Making divorce less icky - new programs and guidance

NY Times

For the last two years, Ms. Pettus, 52, has used her soaring glass-walled living room and backyard to help women mired in the weeds of divorce navigate that which is profoundly icky. She provides community, respite and, most important, resources by hosting monthly panels, seminars and workshops on topics like collaborative law, litigation and mediation, raising teenagers, financial planning, real estate, grief, dating and midlife sex (zinc, apparently, is very important here), led by experts.[...]

Ms. Pettus is not alone in her efforts. While New York has trailed the rest of the country in terms of divorce law — the no-fault divorce did not land here until 2010 — grass-roots support systems surrounding the process have been growing, according to Lauren Behrman, a psychotherapist who specializes in divorce, following the lead of groups in states like California, Oregon and Minnesota, the birthplace of collaborative law. (Collaborative law starts with a commitment to settlement, not court.)

“The biggest challenge is to let people know they have options,” said Dr. Behrman. “That divorce doesn’t have to be this scorched-earth horrible litigation process. But the key is to get to the right professional first. If you walk into the office of a litigator, things are going to go a certain way. If you walk into a mental health professional’s office, it might go another way.”

While divorce rates over all have declined since their peak in the 1980s, the rate for those older than 50 has doubled in the last quarter-century (those over 50 account for half the married population). Nearly two thirds of these so-called gray divorces are initiated by women, an AARP study shows.

It is this confluence that underpins the female-centric nature of divorce support services and groups like Untied. That, and an anecdotal sense that women in crisis may seek community more often than men.

Divorce coaches, another burgeoning specialty, offer one-on-one services, for example, for fees that can hover around $100 an hour and may include a session to plan what to say to one’s lawyer, to streamline the process and thus minimize legal fees.

SAS for Women is a three-year-old divorce coaching business started by two women who had gone through very different divorces but faced a huge learning gap, said Liza Caldwell, one of SAS’s principals.[...]

Stephanie Coontz is co-chair and director of education at the Council on Contemporary Families and an expert on coupling and uncoupling. Groups like Ms. Pettus’s, she said, are “microcosms of a new understanding that we have to develop norms for divorce rather than take sides.”

“As divorce has become more common,” she continued, “people have begun to stop seeing it as a personal loss or betrayal. It’s a process that can go badly or go well, so in many different ways there are people trying to make divorce less disastrous.”[...]