See Rob Dance.
Dance Rob! Dance!
Oh, no it's not the happy dance of celebration. It's the tentative minefield hop of a friendly divorce. Of the three options discussed in yesterday's blog, this is the maneuver MyUnwife and I chose to be our last waltz.
The friendly divorce is called "friendly," not because of the frat party abandon shared during the process, but because of the ice dance synchronization required to succeed. Each step, lift, and smile, is calculated, cold, and planned.
Spin her over the mine, slice left, now wave…
Skate Rob. Skate.
That's why it's not for everybody. You have to be getting along well enough to work through the compromise. If you're envisioning their head on your trophy wall, go ahead and skip the rest of today's blog. No hard feelings.
MyUnwife and I had hard feelings. We also had hard heads. Still, we put them together. It's something we were always good at. Oh, the final product may look like a pre-school Mona Lisa, but we always worked well enough together to complete the project.
So you need to be able to work together, if you want a friendly divorce. You also need to live in a "no fault" divorce state. Ok it's not a requirement, but it's really tough to be "friendly" when you're reamed by 20 quires of accusations. In a "No fault" divorce you can silently seethe at each other with a spit-wad of blame pressed into your cheek. Remember when you were 7 and your sister tattled on you for sneaking into the cookie jar without giving her any? You're Mom's sense of justice involved sticking you both in a room until you could "get along?" This is the same thing.
"I'm not touching you…"
Yeah, that sort of takes on a new meaning now. Sure, we're all adults. Whatever.
The upside to the Friendly divorce is it's the cheapest, and possibly the quickest, of all your options. If you can slug through this (sorry, poor choice of words. Slugging voids the "friendly."), then you can get out and on your way within 6 months (depending on state laws) without spending much more than copying costs and filing fees. It's much cheaper than hiring 1 lawyer, per player. Actually, it's cheaper than hiring 1 lawyer period.
If you're uncomfortable with legal forms, and are worried about completing them properly, there are tools to help you. MyUnwife and I used www.completecase.com. Complete Case is much like Turbo Tax. Both you and your partner sit in front of the computer, answer questions, and then print the forms.
For us, it was worth the 250 bucks. Making sense of legal forms would have been just one more long car trip without a map or a bathroom break: both of us pointing at pointless offramps and baffled by meaningless intersections. By the end of the night, she'd have come at me with the red Swingline 747, while I tried to knock her out with my paper punch.
Run Rob! Run!
No, one less stressor was worth the money. That does bring us to the downside of the "friendly" divorce. You have to dance like a team for one more song. Each move equal give, equal take. She spins, you hold. No matter how tempting it is to let her fly into the hutch full of china she's so determined that she's taking. Even though it was a gift from your Great Uncle (who's now dead) given to both of you. Crashing and breaking, each shard—Sorry, you get my point. Hold on to her. Let her have the hutch. Let's face it, you’re a paper plate kind of guy, and nobody's around to wash dishes anymore anyway. Take something useful like the refrigerator. Where else are you going to keep the beer?
My house…2, 3, 4…dip…your car…3, 4…and bow at the door…
Everything has to be this way. It's methodical and tedious, but chances are, you'll get more of what you want, if you compromise. I was never about the stuff, but I got what I needed. There were things I felt were mine, and I got most of those. I think she did too.
In the end, we're as happy as we can be, and still use the words "divorce" and "happy" in the same sentence.
See Rob smile knowingly.
Smile Rob Smile.
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