Mr. Nice Guy's Divorce

OK, you're thinking already that this is maybe a lament about how the guy gets the shaft. Well it ain't; you've been watching too much television. It's about how me and my first wife did a totally civilized thing and dissolved the marriage without bloodshed, angst, or high lawyer expenses.

Sure, there was angst beforehand, at the end of what was ostensibly a marriage. But when we got past that and sat down to work it out, we had one lawyer between the two of us. That's all we needed.

There's a story (many times true) about a small town where there was only one lawyer, and he was not living very high on the hog. Then another one moved to town, and they both lived happily ever after.

Back to my story. The only reason we needed a lawyer at all was to do the paperwork. We sat down in his office and worked out this & that pretty straightforward (we were friends after all) and when we thought we were done, he said "What are you going to do with the house?" We exchanged blank looks and then admitted that we hadn't even thought about it. So he said "Well, let's just not mention it." (A year or two later, having both moved in and out of the house a couple of times, we finally decided what to do. I sold her my half for ten bucks.)

So off we went; she went to court and I went to work that day; when she got out of court she phoned me, said the judge never looked up from his newspaper.

Soon after that we had a party, and it was interesting who didn't show up.


Interesting pre-nups I've heard about recently: one couple agreed to just match coins, and the winner gets the whole works. Another couple agreed long ago that one of them would get two thousand bucks cash and the other, whichever, would get everything else, both assets and liabilities.


E. Bear's Home Page