"Coupling" and "Uncoupling", Conscious Or Not

“Conscious Uncoupling” is the most recent "flavor of the month”  to be launched into the popular terminology and fashion in divorce, following on the heels of “Integrative divorce”, “collaborative divorce”, and  the division of “mediation” among “transformative”, “evaluative”, “facilitative”, and “adjudicative” mediation.

Leaving aside for a moment some of the more eccentric and New-Age-y thoughts* of the authors from whom Ms. Paltrow drew the phrase, the term suggests, as the other bookend, “conscious coupling”.  That is a concept which I have been advocating and will advocate as long as I continue to have folks willing to listen to, or read, my thoughts on the subject. **

Those who’ve read this blog know that I believe and advocate that the closest someone about to marry can get to a policy of “marriage insurance” is making sure that both spouses-to-be have the same understanding and expectations of “the Deal”, the contract they sign on for when they say “I do”.     Competent financial planners, when interviewing married potential clients, routinely ask both spouses to separately answer questions about financial philosophy, risk aversion, etc., and this occasionally uncovers widely divergent views, often to their clients’ dismay.  Likewise, clergy whom I respect, regardless of denomination, often will want, before performing a wedding for their congregants,   to have a serious pastoral discussion with them about their mutual understanding of their “covenant” (which is just an old word for a contract.)

If there’s more “Conscious Coupling”, there’ll probably be less “uncoupling”, conscious or otherwise.


             * “The creation of insects was a failed attempt by nature to evolve a higher form of consciousness”, “Anthroposophic Medicine” and my favorite,  “The misunderstandings involved in divorce also have much to do with the lack of intercourse between our own internal masculine and feminine energies. Choosing to hide within an endoskeleton and remain in attack mode requires a great imbalance of masculine energy. ” This latter is obviously intended to assist those who have considered developing an exoskeleton to hide in when they get divorced; Paging Gregor Samsa....

**Just passed my 25th anniversary, so I claim some personal, as well as professional expertise.

Celebrity Divorce Without Tabloids: It Can Be Done!

Without noise, paparazzi, or even appearance on a public docket, Tim Duncan and his ex finalized their divorce by settling it, in a non-public document.  As with the Schwarzenegger/Shriver settlement, they decided that a long bitter public court battle wasn't anyone's best career move.

...and incidentally, an acknowledgement for the pointer and a hat tip, to Peter Salem of the AFCC,  whose (co-edited) Family and Divorce Mediation: Models, Techniques and Applications was name-checked in the Onion article about Duncan!

Believe Half of What You See*: The "Skier's Fetus Custody Case", And Other Internet Rumors

To say that the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act   (UCCJEA) isn't usually the stuff of the internet tabloids, and the "entertainment news" shows and sites is an understatement.   So when it does make an appearance,  it's frankly not horribly surprising when the tabloids, reputable online news outlets, and even the "Grey Lady" of American news media, don't get the details exactly right.

The short version of the story (and I haven't read the full trial court record either in New York or in California) seems to be that in May, a New York judicial officer made an odd, and fairly clearly wrong-headed decision on the issue of custody jurisdiction, kicking the case back to California.  A judge in California, faced with an apparent "we don't want it!" from the New York court, then decided to act, since, at that point, no other court was willing to do so.  Several months later, the appellate court in New York, in what is characterized as a "scathing" opinion, reversed the New York trial court's mistake.

Is any of this really news?   Judges (and other judicial officers) sometimes make wrong decisions.  Sometimes, they even make stupidly wrong decisions.  That's what the appellate process is about.






*"People say believe half of what you see, and none of what you hear."   Norman Whitfield and Barrett Strong:   Heard It Through the Grapevine

Back to Hollywood

Kim K's marriage is broken, after seventy-two days; presumably she listened to her own advice on the subject of prenuptial agreements.

Now Why Didn't I Think Of That?

A divorce gift registry. Those Brits are so far ahead of us in handling matters of etiquette.

McCourts: Minding (And Dividing) The Family Store

Jamie McCourt has now filed her action for dissolution, along with a request for somewhere between $300,000 and $500,000 per month in spousal support (depending on whether she immediately gets back all her perks of being a Dodgers co-owner) and about two and a half million dollars in attorney fees and litigation costs.

What's interesting about this case, beyond the usual tabloid stuff, is that it involves almost all of the issues any married couple in business together faces when the marriage goes bad.

The questions aren't that different from those which have to be answered if the McCourts together had purchased and operated, let's say, a sandwich franchise, except that there's a much longer string of zeros after all the numbers, which makes it worthwhile to take a long hard look at the issues, rather than just sort of "washing them out". If either of them wants to air the dirt, as it appears that both may be in the process of doing, their employees, and their business competitors, are of course watching from the sidelines.

To the extent that either airs dirt, and the business suffers, there then will arise the equally interesting question of who it is (to mix metaphors) who killed the golden-egg-laying goose. Since California spouses have an ongoing fiduciary duty to their spouses, and to the community, NOT to kill the golden goose, if each takes a drumstick and pulls hard, it'll take a lot of sorting out to find the cause of goosey's death.

Kim Kardashian Agrees With Me: Get a Pre-marital Agreement!

I just couldn't resist writing the headline. Here's the story.

Divorce, Tabloid News, and the First Amendment

The Connecticut Supreme Court has held that once someone with a "celebrity divorce" signs an agreement that gives away the right to blab about the divorce to the media, in exchange for money from her ex, that agreement will be enforced, and isn't an improper violation of the would-be-blabber's First Amendment rights.

Possibly History's Coolest Divorce Settlement Offer

Per the books-on-disc version of Walter Issacson's biography of Albert Einstein, when Einstein became estranged from his wife, he proposed to her that in exchange for her consenting to a divorce, when he won the Nobel Prize, he would give her the prize money. He eventually did both.

The Parenting Debate, times eight (or fourteen)

OK, although I've got an opinion about the woman with the IVF octuplets, plus six other kids (as does everyone else, apparently) I'm keeping it to myself. I'm not only not going to call any government agencies to "report Mom to the authorities", I won't debate about what "Octo-Mom" * should or shouldn't have done. I will talk, or at least raise annoying questions, about why this set of events is prompting public debate, how that debate's being conducted, and what else should be being debated.

How is the public busy-bodying and involvement of celebrity lawyers and therapists, and the work of Mom's (now former) public relations firm/agent in brokering offers for exclusive interview rights, morally different from the offer to pay Mom money to star in a porn movie? Would Mom's being in the porn movie in some ways be less morally objectionable than, say, putting the kids in a "reality show", or a series of commercials, once they're out of the NICU? Is it, after all, one thing to sell yourself, and something different to essentially sell (or lease) your kids?

If I culled through all the cases on calendar at our support enforcement court departments, in any given week, I could probably turn up at least one guy who has fathered fourteen children, all still minors, although probably it would turn out to have been with four (or five or six) different women. I've watched support enforcement attorneys, and the judge, wrestle with the complex math of recursively recalculating support for some guys like that. Why isn't my not-so-hypothetical Mr. Fertile Deadbeat Defendant on TV?

For that matter, where's and who's Octo-daddy? The information I've seen to date is that Octo-daddy was not an anonymous donor, and Octo-Mom was not married to anyone else at the time. Octo-daddy may be on the hook for one heck of a large medical bill, and a really interesting amount of child support going forward maybe he should be looking for that TV deal?

We're at a point in our country's economic downturn where the availability of basic child health care is a serious concern for a growing number of parents. Should there be some restriction on access to "assisted reproductive techology" and fertility treatments, to those who meet some sort of means test, so that we're not spending health-care dollars to assure the need to spend more health-care dollars? If we do that, and the "means" go away after the fact (let's say someone was a banker, broker or a motor company exec) what happens to the kids? Should there be across-the-board limitation of the expenditure of financial medical resources to enable someone to have her or his seventh or eighth child, or as long as someone piles up the dollars on the counter, should we facilitate someone's, anyone's having as many children as they want?

RFG-S

* Wasn't that a Spiderman bad guy?