“A New Cadre of Experts Helps Women Navigate Their Divorces” is an interesting July 18 NYT article. The amoral adult-centered world of divorce litigation is reflected in that the editors chose to put this in the “Style” section and that the negative effects on children are alluded to just once, in a “How are you going to help your children heal?” quote from an interviewee (the academic psychologists and epidemiologists whose papers are cited in Real World Divorce found that, in general, children do not heal after a typical U.S.-style divorce). The journalist does not mention that children effectively pay for 100 percent of the cost of a divorce, including for the consultants interviewed, because children will receive a smaller inheritance (and the time, energy, and money that their parents put into litigation is not available for parenting).
The profitability of divorce for a thoughtful American is apparent from the facts reported. The main interviewee runs divorce salons for women out of “century-old Brooklyn Heights carriage house that had been remade into the sort of place location scouts covet: an aspirational set for the next Nancy Meyers movie” with a “soaring glass-walled living room and backyard.” How did Elise Pettus, “trained as a journalist and filmmaker” (but whose name shows up in IMDB on just three films, the most recent of which is from 1990, and in low-level production assistant-type jobs), manage to obtain a multi-million dollar house in New York City? She herself is divorced…
The rest of the article is interesting because it shows what is on the minds of contemporary Americans who have sued their spouses or defended against a lawsuit by a spouse in New York, a typical winner-take-all jurisdiction (the victorious parent gets the house, the kids, and most of the cash; Census data from March 2014 shows that 91 percent of the winners in NY were women).
Related:
Some of the comments (129 & counting) are pretty telling… e.g. one femme worrying aloud “how to legally skin that cat.” Quite so.
(One comment deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
ReaderAbroad Norway
Women in divorce…
Picture 1: food
Picture 2: food
Picture 3: a picture of “me”
Picture 4: shoes
July 18, 2015 at 8:51 p.m.