Recently it came to my attention that people who see my posts on Facebook regarding some tips and pointers on divorce, don’t always click the meme or the link to see the real blog behind it all. People
are looking at our “self-help” blogs and are under the mistaken impression that we are “pimping out divorce” or “encouraging divorce.” (It’s a hard life for a Pimp). Wow, the amount of power that you think we have is astounding. This is not how divorce works. We don’t encourage a divorce. We don’t tell people to get a divorce. We do, however, profit from divorces, just as any doctor or surgeon profits from a health issue. If we could promote divorces, and it worked, we’d be riiiiiiiiiich! (But the point is, we don’t…)
Regardless, do I personally wish divorce didn’t exist? No, because sometimes the wrong people get married. It’s unfortunate and upsetting, but sometimes the marriage in the first place was the problem, not the fact the people need a divorce. We use our knowledge to HELP our clients fix something that is broken. If you still feel that we’re “pimping out divorce” or “encouraging divorce” because we write blogs to help people through the situation that they are stuck in, please keep reading why you’re incorrect in your assumption:
- Most divorce attorneys I personally know are hopeless romantics. Every family law attorney or divorce attorney I’ve ever met has been either very happily married, very happily committed, or strenuously searching for someone to love. Every day we see people giving up on love or committing terrible acts against their spouse. After dealing with the terrible ins and outs of this, when we go home, we are motivated to work hard on our own relationships. There are often times that I tell my clients, “Don’t worry! A lot of the time, after filing for a divorce, people actually reconcile. Sometimes the divorce process pushes you back together.”
- Your causation is off. A Band-Aid doesn’t cause an injury. A self-help book doesn’t lower self- esteem. A personal injury attorney doesn’t cause the car accident. A divorce attorney doesn’t cause a divorce.
- No happy marriage ends in divorce. This is cliché at this point. Everyone has heard this by now, at least I would hope. We don’t meet with people who are in happy marriages unless they’re here for some other matter like an adoption. (Yay! Adoption!) I am not going to encourage a divorce unless it were a situation in which my client was in danger. For example: Chuck (Norris) kicked Ally in the face, the stomach, and then held a gun to her head. She comes in the next week spilling all of this information and desperately wanting a Protection From Abuse Order. Three days later, she retracts her statement and says that she overreacted, and he didn’t mean to do all that. He was practicing for a part in a play, and she just got in the way. At this point, I would advise her to leave him and to file for divorce. If that makes me a bad person, then so be it.
- Your reading comprehension is off. My blogs are there to help people through a divorce. Happily married people read them and forward them to friends and family who need them. These blogs are intended for that purpose. They are there for happily married people to forward, and for unhappily married people to use when necessary. They are not to create unhappily married people out of happily married people.
- Sometimes people need some comic relief – the world of entertainment realizes this, why can’t the general public? Have you ever watched a very serious movie that causes you to feel down or uneasy and then one of the main characters has a very ungraceful fall that relieves the tension for a brief moment? That’s what some of the memes, humorous blogs, and excessive examples are for. This is not to make light of divorce or the subsequent emotional upset caused by it, but to give you a brief moment of laughter over something you and others can relate to when your friends just don’t get it. For example, comic relief would be:
