How to Negotiate a Divorce

I will state up front that I was very slow at learning how to negotiate during my divorce. This is a major reason why I write about divorce, so that I can try to help other people avoid the mistakes that I made. I’ve watched many, many people divorce over the last decade of my life and here are the main things people want divorce to give them:

1. Victory

2. Security

3. Freedom

4. Worthiness

5. Love

However, if you had told me these things were what I wanted, I’m not sure I would have admitted it, though it seems clear to me now. I understood on some level what my attorney told me, and what I heard from divorce experts in general, that divorce can only divide assets. It is a business transaction, the division of assets acquired during the marriage. It cannot give any of the things above, which is why so many people are angry about the end result of divorce.

What divorce can actually give you:

1. Half the share of the house

2. Half the retirement funds

3. Half of the china that your mother gave you at your wedding

4. Half the bedroom set that you saved up for two years to buy

5. Half the kitchen appliances that are really too big for you in your new kitchen and your new life

Solomon’s sword cutting a child in half is an apt metaphor for what divorce requires us to do, divide a life that has been shared sometimes for decades. Mostly, it is the physical manifestation of that life which is all that can be divided.

If you are in a divorce, it is a useful beginning point to make a list of all the items in the marital home. And then a list of the larger assets, cars, retirement funds, the home itself, jewelry, and on and on. Most of the actual stuff doesn’t have much real garage sale value and therefore is just something for you to argue over. I highly recommend not arguing over the china or much of anything that you physically acquired during the marriage.

I do recommend arguing over retirement funds and if you were a caregiving parent, arguing for alimony if appropriate. There are other things you can ask for, like life insurance on the working spouse who is paying alimony. You can put different figures on pre-tax or Roth accounts and they probably should be valued differently. In most cases, the house should probably be sold. But these are things to argue over.

We argued over the two gravesites next to our stillborn daughter and our parents. This may seem like a ridiculous thing to argue over, but it was a core and thorny problem in our divorce. I admit, if you have no or very little financial assets, it becomes less about the money and more about the stuff. The more you can walk away from the stuff, the easier your life post-divorce will be in almost every way. I know many women who give up assets in order to get concessions on custody agreements. I hate this, but I won’t pretend it isn’t a real thing that you can use to get what you want/need.

Learning to be a good negotiator, using what you know the other person most cares about in order to get what you most care about, is an extremely important skill. So is bringing as much as you possibly can to the table in terms of what you are willing to give up to get the things you want. I would recommend having only one or two things that you care most about and then starting to throw other things onto the pile to trade for those one or two things. If you can clarify your vision of what is most important, it helps enormously in a final negotiation. Don’t sweat the small stuff has never been so true as it is in divorce.

I also admit that there are many circumstances in which getting out fast is the best end result for you and also possibly for your dependents. Many, many women end up giving up financial assets in exchange for more custody of or control over healthcare decisions for their children because that is the way the court system is set up. It may not be fair, but it is what you can get, and women often disadvantage themselves financially to help the kids. We can talk another time about how patriarchy tells women that this is the only thing that they are made to do, to sacrifice for family.

It is also often true that one party doesn’t have the resources to wait for the long and expensive court battle and that this person is often the woman, especially if she has cared for children and been at home rather than in the work force. This means that whatever the law says is “fair” doesn’t matter because that person doesn’t have time to wait for the law and ends up signing away their rights because of expediency. And sometimes understanding that what the other person wants out of the divorce is simply you to lose means that you are playing a game with the goal simply of looking like you are the loser, even if you are trying to actually end up with a small number of things you care about.

Divorce is awful. It was worse for me in many ways than losing my daughter at birth, and I thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. The law is not fair by any stretch of the imagination. It is probably better now than fifty years ago, but it is still very far from seeing the full picture. Yes, men end up getting screwed by the courts at times, but I will say that it happens a lot less than you tend to hear about.