After divorce rates peaked during the 1970s and 1980s, much has been made of the fact that they are now on the decline, especially among millennials. Still, if you’re thinking about splitting with your spouse, or you’ve already been through a divorce, sunny statistics aren’t exactly useful. Throughout this weeklong series, Glamour.com explores what it means to uncouple in a modern world
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If you’re a consumer of any kind of pop culture—or really, just a watcher of human existence—chances are you know a lot about divorce, even if you haven’t been through one yourself. In particular, you’re probably familiar with the bitter acrimony that can often accompany the fallout and the kind of drama that can make for riveting television or devastating real life.
What’s on display less often, though, are narratives around what people should do when figuring out how to prepare for a divorce: Before you call the marriage off, or maybe even before you decide to call the marriage off, it’s hard to know what kind of game plan to deploy. How should you be protecting yourself? Who should you tell? What’s the social media strategy? There’s a lot to consider before you ever walk into a lawyer’s office—if, in fact, a lawyer is the right person to handle your split at all.
There’s no blueprint that works for everyone, of course. But Glamour.com did get some go-to guidance from experts in the business of breakups, on both the emotional health front as well as the financial side. Here’s what they had to say about things that the soon-to-single should be thinking about before embarking on divorce proceedings.
Start paying closer attention to your money…
Often enough, when someone approaches New York City–based divorce attorney Jacqueline Newman about getting divorced, the first thing she tells them to do is start familiarizing themselves with financial assets. Even today, she says, “a lot of women still leave this stuff to their husbands, and they live in what I call the ‘financial dark.’” Start paying attention to bank statements, documenting account numbers, and looking at tax returns—and don’t sign anything without reading it first. What happens very soon after you file for divorce is that both parties will be required to fill out a statement of net worth, explains Newman, and you want to make sure that all of your assets and accounts are accounted for, which starts with knowing what those are.
…but don’t necessarily stop spending.
This advice can differ depending on financial circumstances and the couple themselves, says Newman, but if you’re someone who hopes to receive spousal support to maintain your lifestyle, it’s something to consider. Say that, during the good times of your marriage, you went out to dinner together often, took vacations, and generally got used to a certain kind of existence. But when things went south, or the process of divorce started, you might think that it’s time to tighten your financial belt. Newman says that sometimes maintaining your lifestyle is actually the best move in the lead-up to a divorce, because the court may create a budget that looks back on the lifestyle you maintained during the last year of your marriage. “Sometimes that’s not really reflective of what you lived on—it’s just reflective of the status at the point the family wasn’t doing well,” says Newman. “So I say to people: Live your lifestyle.”
Start opening credit cards.
“A lot of women, and people in general, do not have credit cards under their own names,” says Newman. That’s because they share the card account with their spouse. They have access to a card, but the card might not belong to them, which can get tricky depending on the circumstances. “God forbid [you] get cut off, but you want to be in a situation where you have access to money,” she adds. She also adds that it can be helpful to “start filling your mattress” a lit bit, pocketing some cash just in case.
Start writing everything down.
If you haven’t journaled in years—now might be the time to pick it up again, says Newman. “I tell people to keep a diary: when who is going away, who is going to what, like parent-teacher conferences or play dates; if there are certain fights or occurrences that you want to document.” The idea is, if you ever have to draft motion papers and tell the court your story, it can be tough to remember the details during such a stressful, emotional time, and it’ll help to have documentation.
Consider going to see a marriage counselor.
While Newman says that her first question to potential clients is whether or not they really are sure they want to get divorced, Chicago-based clinical psychologist Rebecca Bergen, Ph.D., says that even if you are sure, you might want to consider therapy à deux. It can help prep the lines of communication, she explains, which will help you later on. “It’s going to be a process of grieving, and that grieving can start prior to the actual separation or the actual divorce,” says Bergen.
Settle on a social media game plan.
Hopefully, you and your partner have an arrangement in place for how you’re going to share the news—a little like coming up with a PR approach, says Bergen. But when it comes to social, the important questions to answer, alone or together, are how much information you want to share and whether or not you feel like you’ve already told everyone you think you should in a more personal format. Of course, adds Bergen, “this totally depends on how the relationship is ending.” But a plan of action for how you’ll approach it with your in-laws, how to take the news to your shared friends, and, of course, what you’re going to say to your kids can make things go more smoothly.
Reflect on how you want to be seen.
Bergen is a big fan of using visualization and imagery to decide how you want to behave, and be perceived, and then use that to keep your emotions in control. “Maybe it’s a mantra or a phrase you go back to when you want to go off at your partner but you don’t want it to get to that point,” she says. She also encourages visualizing what your life will look like, in the home where you live or more generally, once your partner no longer occupies that space. “Imagining what that will be like is a way of prepping your emotions.”
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