Yes, there are good divorces

I was in my first year of family law when I met a lovely client who we will call John. He had an equally lovely wife who we will call Jane. They also had two lovely children.

They had travelled the world together, gone on lots of adventures and had real genuine love for each other. Their children were cared about and progressing in their lives quite nicely. John and Jane were wealthy and had a number of different types of property and investments. They had business holdings and a beautiful house on the lake filled with beautiful things.

However John and Jane did not want to be married to each other any longer. They had different interests and passions and while, they wished each other well, they really wanted to move ahead with their lives on different paths. Their time together had come to an end.

John came to me through a third party mediation company that did not completely understand how family law, tax law and estate planning intersected. They had come up with a proposal for his divorce that made no sense and would have resulted in a tax nightmare.

When I tell this story, many people comment on how strange it is that John, who was wealthy, didn’t immediately hire a divorce lawyer. However it really wasn’t all that strange – John and Jane did not want to fight; they didn’t want their children to feel caught in the middle of things and they wanted to come up with creative solutions that worked for everyone.

John confided in me that his perception of divorces with divorce lawyers was that the parties either hated each other from the start or grew to hate each other as the divorce progressed. He did not want that for himself or his wife of many years.

We decided to throw out the settlement and find Jane a lawyer in town who was as committed to negotiating a settlement as John and I were.

I had the privilege of working with John and Jane and her lawyer to come up with what still remains one of my favorite divorce settlements. The two of them worked really hard to talk about what their goals were for the divorce and how to achieve those goals. They spent time reminiscing and talking about their hopes and dreams for their children – which we then relied on to come up with a parenting plan. When John and Jane parted, they still had deep respect and admiration for each other and I believe that they had “closure”. They remained business partners on some ventures, had a plan to keep some property in joint names until they sold it (with a detailed plan about how it was going to managed until then) and even agreed on John managing some of Jane’s investments for a time.

I kept in touch with John through the years and he never had anything but positive news about Jane. Both parties went on to happily re-partner and their children grew up and became adults with healthy relationships of their own.

I have had other files similar to this one and they all have the same characteristics: the parties still love each other (but are no longer in love with each other) and respect each other; neither party wants to devastate the other; they are both committed to the wellbeing of their children and they can put the best interests of the whole above their own individual interests. I have found that some sort of mediated settlement will achieve the desired outcome in these files and that as long as everyone can remain focused on moving forward with kindness, the parties will always overcome any problems that may arise.

I also find that – after this type of divorce – everyone moves forward more productively. It is as if being mindful about how they end their current relationship paves the way for happier future relationships.

John’s file was the first file that I used mediation in, so it has an extra special place in my memory. I also feel very lucky to have been able to work with him and Jane so early in my career as it provided a detailed road map for how people could “divorce well”.