Perils of Adversarial Divorce

While this may sound tempting to most people, especially if you did not initiate the divorce process or were against the idea of divorce, this revenge-seeking behaviour can have disastrous consequences on your mental and physical well-being in the future. Such kinds of divorces, wherein the spouses are unable to reach an agreement on various issues, are called adversarial or contested divorces.

The spouses may fail to reach an agreement on one or many things concerning their future lives. The disagreement may be due to issues relating to child support and maintenance, visitation rights, custody of the children, distribution of marital assets, payment of common debts, or payment of educational expenses for children.

No one said that divorce is going to be easy. But that does not mean that you make your ex-spouse face the wrath of your anger. Your marriage may be on the right track according to you. However, that does not mean that your partner should feel the same way too. Everyone has a right to live their lives their own way. The sooner you accept the fact, the easier it will be for you to let go of your ex-spouse as well as of the negative feelings.

There are times when an unsuspecting spouse suddenly hears from their partner that they want a divorce because they want to be with someone else. While this can be a tough situation, it does not give you the freedom to publicly humiliate your spouse at every possible occasion. Adopting this behaviour will only make your spouse as well as other people around you lose respect for you.

Some people make it a point to humiliate their partner in court during the court hearings. People often tend to use harmless negative traits of their spouse in an exaggerated manner to seek revenge. What most people do not realize is that by doing so you are not only unnecessarily hurting your spouse, but also souring relations with your spouse for the entire lifetime.

Adversarial divorces involve little or minimal interaction with your spouse. Usually, the clients meet with their respective lawyers and the only contact between the spouses is during the court hearings. While this may seem like an attractive option because you would want to limit your interaction with your spouse because of the bitter feelings, it is important that you ask yourself what you want to achieve out of the situation.

Do you want to solve the issues? Or, do you want to just fight out of spite and use courtroom as your weapon? If you want to use courtroom as a way to let out your bitterness, no one stands to gain from it except your lawyer. Most divorce lawyers charge by the hour and this includes time spent on hearings, appearing in courts, time spent on discussing issues with your spouse’s lawyers, time spent on meeting the judge, and any time that your lawyer spends working on your case.

However, even after you spend so much money, there is no guarantee that the judge will decide in your favour. In addition, after all the hassles, it will be the court and not you who gets to decide all the decisions relating to child custody, support, property, visitation, spousal maintenance, and debts. Therefore, all the important post-divorce decisions of your life will be out of your control because of your revengeful attitude.

These decisions will also take a longer time to decide because of the increased amount of conflicts between you and your partner. If you have children, you will still have to play the role of parents together even if you are no longer a married couple. This would mean attending your children’s birthday parties, school events, and other events that are important to your children.

Therefore, you will have to come in contact with your spouse at some point in time and an adversarial divorce will not help in such cases because the wounds of divorce-related conflicts can take a long time to heal. Even after going through the revengeful path, most people end up feeling like no one “won” the war in the court. This happens because both the partners make an adversarial divorce a traumatic and hurtful experience. For some people, this experience can be so bitter that it affects their mental health so badly that they need to seek professional counselling to recover from all the negativity.