On behalf of Stange Law Firm, PC posted in Divorce on Friday, May 6, 2016.

Divorce can be a funny thing. One day, you may suddenly come to the realization that you want out of your marriage and you want a divorce. While the realization may arrive with surprising suddenness, the underlying motivational factors have probably been present for a long time.

You may have been married for many years and seemingly had a “successful” marriage. But over the years, you may have suffered many, repeated incidents that damaged your relationship. While any one of them may have been insignificant on their own, they may have created a pattern and practice that over time has become intolerable.

This is probably why so many efforts to reduce the divorce rate, such as waiting periods, legislatively mandated counseling and other restrictions designed to make husbands and wives “rethink” their decision to divorce are unsuccessful.

The experience of being in a marriage and a relationship is a long-term event, with years or decades of material surrounding it. By the time an individual walks into an attorney’s office in St. Louis, the decision has been made. Everything else is merely details.

Now, they are very important details, and you will have a lot of work to do with your attorney, making sense of those details. From property division to child custody and support issues, these are all fundamental details that will shape the rest of your life. You need to give them all of your attention because they will control a vast number of aspects of your future.

But the decision to get a divorce? That decision typically has happened long before, formed from a lifetime of experience.

Source: huffingtonpost.com, “The Shift to Divorce,” Jane Ryan, May 2, 2016