from this process

The unreasonably high stakes of “losing” a divorce case make it more like a no-holds barred cage match. I think America likes it this way because on some level it believes people must suffer for getting divorced.

[meepmorp]

Not everybody's divorce is like this. My ex and I went through voluntary mediation and came to a mutually agreed settlement, with shared legal custody.

We just both recognized that the process was about separating our lives, not resolving our feelings about one another. And that's pretty much always why it goes wrong - people want to use court proceedings as a substitute for therapy.

[nicoburns]

That doesn't make any sense, because it being a "no-holds barred cage match" makes it more likely for one party to lose. Going in with a co-operative mindset (at least until the other party demonstrates they are not) should be win-win.

[giantg2]

"Going in with a co-operative mindset (at least until the other party demonstrates they are not) should be win-win."

Completely agree. However, the underlying reason for many divorces is that they no long have the ability to cooperate or view things rationally.

[pyuser583]

They only cared about the events leading to the divorce, not the divorce itself.

[notch656a]

Accusations of abuse seem pretty rational to me in a custody battle. It's one of the best ways to get custody. Come up with some 'witnesses', trick the kid into testifying on your side. Have the attorney write up the sob story and blindside the other partner so they're left defenseless. Bonus points if you can get a restraining order in the process so custody is lost and continuity is maintained by continuing the custody terms of the restraining order -- also a good way to destroy means of defense as in some states a spouse has their firearm rights suspended during the order.

[watwut]

it is actually not. Courts tend to punish those if they don't believe them - accusing partner of abuse is fairly often how you get less custody.

Restraining orders are not easy to get either. It can take quite a lot of fight even in cases where actual stalking and threats of violence are going on.

[notch656a]

You're the judge and I'm a 'battered wife.' In this fiction: I self-harm myself (claim it was the husband), come up with a terrible and fairly convincing but unverifiable story of abuse and be sure to mention to you my husband has several guns and has threatened me and the kids with them. Do you choose to issue a restraining order, or do you roll the dice and hope nothing bad happens?

[giantg2]

"Going in with a co-operative mindset (at least until the other party demonstrates they are not) should be win-win."

Do you have a source for this? In my state, and many others, temporary protection from abuse orders against spouses are very easy to get just by saying the right things without any real evidence. Those stay in effect for a couple of weeks until a hearing. Then it's difficult to get them overturned unless you have physical proof because the course want to "err on the side of caution".

There are divorce lawyers who actually recommend filing false protection orders during divorce, for the very reasons stated by the previous commenter. It's well known amongst divorce attorneys that some in their profession do this. There is generally no punishment for those attorneys since you can't prove their involvement easily, nor for the false filer in many cases. After all, if your spouse is a felon (perjury) the courts will likely make you pay more in child support and alimony due to their limited earning potential.

[bko]

> If you end up with <50% custody, you have to keep a job that pays at least as good as your current one for 18 years, pray a judge believes you when you have trouble with work, or expect to end up in a jail cell with your license, property, passport, and civil rights revoked.

I don't think thats how child support works in most states. Income shares model basically looks at the cost of raising a child in a particular jurisdiction then pro-rates that based on the parents income. For instance if the cost of child per month is 1k and the man earns 50k and the woman earns 100k (assuming woman has custody), the man would pay $333 a month (50 / 150 * 1k)

https://www.thebalance.com/how-child-support-payments-are-ca...

[giantg2]

That is how it initially gets set. It's a mess to have it reset though. If you lose my job and it takes 6 months to find another one, you have to keep paying. If the new job you find pays 75% of your old one, you still have to pay the old amount. You can petition the court to change it, but they are reluctant because some people take lower jobs to spite an ex. So instead they tend to set it based on "potential earning capacity".

"OH look, you made $100k this year and have a masters in IT. You should be able to earn that forever to pay child support and/or alimony." ...is basically how it goes.

[giantg2]

I wanted to add also, that I wonder how this affects people who reasonably can't maintain that level. For example, if I were to get divorced it would crush me. I'm barely holding on at my job now (meh to bad reviews, I hate the place, I have no marketable skills to get hired anywhere else). I'm pretty sure the added stress of a divorce would lead to even further performance issues and being fired.

[pid_0]

Well the simple way to get around this is to just not have kids. It’s easy! Just don’t have them and your life will be great. Happily married, 0 kids. 1 vasectomy.

[ngetchell]

This isn't how divorce or child support payments work. This is just a popular line of reasoning in Men's Rights circles. It's certainly possible but very unlikely.

I know lots of people that are divorced, with partial custody. Most like the situation better than when they were married.

[bsagdiyev]

Tell that to my dad, who dealt with a vindictive ex-wife who cleaned him out and used my sister as a pawn against him. My sister still hates my dad to this day due to the lies she told her about him.

[micromacrofoot]

for every story like this there’s an opposite, my dad left the state to avoid child support, worked under the table to avoid wage garnishment, and I got to watch him buy expensive cars for girlfriends from afar while my mom worked 60 hours a week to keep us barely above the poverty line

[oneoff786]

They also generally desire to harm the other party more than get assets for themselves. If just one part is willing to spend a dollar to make the other party lose a dollar, you’re gonna have a bad time.

[ransom1538]

A lawyer once told me: "Criminal law is bad people pretending to be good. Family law is good people pretending to be bad."

[kmlx]

friends of mine divorced recently. they were on good terms, but were getting egged on by their lawyers. the lawyers very much preferred a long drawn-out divorce. luckily my friends were on good terms and they discussed about what their lawyers were telling them. which were mostly falsehoods. stuff like “are you sure the other party hasn’t hidden funds from you?”. so i’m sure there are horrible divorces, but i’m also sure there are horrible lawyers as well.

[civilized]

Sounds like the lawyers know that getting couples to fight profitably is like shooting fish in a barrel.

[jimz]

My decision to at least exclude family law, beyond the divorce of my parents when I was a teenager being fairly ugly (although now with a larger sample size I've observed, relatively tame), was cemented by sitting through a whole session where the only property that needed to be split were a pair of season tickets to my school's men's college basketball team. While the school's team is quite good, we've never won a championship, at the time of the proceedings we've only been AP #1 for a week and then was almost knocked out of the tourney by a 16 seed, and in open court both parties acknowledged that they don't go to all of the home games and are seeing other season ticket holders, meaning that neither party needed to have both sets of tickets just to go watch the games live. The only advantage is that the seats would be together, but I've been to a lot of games of just about every North American professional sport (yes, including Arena Football) and seat swapping is ubiquitous whether the place is sold out or a quarter full. I've litigated my own case in small claims court and can honestly say that there were cases far more consequential there than the acrimonious splitting of a pair of basketball season tickets. It's not exactly kafkaesque - the criminal justice system fits the bill better - but it's at least... Dadaist in an un-self-aware way? I've appeared in undergraduate musicals written by my classmates that were less cringeworthy than that.

And I've practiced administrative law which, since they are not established under Article III of the Constitution, can be pretty cowboy and roughshod. I've also appeared in tribal court which seem to frequently take cues from TV courts. But they are not frivolous, not at all. Administrative hearings can and do determine the liberty of people every day. Same for tribal courts. There's something farcical about all 3 types of proceedings but family court just hits the perfect note of "legitimate", "important", and "farcical" to me, even though they are undoubtedly important. I can assure you that no immigration or NLRB hearings, the administrative courts in this country with teeth, sink into farce at a similar rate.

At one point there were some half-joking talks about finding an agreeable local tribe to partner with us to open a startup that allow same-day in-app divorces. Sadly even with introductions and approaching tribes in several states they all ended up saying no. There's a free idea for y'all, business-wise, if you can pull it off.

[giantg2]

"I hope that the new app will help divorcing couples to work through the divorce with less pain on both sides."

It won't. The people who fight over used dish soap and other petty things will continue to have issues.

The other part is people having an incorrect perception of what they are entitled to in a divorce. The app or a lawyer will be able to show them how wrong that perception is, but it won't dull the pain.

What would actually help is forming a prenup while both parties are happy, before vengeance, winning, or whatever emerges from the failed marriage.

[thr0wawayf00]

This. My ex-wife and I split amicably and without lawyers, it was a really easy process in my state. Not having any assets made things easier but we were mature enough to be adults about it all.

The problem isn't the divorce process, it's the people involved, either the parties to the divorce or their attorneys.

[nickMMM]

thank you - I hope so too. When people are separating and fighting over kids, that can get intense too. This tragic story has stuck me for a long timehttps://nypost.com/2021/11/26/texas-man-shoots-partners-ex-a.... If people understand their rights better, they can avoid taking things into their own hands.

[lazide]

In my experience, it’s less about knowledge and more about emotional regulation - lack of it is often why it happens, and why it is so hard to deal with overall.

[throwaway_4ever]

Sheesh Texas let that guy shoot and kill an unarmed man, outside of the house, with no charges?

Insert a gun into a frustrating situation for no reason. What an a-hole.

[sofixa]

> Insert a gun into a frustrating situation for no reason

IMHO that's the main reason everyone having a gun with zero training is one of the stupidest things ever. People are dumb, people are brash, people make mistakes, people argue over everything. Why introduce a lethal component to every confrontation and bar fight? Because a piece of paper written 200 years ago says that it will be needed to protect the country doesn't really sound like a good enough reason for all the useless deaths.

[saiya-jin]

Gun ownership can be done well, with most people being minimally restricted. I really don't see why psycho-tests and some minimal level of gun manipulation skills shouldn't be a prerequisite. I mean do you want to live around a person who can't pass that but bought yesterday AR-15 with ten 40-round magazines and 2000 bullets?

But gun owners in US have this knee-jerk end-of-the-world reaction at any attempt to change anything, regardless of all the school shootings and overall ridiculously high murder rate. Tunnel vision that guns are the most important thing in the world and who doesn't restrict them is the best politician.

I lean in my opinions more towards right but due to this I would never ever be republican if I were in the US. Voting for the same people as vast amounts of bible belt gun nuts whose wet dreams are mostly about their property being invaded by some thugs (or anybody really) so they can finally defend themselves with one of the 50 guns they have mostly for this purpose, and the spend significant amount of time and money on preparing exactly for this scenario... that would be insulting.

[OmarAssadi]

I really shouldn’t have clicked the article, honestly. I have become so desensitized to everything on the internet at this point, but something about parents always makes my heart ache so baddddd. I totally struggle to not to insert my own mom or dad. It’s just tragic.

I really cannot comprehend why there is no punishment for things like that.

Sure, was he at risk of the other person grabbing the gun? Probably. But why did he have to unnecessarily bring a firearm into a heated and emotional argument in the first place? What was supposed to happen?

It feels so psychotic to me, like taunting someone with the intention to bait them into their death. Those kids lost their parent for no good reason :(

[watwut]

That sounds like a case of somestic violence - it frequently escalates precisely as reaction to victim searching freedom.