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Why is divorce so expensive?

Because it’s worth it? 

Divorce is a hard issue to ignore, since it permeates one in four households like a social disease. In fact if marital discord were a disease, then the cure – divorce - can often feel like cutting off a gangrenous limb with a pair of blunt scissors. Getting a divorce is not supposed to be a pushover, but current practice makes it a nightmare.  One long running joke asks the question: Why is divorce so expensive? To which the reply: Because it’s worth it. But what price, Freedom? Couples everywhere are finding out the hard way. The way most divorces pan out exacts a hefty sum from divorcing parties and places it in the hands of their legal practitioners. You may have thought that you were on the path to Freedom, but in reality you end up on the road to Hell.

For a divorcing couple of my acquaintance, not one week went by in the run up to financial separation without a heated exchange of correspondence. It seemed incredible that people, who had known each other intimately for years, should suddenly chose to communicate via third party only and by post. What was actually happening? Fifty thousand pounds later, and after finally settling on a meagre sum of eighty five thousand pounds (considerably eaten away as a result), they sat back and surveyed the damage. In a flash of inspiration, it occurred to them that none of the time wasting correspondence so astutely composed by their solicitors – not one single page of it – had made the slightest difference to the outcome of their case. It might just as well have been written on toilet paper and flushed. Perhaps then it would have found its most suitable resting place.  By the time of the final court hearing, this munificent collection of billets doux formed a pile so high that the judge peered round it like Richard Dreyfus in the Close Encounters film, when he stares at that mountain of gunk he constructed on the dinner table and wonders where it came from. 

Without a doubt we could all say: well, what fools they! Their own stupid fault for being such a pair of dysfunctional dimwits. But the truth does not lie in any psychotic aberration of the facts. It lies in what can only be called the Psychology of Exploitation. The system works like this: Spouse A tells their solicitor that Spouse B has got it all wrong, and that actually there is no money in the kitty and that anyway it wasn’t their fault that Spouse B wanted a career or that Spouse A spent Christmas of 1985 in The Dog and Ferret. Spouse A’s solicitor soaks up this petrol bomb of information and fires it out in a six page letter, which Spouse B reads.  You don’t have to be Jerry Springer to figure out the response.

Which leads us to the point of the correspondence mountain: people in a vulnerable situation under emotional strain can be expected to act illogically. But those who represent the popular face of justice: the legal practitioners, cannot. Not only are emotive recriminations fruitless once the towel has been thrown in on a relationship, but they form the substance of a legal bill the length of a megalomaniac’s shopping list, which you will be only too keen to burn once the fire of discord has died out. Exploitation is the only word for it. Popular wisdom has it that the only people who stand to gain from a divorce, are the solicitors, and there is more than a good deal of truth in the expression - there is a good deal to worry about. The legal system of a nation is its pulse. Profiting from other people’s weaknesses puts our legal practitioners a heartbeat away from the loan shark or the dodgy tradesman.  To survive the divorce process with something more than an overdraft and a Jack Nicholson smile, you need to put your feelings on a shelf: up there with that video of Gone with the Wind and last year’s photo album – and Move On.