Divorce Series Archives | Marriage & Divorce

The Grey Divorce

A surprising statistic is that about a third of all recent divorces are occurring with spouses over 50 years of age. These divorces have taken on the name, “Grey Divorce,” for obvious reasons. This is twice the number that was true in 1990. As with younger divorces, women initiate the divorce twice as often as […]

Managing Emotions in a Divorce

Most divorces are dominated in the early stages by strong emotions. At the same time, the biggest obstacles to having a sensible divorce are strong emotions. It is, therefore, not surprising that as many as 80% of divorcing spouses make major mistakes handling their divorce because the process is dominated by their strong emotions. In […]

Divorce Series: Managing Emotions in Divorce

Most divorces are dominated in the early stages by strong emotions. At the same time, the biggest obstacle to having a sensible divorce is strong emotions. It is, therefore, not surprising that as many as 80% of divorcing spouses make major mistakes handling their divorce because it is dominated by their strong emotions. Those mistakes […]

Divorce Series: Parental Alienation – Its Causes and Cures

Parental alienation and Game Theory[1]. When Ken was in private practice, one of his known areas of expertise was “parental alienation”. These were cases in which a child, at a minimum, expressed a desire, or more seriously, had successfully refused, to spend time with one of their parents.[2] In practical terms, this meant Ken serving […]

Divorce Series: Understanding a Sensible Divorce

Introduction and Confused Beliefs In our book, Planning a Sensible Divorce: How to Avoid the Toxic Dance of a Messy Divorce, Ken and Allan make the point that about twenty percent of current divorces are fairly amicable. About another twenty percent involve spouses with mental disorders or conduct problems, such as violence, or both […]

Ten Traps Series – Why Do People Sometimes Make Terrible choices?

Why do people sometimes make choices that are self-defeating? In our recent book, Game Theory and the Transformation of Family Law, Attorney Allan Koritzinsky and Ken Waldron suggest bargaining founded on game theory. But why game theory? Game theory is a branch of mathematics that analyzes how and why people make the choices that they make. […]

Ten Traps Series -Trap # 1

Trap #1: In the traditional family law system, the parties are directed to and often pressured to focus on legal outcomes, not life goals. Legal outcomes are not goals. Legal outcomes should be tools for the parties to reach their goals. If focused on the legal outcome, it makes sense that a property distribution should […]

Ten Traps Series – Trap #2

“What custody schedule do you want?” In a prior blog, we noted that this is a trick question because it distracts people from their life goals and focuses them on legal outcomes, as though they are goals. It is also a trap question because it reframes a non-zero sum game into a zero sum game. […]

Ten Traps Series – Trap #3

“The other side wants . . .!” In prior blogs we focused on the fact that while people are rational, they can be trapped into making poor choices. The third trap is convincing people that they have a dispute with the other parent. The assumption that people going through a divorce have a legal dispute […]

Ten Traps Series – Trap #4

We began this series by focusing on how the legal system can trap people into self-defeating patterns of decision making: Trap #1 – distracting people from their life goals into thinking that legal outcomes are goals; Trap #2 – treating divorce as a zero sum game; Trap #3: the system assumes disputes and seduces divorcing […]