Being a lawyer has really messed up my mindset about marriages and relationships lately. You need to see the tons of emails and calls I get daily from folks seeking my legal services to institute a proceeding for divorce for them (both men and ladies); I got two emails to that effect just today. The professional ethics of lawyer-client confidentiality binds me if not I should have shared some receipts of them here.
Due to the fact that I constantly write articles on law-related topics (including divorce), people get my email address from news blogs and messages from those seeking divorce keep trooping in on daily bases, this has forced me to raise this unprofessional but friendly alarm.
“It seems everyone wants a divorce. There’s no other better explanation for it”.
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Sometimes when I ask about the duration of the marriages, some of these marriages are even barely up to a year. It seems everyone wants to be out of the marriage institution and you will be forced to ask yourself, does it mean that these days marriages are no longer working or what is really going on.
I know as a lawyer I should be eager to jump on those divorces briefs and go ahead to file the processes as much as the client is ready to pay me my professional fee (some of the clients don’t even care about how much the fee cost, they just want to be out of the marriage no matter what it takes) but as a human who has empathy before anything else, I am sometimes reluctant to take up some of those briefs, especially after carrying out due diligence inquiry and meeting with the client and I found out that the reason(s) he/she wants the divorce is too trivial that the court will not grant us audience.
Be it as it may, as a lawyer and as a human, I do not advocate that anybody remain in an abusive relationship; God forbid that I do that or ask a person to remain in a marriage that has failed completely but some of the issues or reasons why some of these clients want a divorce when you hear of it are just too trivial; just mere misunderstandings in most cases that the partners can talk through and settle it with makeup sex; unless they are not telling the lawyer everything or the real reason why they really want the divorce.
How can you ask a lawyer to institute a divorce because your husband does not answer your phone calls immediately or because your spouse snores or your spouse refuses to cook or wash for you? These are some of the reasons I hear from some clients and they will end it with “it’s a long story or lawyer you won’t understand, just go ahead with the divorce process, I’m tired of the marriage”.
I am honestly not an insensitive person; I am not insensitive to the fact that some of these issues are deeper than what they may seem on the face of it but sometimes it circles back to ego. A partner does want to let go of ego.
As a lawyer who is also a certified mediator and counselor, sometimes I can decipher that the relationship has not broken down irredeemably, the partners just need to talk things through, or that a partner just needs to let go of ego and apologize and they will live happily ever after.
In as much as the spouse is not abusive and you are not physically abused or mentally abused, whatever other reasons that do not fall into that category are always considered trivial by the court and the court will be reluctant to listen to the divorce proceedings because the marriage has not broken down irredeemably.
Some of you all need to understand that divorce is not as simple as you think. I have never seen a person that went through a divorce and remain the same, it also does have a huge negative effect on the children. Divorce is also very expensive. It is never cheap.
The litmus test before a court will grant a divorce is “has the marriage broken down irredeemably? have the partners tried all they could to make the marriage work and it is not working?; has a mediator or the lawyers to the spouses tried to mediate and seek amicable settlement of the partners and it failed?
If all the answers to these questions are in affirmative then the court will proceed and grant the divorce but if any answer to the above questions is in the negative then the court will be hesitant in hearing the divorce proceeding.
Most importantly, the court considers the duration of the marriage. The court will definitely be reluctant to grant a divorce for a marriage that is barely a year.