Marriage is Easy, Divorce isn’t. Get a Marriage Agreement

by | Dec 14, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

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Marriage Is Easy. Divorce Isn’t. Get a Marriage Agreement.

It’s pretty easy to get married. All you need is a license, and when I was practicing, it cost about $100. Some people have fancy weddings, which take real planning and money, but that’s a choice. Nobody’s forcing you into a big production.

You don’t get the same choice with divorce. It only takes one person deciding they want out. Marriage needs both people to say “I do.” Divorce just needs one person to file. If the other spouse doesn’t respond, it goes to court, and a judge decides for you. Courts don’t always make good calls for families, so I’d always recommend working things out with your soon-to-be ex before it gets there. Court was expensive too, roughly five thousand dollars a day back when I was seeing clients through it, and that’s before the cost of preparing to get there in the first place.

A desk-order divorce, doing all your own paperwork, was cheaper, around eighty dollars. But it was rarely realistic to actually do it all yourself. The real sticking point was always the Separation Agreement. Mine ran a hundred and forty-nine pages, every one of them describing something contentious, except the two signature pages. A hundred and forty-seven pages of contention took us a year to work through and felt like a full-time job. I used to call ours “the Beast.”

Here’s a start on what has to go into an agreement like that in British Columbia.

You have to agree on the date your relationship started. You’d think that would be simple. It rarely was. I saw clients argue over it constantly, sometimes over surprisingly small technicalities, like whether staying at a partner’s place regularly while keeping a different mailing address still counted as living together. The date matters because it can shift the financial outcome for either person, so it was rarely neutral.

Agreeing when the relationship ended was often even harder. Some people felt it had been over for years. Others still couldn’t quite believe it was ending. Again, the date carried real financial weight.

Then there’s parenting, time and money both, which usually ate up the most time of anything, especially when one parent had been the primary caregiver and the two of them had to rebuild enough trust to share parenting equally going forward. There was a lot to learn too. Most people don’t know, for instance, that a fifty-fifty parenting split doesn’t always mean no child support changes hands.

Then come the assets and debts. People often discovered assets they didn’t know existed, and even more often, debt one spouse hadn’t told the other about. Sorting that out took time and trust that usually wasn’t in great supply by that point.

A Separation Agreement, in the end, is a document that maps out every piece of your future life, negotiated with someone you probably don’t like very much right now. It takes time and enormous emotional energy, and it’s usually built during one of the darker periods of a person’s life.

So.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to build that kind of agreement before the wedding, while everyone’s still happy? It seems a little absurd that our system lets anyone get married on the strength of a hundred-dollar license bought online in a moment of blind optimism, while divorce comes wrapped in rules, requirements, and a court system that’ll make you comply if you won’t agree.

What if the agreement got made in that early, hopeful stage instead?

It might save a marriage, or save someone from marrying the wrong person to begin with. It would almost certainly make the divorce easier, if one ever came. Ask anyone who’s been through it. Divorced people are usually the first to say they wish they’d had one. Which is, of course, preaching to the converted.

How do you reach the people who haven’t gotten there yet? The happy, blissful, about-to-be-married ones?

I don’t know. I only ever saw the aftermath of the people who didn’t have one. Maybe you have a better idea.

The BAD MOTHER tagline

by | Oct 18, 2016 | Divorce and Separation, Parenting & Co-Parenting

I wrote the post below back when I was recently separated with two young children, in the thick of grief and anger, most of it aimed at my ex. I felt like I had no control over my own life. photo-1470319149473-af271634cecf

The Bad Mother Tagline

Have you ever thought of yourself as a bad mother? I know I have. “I’m a bad mother” has been the tagline running under nearly every parenting mistake I’ve made since my oldest was born, ten years ago now. Forgot his hat. Bad mother. Yelled at him for being irritating. Bad mother. Forgot to remind him to look both ways when crossing the street. BAD MOTHER. A friend and I once joked about getting matching T-shirts that said “dumb mum.”

We’re wired this way as a species, apparently, quick to forgive everyone except ourselves.

I got a fresh reminder of this a few weekends ago.

My kids’ dad asked if I could take them for the weekend. He asked on Wednesday. I was buried in work and had promised myself I wasn’t working weekends anymore. My answer should have been an easy no. I had plans. I needed the recharge.

No was right there, on the tip of my fingers as I started typing my reply. Then something stopped me.

The thought: I’m a bad mother.

How could I not want to be with my own kids? Their dad needed help. How could I put my own interests ahead of theirs?

So instead of no, I said yes. I cancelled my plans and told myself that wanting that time in the first place had been selfish.

You can probably guess how the weekend went. Not well.

It started going sideways Friday at 2:30, when my youngest called from school with a tummy ache. I knew immediately it wasn’t real, not medically. He hates last-minute changes, and switching up the schedule on short notice was enough to give him an emotional stomachache. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. He needed time to process the change. So did I.

I’d been counting on those hours to get my work done before pickup. Instead, I found myself standing in front of my seven-year-old, and the first words out of my mouth were: “Do you really have a tummy ache?”

I heard myself say it, and right behind it came the tagline, on schedule: I am a bad mother.

I spent the rest of the weekend taking my mood out on my kids in small ways I’m not proud of, and by the time they left, I was cycling through the whole tagline lineup. Bad. Hadn’t learned a thing. Still the same people-pleaser I thought I’d outgrown.

Monday morning, kids gone, I finally had space to think. I cried, partly from the weekend itself, partly because I still had work waiting and no energy left for it.

Then I started writing, and something clicked. I’d just gotten the clearest proof I was ever going to need that the “bad mother” tagline had to go. For good.

Looking back at that weekend now, oddly, I’m grateful for it. Thank you, terrible weekend. You were the thing that finally put that tagline in the ground, along with the others I’d been using to beat myself up for years.

The Blame Game

by | Jun 15, 2016 | Divorce and Separation

Blame and Happiness

I went to a great workshop a few weeks ago put on by Dr. Sue Goldswain and John Boland. If you’re ever in the market for a marriage counsellor, they’re worth looking into.

One thing that stuck with me: it takes two people to build a relationship, and two people to take one down. If a marriage ends in divorce, both people played some part in that.

It was a relief to hear it wasn’t entirely on me.

It got me thinking, though. I hear a lot of different versions of how a marriage failed or is failing, and I’ve noticed something consistent: the person doing more of the blaming tends to be the one hurting more.

I know this because I lived it. I hated my ex when we first separated, and I was miserable. How could I have married someone so horrible? As the blame slowly faded, it actually turned into something closer to gratitude, and I got noticeably happier along the way.

How do you feel about your own relationship right now? If you’re doing a lot of blaming, is it actually fixing anything?

hire yourself

by | Apr 6, 2016 | Money

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Hire Yourself

Tax season always brought the same question to mind: why is it still this stressful for so many people, when the software gets easier and cheaper every year?

I’ve seen the full range. Some people have everything to me the day filing opens, organized enough that I could practically just hit enter. Others I’d chase for years before finally filing a decade’s worth of returns in one sitting. In between, every shade of relief and dread you’d expect.

To be clear, I’m not talking about genuinely complicated returns; sometimes hiring a specialist is exactly the right call, so you can focus on what you’re actually good at. I mean the more ordinary case: employees, or people running a simple sole proprietorship, who still can’t bring themselves to sit down and do it.

Most of what stops people comes down to fear, in one form or another. Fear of making a mistake and facing penalties. Fear of having made too much money and owing a lot. Or, on the flip side, fear of discovering they made very little, and reading that as some kind of verdict on themselves rather than just a number. Easier to not look at all.

Then there’s the sheer volume of it. If you run your own business without a system for tracking money in and money out, facing a full year of receipts can feel enormous. I understood that fear well; some of my clients handed me a literal shoebox of receipts every year. Not my favourite kind of work, but it always helped to know I’d get paid for it.

All of that fear adds up to people avoiding a significant part of their financial lives. I’ve always believed that more information puts you in a better position to make good decisions, and burying your head in the sand tends to keep people stuck rather than protect them.

So what actually helps?

If it’s genuinely overwhelming, hiring someone is a reasonable option. Find someone you’re comfortable talking to, and ask them to walk you through what they’re doing as they go. It costs a bit more upfront, but it usually pays off, both in savings and in finally understanding your own numbers well enough to lose the fear around them.

I’m a firm believer in outsourcing what you genuinely can’t or don’t want to do yourself. That’s not a failure; it’s knowing your limits. But there’s a difference between outsourcing the task and outsourcing your understanding of your own financial situation. The first is fine. The second leaves you exactly as afraid of your own numbers as you were before, just with someone else quietly managing that fear for you instead of you managing it yourself.

My favourite suggestion, though: hire yourself. Decide what your own time is worth, sit down, and do the work. Once it’s done and you know what you’re owed, take that money and spend it on something that actually makes you happy. If saving it is what makes you happy, save it. But there’s a good case for putting at least some of it toward an experience you’ll actually remember.

Do that once, and next year’s taxes start looking less like a chore and more like an appointment with a bit of found money at the end of it.

Pay for your own coffee

by | Mar 15, 2016 | Money

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Pay for Your Own Coffee

I have friends currently in the dating stage of life, which is fascinating to hear about secondhand, and, being me, the money part catches my attention most.

Nearly every friend I have insists it’s the guy’s job to pay for dinner and drinks. One recently tried to pick up the check anyway and got a “come on, let me be a man” in response; he took it back before she could finish the gesture. Another friend of a friend apparently uses dating to fund her nights out; when money’s tight, she finds someone online willing to take her to dinner. It always works.

I asked around: is there ever a real conversation about the bill? Mostly no. A woman might make a token gesture toward paying, mostly for politeness, but that’s usually where it ends.

What strikes me is that these are all women in their forties, all at least as financially secure as the men they’re dating. This isn’t about need.

So what does this actually do?

One friend went on two dates with someone who paid both times. After the second, she decided they weren’t a match and spent two full days agonizing over how to tell him, instead of sending the simple, honest note she eventually did. She told me it would’ve been so much easier to end it if she hadn’t felt like she owed him something for the forty dollars he’d spent.

A more serious version of this happened to another friend some years back. A guy took her to a fancy dinner, and when the night didn’t end the way he expected, he made his displeasure clear and never contacted her again. She was, fortunately, someone who didn’t let that kind of thing shake her, and her read on it was good riddance. Not everyone comes out of a situation like that as unbothered.

My honest take: men get a lot of leverage for the price of a fairly cheap dinner. Some women consciously use that dynamic to their advantage, which is fair enough, but it still reinforces a pattern that doesn’t really serve anyone in the long run.

This dating-and-paying pattern sets a template, and if the relationship continues, that template often carries forward. Being financially taken care of by someone else shifts the whole balance of power in a relationship. I see a version of this with my own kids: I pay, and I make the decisions.

Do women need to be taken care of? What people actually need in a relationship is to be loved and respected, and assuming upfront that someone can’t take care of herself financially isn’t really either of those things.

I’ve met several widows through my volunteer work preparing taxes for seniors. Almost without exception, they were never the ones making the financial decisions in their households. Learning to manage money for the first time as a senior after losing a spouse is genuinely hard.

The pattern starts small, right at the beginning. Going on a coffee date? Pay for your own coffee.