Category : Divorce advice

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How To Know You’re Growing Apart

Growing apart is an unfortunate reality of married life, and it’s one that must be fought against every step of the way. The marriages that are unable to fight back are the ones that often fail. The good news is that something can be done before it’s too late that will enable you to keep the marriage together. You simply have to know what the warning signs are and resolve to do something about them.

Warning Sign #1: You do everything separately.

Vacations, bed times, weekend time. If you are spending all your time apart and living as glorified roommates, then you need to stop it at once. Schedule a weekend off together somewhere, free of the kids. Hire a babysitter for the night if you can’t afford a whole weekend. Reconnect as dating partners and not just caregivers. Have a code word if the conversation starts to become too much about the kids. All of this is important for not growing apart.

Warning Sign #2: You are stressed to the max.

Buy a house? Remodeling one? Did you just have a baby? Or perhaps you have a sick child that requires more care than a child on a normal development pattern would need? All of life’s stresses can add up over time, or they can crush you at once. If you can’t learn to lean on one another and nurture your relationship throughout, then you could be headed for trouble. If you’re stressed, do NOT be afraid to ask for help. Family. Friends. They all want to see you succeed, and by utilizing them when times are tough, you can take the time to reconnect with one another, assess tough situations, and figure out how best to deal with the issues.

Warning Sign #3: You are bored with one another.

You’re spending time together, but unfortunately, you aren’t as drawn to one another as you used to be. When you do get free time, you’re out of ideas for things to do from the very beginning. Instead of living a life together, you’re going through the motions and wishing you were somewhere else. The remedy for this is tough, and sometimes there isn’t one.

If you can’t work out your issues, read over our online divorce reviews and see which option is the best for you.

Relationship Advice From Divorce Attorneys

Relationship advice from a divorce attorney may not be your ideal resource, but these professionals see how marriages can fall apart every day of their lives. They also see how clients are able to put themselves back together again. Therefore, they can be a surprisingly effective tool in rebuilding your dating life and seeing yourself as someone’s significant other once more. Forbes recently asked several to weigh in with some of their best advice, and here were their responses.

1. NYC Attorney Alyssa Eisner: “Be true to yourself. If deep-down you really want kids, don’t tell yourself it will be enough to be a stepmom. You will ultimately resent your spouse, and it will come out in passive-aggressive ways. If you really want someone who won’t come home until 10 p.m. because he’s out hustling and making a lot of money — don’t marry a blue-collar guy, because you won’t be happy. Don’t think you can change the other person. You can’t.

2. San Diego Attorney Zephyr Hill: “Be judicious with social media. Healthy relationships require spending time together in real life, and social media can be a hazardous distraction. Broadcasting the details (good or bad) of your relationship is a recipe for disaster.”

3. Pasadena Attorney Mark Baer: “Synchronize. Avoid most arguments by making it more difficult, if not impossible, to forget things by using synchronized lists, calendaring apps, and the like. Synchronize financial information so spouses can keep track of combined income and expenses, avoid bouncing checks from joint accounts, and hopefully eliminate financial ‘surprises’ that can create marital conflict.”

4. Somerville, N.J. Attorney Francine Gargano: “If you get involved with someone who is divorced, seek out a copy of the complaint and answer in the divorce (not the Final Judgment of Divorce) so you can see the allegations against the individual, i.e. domestic violence, adultery or maybe just irreconcilable differences. You will have a better understanding of the type of person you are dating.”

For more make sure you check out the full article here. And if you’re uncertain of which path to choose in your divorce, make sure you check out these online divorce reviews.

What To Do When Your Spouse Says, ‘I Want A Divorce’

They’re the words no spouse wants to hear. Four simple words that can blindside you and turn your whole world upside down. ”I want a divorce.” As an online divorce review site, we’ve seen many people not know how to respond to this demand, and it can lead to major issues if not handled correctly. While each situation is different, there are some general principles you should keep in mind if you’re on the receiving end of those words.

1. Realize it’s not your decision to make.

The decision to file is fueled by what your spouse is thinking and feeling and wanting. It’s not something that you can hack in to and reprogram. They’re the only ones who can do that and so thinking that you can somehow “make them stay” will only set you up for disaster. Avoid allowing your emotions to override your common sense in this area and instead try to listen to what your spouse is saying. If part of them still wants to be with you, they might suggest or agree to go to counseling. But typically when the words leave their mouth, it’s difficult to change their minds.

2. Commit to being your best.

While you cannot control how your spouse will act once they decide to file, you can control your own actions, which should include keeping a level head, taking care of yourself, attending marriage counseling if that is an option or regular counseling should you need some professional advice on how to deal with the fallout. What you don’t do is engage in erratic behavior in a desperate attempt to “win back” your spouse. No one ever crazy-ed their way into a happy ending.

3. Start building a support unit.

You may not be able to rely on your spouse anymore once they tell you they want a divorce, but you can find the people in your life who really matter to you. Draw close to them. Don’t let them go. They will see you through the hard times ahead and ensure that you end up in a better place when the dust clears.

Good luck as you enter this uncertain time.

Confronting The ‘Other Man Or Woman’: How Some Look At It

As an online divorce review site, we see many cases come through that were initiated due to an act of infidelity. Most of the time, the couples contemplating divorce choose to part ways and be done with it, but sometimes, that isn’t enough for the spouse who was cheated on, and they would rather confront the other Mister or Miss with whom their spouse got involved. Here’s how several redditors looked at it.

1. “True story… Shook his hand and thanked him for inheriting the crazy… They were finished in a month.”

2. “… yes, I’ve confronted the other guy on the two occasions I’ve been cheated on. It was not even a little satisfying in the long run. I was young and dumb.”

3. “I wasn’t going to before he showed up at my house the day after me and my ex-SO broke up. She let him in, I grabbed a bat and beat … him. … he ended up in hospital and the police said if he presses charges I could go to jail. He didn’t, but I still regret doing it. … Moral of the story. It’s not worth it. Let it go and move on.”

4. “Accidentally. He was one of her close friends so I knew him fairly well. He just so happened to start taking guitar lessons the same place I was the week after it happened. I walked downstairs to the place and lo and behold he’s standing right there. He tried to duck away so I couldn’t see him, but I thought it would be funny to make it as awkward as possible so conversed with him for a bit. He was squirming the entire time.

“This was in high school (specifically my senior year) so kind of different than a relationship later in life, but this was the last time to my knowledge that I was cheated on.”

5. “My ex had the audacity to introduce me to him a couple months after we broke up. I just walked away, and never spoke to her again. I don’t know why I was speaking to her in the first place.”

6. “You’re blaming the wrong person. Stop getting mad at the other person for your SO’s infidelity.”

What would you do, or what have you done in this situation? Sound off in our comments section.

How To Know If They’re Still In Love With You

As an online divorce review site, we stay interested in topics associated with marriage and divorce, and one of the biggest is love. But whether you’re still in a marriage or you’re looking at doing it again, how do you know if your partner still loves you? Maybe these examples can shed some light.

1. “My girlfriend tries to stay awake until I come home. I tend to work a lot of late nights, but she’s more of an “early to bed, early to rise” kinda girl, so she always tries to stay awake so she can at least say good night. She’s studying abroad right now, and she still tries to stay awake until I come home from work so we can skype goodnight :)”

2. “The other day I was having a really bad day. Just sad and upset and generally horrible. So we’re laying in bed watching TV and during a break he goes to the kitchen for whatever reason. When he gets back he hands me a burnt marshmallow on a stick. Because he knows how much I love burnt marshmallows and that it would make me happy. Needless to say, my day was instantly better and I love that guy a lot.”

3. “I seriously injured my back recently and he helps me do absolutely everything and expects nothing back. When I start to feel bad for needing him so much, he reassures me that he’s my husband and he loves helping me. ‘For better or for worse.’ It means a lot.”

4. “I have been dating her for three years, and honestly no matter how mad I am at her, when she calls me Jamie Giraffe there’s no way I can be mad. It’s such a simple thing to be called a special nick name but its so special.”

5. “The way she smiles after I kiss her. It’s always the little things.”

6. “Every morning, my wife of 18 years gets up before me and makes coffee. She doesn’t drink coffee.”

7. “When he wakes up in the middle of the night and kisses me while still half asleep. That makes me feel like even when he’s semi-conscious he wants to show me he loves me.”

8. “When I’m stressed out and miserable because of my job, he always says ‘Just quit. We’ll be okay,” when he knows full well that we need the money my job brings in. He’d rather have to scrape and scratch to pay the bills than see me unhappy. And because I love him, I keep working.”

Marriage As Discipline: How To Embrace The Work Part

Karl Pillemer, author of the book 30 Lessons for Loving, recently stopped by Huffington Post and shared some helpful advice that was given to him by elderly people he interviewed for the new book. Their advice covered living and loving, and on the topic of marriage, one thing became clear: approach it as a discipline.

Pillemer said that elders “viewed marriage as an unbreakable bond; they simply had to work within those parameters. That means, for example, you live through rough patches and don’t just try to get out of the relationship. You come to accommodations and acceptances of the other person. You see this unit as something that is bigger than two people and their immediate individual satisfaction.”

More from HuffPo:

“When they got married, they were making a commitment to the concept of marriage as a worthwhile institution, rather than the partnership based on immediate satisfaction of the individuals involved.

“I got from them the idea of marriage as a discipline — not a punishment kind of discipline but the way it’s used if you’re learning music or a martial art. Marriage is a lifelong path, one that you never perfect and that you continually work to get better at. You’re continually working to improve communication and overcome problems and establish more interest.

“This worldview — that once you were in marriage, you were in it for good — shaped people’s day-to-day experience and view of it. It’s one of the things which those who do articulate it recommend to younger people. They say, even if the reality is that you may not stay married, you ought to have this attitude, because it will make you work harder to get through difficult times. And there are such benefits to doing that that you ought to do it.”

As an online divorce review site, we know this isn’t an approach that everyone can, or even should, take because so much depends on the other party. But it is invaluable advice for anyone hoping to bridge the gap of differences that can exist in a  marriage. It’s definitely worth considering the next time that you have issues in a relationship. But what do you think, readers? Are the elders right or is this advice an oversimplification?

How Do Married People Handle Money?

As an online divorce review site, we’re always looking for interesting bits of information to pass along, especially to those of you who are thinking about tying the knot again and are concerned about what many believe is the number one cause of divorce — money issues. Today, we’ve compiled our favorite suggestions for how to handle money as a long-term couple as told by the reddit community. Let’s get started.

1. “My wife and I have four main bank accounts: The joint account, My account, Her account, Savings account. Every pay period, we each get a little bit ($60) auto-deposited in our individual account, and the rest goes into joint. This means that each month we each get roughly $120 to play with, go out, buy stuff, whatever – without having to justify, ask permission, or explain it to the other. Everything else comes out of the joint account – mortgage, bills, utilities, if we go out to eat together, etc. The savings account gets a certain amount each month (obviously you would set this amount based on what you’re comfortable with). This method has worked perfectly for a long time, we don’t argue about money. If you have debt to pay off, I also recommend looking up Dave Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover (you don’t really need the book, just look up the ‘debt snowball’ and start from there).”

2. “Married 10 years with 3 kids — always shared accounts, we now make roughly the same income. Money battles are a fact of life for most marriages. For a while I was making almost twice what she was, and worst, while she wasn’t working and caring for the kids … her income was much lower than mine. It wouldn’t be fair to her to restrict her spending money because she didn’t ‘earn’ it. When we got married we stopped being two individuals and became 1 family unit. When we need a car we look at what we can afford together, same for all major expenses. For the day to day small things [we] just give each other warnings about upcoming expenses to avoid over spending at the wrong times. … We have friends that maintain separate accounts but they don’t have kids yet. I can’t imagine a good system once children come into play.”

3. “We decide how much each pays towards bills by a ratio of our incomes rather than 50-50….”

4. “My grandparents have been married for 57 years and they still have separate bank accounts. They take turns paying for things and split their bills. They are living a comfortable life.”

5. “We have 4 accounts — a joint checking, a joint savings then individual ‘allowance’ accounts. Each paycheck goes directly into checking, only enough for expenses is kept in it, the rest is transferred into savings. We also have automatic transfers of $150 the day after payday that goes into each of our allowances … This helps enormously with fighting about expenses like my daily coffee stop, his hobby parts, shoes I want but don’t need. If it isn’t a regular house expense, it has to come out of allowance. We usually don’t count work clothes, but since my work is pretty casual the lines get blurry sometimes. I highly recommend it because we rarely fight about money.”

What do you think are some good money management suggestions for long-term relationships/marriages? Sound off in our comments section.

The Single Vs. Taken Debate, And What You Can Learn From It

Comedy site ScrollDroll recently posted a list of sad-but-true graphics to Facebook that illustrate rather ingeniously the difference between a single man and one who is taken. As an online divorce review site, we found it interesting because it highlights potential relationship problems that could lead to divorce. There are lessons to be learned in each of these, which you can find in their entirety at this link. For our purposes, we’re going to focus on a few of the most common.

single v taken friends

1. Where Did My Friends Go?

You’ve heard the old joke that when a woman stays out all night and her husband calls 10 of her friends to see if she slept over, none of them have a clue what he’s talking about; yet when the roles are reversed, the woman finds that her husband not only slept in eight different places at the same time, he’s actually still at two of them in spite of the fact that he’s in the next room brushing his teeth. As a single man, you are part of a brotherhood. Too often, you lose that by losing contact with your friends after marriage. While your spouse does need to be priority one, you can’t lose your identity in the process, or the marriage will be headed for shaky ground.

single v taken friend requests

2. Friend Requests

Social networking makes it much easier to facilitate affairs, and it all starts with a simple friend request. When you’re single, you may find yourself accepting anybody and everybody. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with this. But when you’re married, you should be more discerning about who you’re confirming or deleting. Why should you ever accept a request from an old significant other? No good can come from it.

single v taken drinking

3. Drinking With Reckless Abandon

Drinking and substance abuse is something else that you should avoid as a solo activity. In the graphic above, beer represents the single man’s independence. But that can also lead to some pretty reckless decision-making. It’s usually never a good idea to go out drinking without your spouse. It makes temptation very tough to avoid if you can’t do it responsibly. As a “taken” man, you have a commitment to someone else, and so a glass of wine or even a shared six-pack are much better than going to the bars by yourself.

[Images linked above]

Should You Ever Go Back To An Ex?

You may have heard the old saying that “exes are exes for a reason.” What this implies is that if you’re even considering getting back together with an ex, don’t do it. We’ve seen enough relationship redo’s between two people to know that it’s pretty common, even for those who’ve gone as far as getting divorced. Still, is it fair to make a blanket condemnation?

Most of the time, yes. 

It’s rather difficult to put together a working relationship when you have all kinds of relationship baggage and trust issues tied up into previous failed attempts. Still, if you’re willing to try, you may want to keep this Reddit response in mind.

“Are ALL the issues that caused you to break up ACTUALLY and FULLY resolved?

“If the answer is anything but a resounding yes, don’t get back together. If it’s a somewhat yes, stay separate, do what must be done to fix the issues/ put measures in place to fix them, and then if that works… then ask the question again.

“Note that my test doesn’t factor in feelings, love, things like that. People being abused in their relationships love their abusers in a lot of cases… and it’s awful. The point is: you can feel all the feels you want to feel, it doesn’t affect whether the relationship with the person you feel for will work.”

The key is in resolving issues, and most of the time, couples who pull this move with their relationship haven’t tried to answer the questions that need answering or to resolve the issues that need resolving.

Rose-colored glasses are a problem when it comes to a relationship where there is a history of failure, and if you don’t want to break up or, worse, find yourself in another divorce case with the same person, then you have to take a frank and honest look about the ways that you’ve both failed each other in previous efforts.

Do you think it’s possible to get back together with an ex and have a successful relationship? Sound off in our comments section.

9 Effective Ways That People Cope With Depression

Depression is a lying beast that will make you think you’re worth less than you really are. Many who come to our online divorce review site cope with it day-in and day-out. Here are some of the best “methods” that people from Reddit are using. Try these (with your own twist, of course), and see if they help.

1. “Honestly, the best way that I cope is to detach a little bit and de-stigmatize my ‘down days’, as I call them. Last week I spent Wednesday and Thursday nights after work in bed. I ate kettle corn for dinner and watched 12 episodes of The Vampire Diaries. :P I’ve been allowing myself to have those days because every other day I work really hard to be in the good place that I’m in, and if the chemicals in my brain are going to give me a ‘down day’ there’s not a whole lot I can do about it.”

2. “Try not to isolate yourself. Get out when you can. Take up offers to do things.”

3. “I started cooking my own meals every day. The sense of accomplishment from finding a recipe and going to the grocery store and then cooking a meal I enjoyed was fantastic.”

4. “I started reading. Everything. Reading about philosophy. Reading novels. Reading self-help books. Reading about psychology. Reading about others that have overcome depression. I inhaled knowledge, I overdosed on poems, I gorged on affirmations. I can’t attribute the change in my thinking to any one sentence but I know that somewhere within all those words, I found some hope.”

5. “Drinking water. I actually live in CO., which is a arid state, but either way, we dose ourselves in this society everyday with sugars and soda’s, and coffee, alcohol, etc. Honestly, just the simple fact of drinking water will REALLY help just physically. Keeping hydrated will help. ALOT.”

6. “Exercise. I don’t really like gyms, or at least can never find someone to go with or the cost, so I try to ride 1.5 miles on my bike everyday if I can. Just some sun and physical activity will help.”

7. “It may sound dumb but having a cat helped me. Having it around and taking care of it takes my mind off things. It’s not too hard to make a cat happy, and when it’s happy it makes me feel better.”

8. “Change your environment to remove negative/bad influences as much as possible. Spend less time with negative friends or family.”

9. “Get to know you and be true to you. Get comfortable saying ‘no’ to things that will drain you. Spend as much time with others as you need, not what they say you need.”

How do you cope with depression from your divorce or relationship troubles? Sound off in our comments section!