Every book, website, divorce blog— says the same thing: when you are getting a divorce you are not friends. I hate it. I can honestly say that I don’t know whether the truth perpetuates this warning or the warning perpetuates this truth.

Why do people who were once married hate each other to split? Why should their new partners need to erase the past out of their lives?

I call stunted psychological development on all who participate in this reality. But, it is true for most divorce cases. The lawyer is who you contact next. You have two choices. I am going to add a third for fun. Any choices when you are getting a divorce should add on a month to a year of marriage depending on the contentious relationship you are in.

A: Mediation
B: Divorce Lawyer
C: You are told you can do this whole divorce Online

Let’s take a moment to look at these options.

A: Mediation.

Mediation is when you hire a third party to help you negotiate the divorce. This keeps you out of court, can speed up the process of negotiations and allows for a third party to help you think through the process rationally. A lot of articles out there tend to lean towards mediation and impose their view of believing mediation is the best option without factoring in life’s complications, i.e. biased and unbiased mediators, the skill set of one party to speak up for themselves and one party not capable of cooperating. Every situation is different.

In a search for a guide to mediation state-by-state, results were bone dry. However, you can visit your state’s website for information (Example: mediation and divorce. Here are several links on mediation that may help you decide if this option is for you:

elibrary.law.psu.edu

Verywellfamily.com

Nolo.com

Mediate.com

Divorcemag.com

In my case, mediation was the first consideration. The problem with this for me was that we had experienced third party representation in our relationship several times. Like I mentioned before, we had been kicked out of therapy on occasion and on other occasion, it just didn’t work. Often, that third person party was mesmerized with my ex and he dominated the conversations. I had witnessed the same acts of mansplaining, disregard for true understanding between genders, and outright lying in our conversations with others: regardless of  third party or group gender, our exchanges made me feel invisible and misunderstood. I wanted a divorce by the letter of the law. I wanted to get exactly what I was supposed to support my son, a split of the debt. We had nothing else to negotiate. We had a house I was living in and we would eventually sell that house owing $800 dollars at closing that he put on a credit card under my name.

Mediation is costly. It may not work. So at that point, you are paying twice– once for trying and once for the real thing. It feels a lot like trying to keep a marriage together by having a baby. Mediation works for those who are already committed to creating a third thing with the situation they are in: divorce should get you to a place where you are defining a new relationship you are committing to for the well being of all involved. If you are not willing to define this fairly, you will end up in court or you will agree to something unfair and one party will work to sabotage what you have put into law.

B: Divorce Lawyer

This is the route I ended up going. Divorce lawyers are not who I would choose to be friends with. So, if you tend to not like them– I’m with you. The first divorce lawyer I had was in Manhattan. She advised me well at first. What I need to do was immediately go to the courthouse and file for child support. I went four years without child support while we fought over the actual means of which we would get a divorce.

She put the court date on the docket, he met with me and the lawyer and convinced us to wait to work out the whole negotiation.

This bought him time. Eventually we filed again. We sent the papers to the lawyer he said he had secured. She sent them back and said he wasn’t being represented by her. This all meant $ on my part. I was not receiving child support, made less than he did and was paying a share of the debt, yet I was shouldering the burden of the divorce.

He had registered our son for school in Brooklyn where he resided with his new Girlfriend because I was taking care of the house — we were waiting for it to sell. I had the bills of a two family home with a pool on a adjunct professor’s salary while driving my son to school in Brooklyn, a borough away. In response, he would argue that my son should stay over there more to help with the burden. All offerings were in “good-faith”, and led to being used against a fair negotiation.

When visiting my lawyer, she mentioned talking to him without me being present or without my knowledge. Then casually, she mentioned that he was doing a reading, etc. This built a distrust between us. I knew the drill. I wasn’t being advised to be aggressive to save time and money. I told her I would no longer need her service. Her service cost me $8,000. We never went to court. We never successfully served a paper.

Out of energy, I gave the divorce a rest. I needed to center. I needed to accept we were not on the same side.

C) You can do the whole thing Online.

You can. He had consolidated our student loans and opened up credit cards in my names. Yes, you can do that too. He had me down on his credit cards. I had no idea of the debt, and don’t know exactly how it came about. But you can just jot down what you want and file online and get it done. It’s like $500 or something. I don’t remember much about the details because as he was visiting me with his sweet nothings and trying to convince me that this was surely the way, he also told me he was getting married at Poet’s House in a public ceremony despite the fact that he was not divorced yet. My son was in the wedding. He wanted us both to keep our continued marriage a secret. My son was six. I pretty much accepted he was unstable at this point, and being away from him long enough, I was clearer on what that meant.

After his “marriage,” I said he needed a lawyer. He would beg me to not go through with the divorce because he did not want to marry the woman he had “second married.” It was like being in the twilight zone when around him. And we all worked together: Him, His Present, and me. Of course his Present didn’t like me, so the whole thing was convenient for them both. I was not getting child support.

I filed for child support and they contacted him. I did this by walking down to the court house. It took about an hour. It cost me nothing or next to nothing. I was on the schedule within two weeks. He came to see me, desperate again. I told him it was time. He looked me in the eye and said, “I just have a couple of more payments to make on my credit cards until I am done, please.” I had not even started paying down my credit card debt he had acquired in my name.

Even saying all of this, I sound like an idiot. I know it. How can a person not know their own debt? Or what credit cards are in their name? Or stay married to someone who publicly marries someone else? Or who lets the Present treat her son like he is a bother? Or let’s her ex ask her six year old to lie?

I could go on. Refer to Divorce Part I. I wish I had the clarity to be a different person. I did not.

The first step in not being that person, was not agreeing to getting a divorce Online.