You realized that your marriage has become “irretrievably broken” once you realized that that you and your spouse drifted apart.

The loneliness can be palpable, but so is the awareness that you aren’t invested in fixing your marriage either. Divorce papers are inevitable.

Your marriage was once a place of support and kindness in an unpredictable world. Now where do you turn for advice as divorce court looms in the future?

Your first instinct might be to turn to a parent for divorce advice, assuming that you have maintained a solid relationship with your parent(s) and that they genuinely look out for your best interests. While it’s logical to reach for family support, your parents may not be the best source of divorce advice – whether or not they have endured a divorce themselves. Here’s why:

1. If you have maintained a good relationship with your parents, they are invested in your success, and they have invested in your future, including your marriage, just as you have. When the marriage is no longer a part of their lives, they will experience loss and grief, just as you are. Consequently, their viewpoint may be biased or warped through grief. Grief entails not only the death of the marriage, but the death of a certain vision of the future. Your parents’ emotional turmoil may be worse if the news comes as a shock to them.
2. If your soon-to-be-ex spouse had his/her own relationship with your parents, then your parents are likely attached to your soon-to-be-ex. Again, they are biased in their reaction because they are too close to the situation and possibly enmeshed in the family systems that gave rise to those dynamics resulting in divorce.
3. Your divorce in 2022 is not the divorce of your parents’ generation. This is a divorce where your text messages can haunt you and where your Instagram account can be problematic for your legal strategy. This is a divorce where situations and perceptions can be manipulated through Facebook. These hurdles were not part of your parents’ generation, and they are unlikely to advise you properly with the repercussions of social media in mind.
4. Your parents’ anxiety will kick in as they worry for your well-being and the welfare of the children, which means the questions – and more questions – will follow on the heels of your disclosure. Your parents’ advice may be predicated on assuaging their anxieties and their fears…and that is usually not clear-sighted advice. As far as your parents’ questions, you don’t have to answer them. You may not have the answers yourself, in which case, tell the truth: you are working on the details with the best interests of the child as your guide.
5. Your parents may be focused on helping you to obtain a quick divorce or a cheap divorce. Neither of these outcomes are guaranteed, and for many reasons, neither of these are necessarily desirable. You can find a divorce attorney near you who can work with your budget and who can achieve the best possible legal strategy for your unique situation.
6. Your parents may give inaccurate advice that was true in their day but not now, such as the following bad advice: “Stay together because the mother always gets the children, and you don’t stand a shot at custody as a man.” Not true. Yes, there is bias in the family law system, but the impact of gender and sex stereotyping is simply not the same as decades ago. Fear – especially others’ ill-founded fears – should not define your horizon.

As you sort your next steps, please take a look at our DIY Toolshed. You may find some helpful information there, but the best strategy is to ask for a free consultation with one of our family law attorneys.

Warning: All posts on this website and partner website, JustPrenups.com, contain general information about legal matters for broad educational purposes only. The information is not legal advice and should not be treated as such. This blog post does not create any attorney-client relationship between the reader and the DADvocacy™ Law Firm.