I don’t agree with everything you’ve posted, but this is spot on. Even in the few backward states that make you wait through a yearlong separation, the divorce itself is simple. Sure it’s a pain to file paperwork and show up in court, but it can also provide a sense of closure that it’s hard to get when a living-together unmarried couple breaks up.
In my divorce, we split all the joint assets, possessions and debts ourselves before we even started the paperwork. We hired a lawyer because we’re both procrastinators and knew it would be worth the money to have someone else providing a deadline structure. We each signed affidavits for the judge that our stuff and money was split in a satisfactory way and that was that. We hadn’t been married long, but lived together for our entire adult lives and were completely financially entangled, but since we were on the same page regarding who got what the split wasn’t hard. If there had been disagreements, the process would have been difficult whether we were divorcing or just breaking up.
Actually in our case I think the need for paperwork helped, as it made my ne’er do well ex actually take me seriously when I had to set boundaries like a deadline for him to get his stuff out of my apartment. If the courts weren’t involved, I think he would have dragged his feet for years. What worked for me was to separate out what was unambiguously “his” and say that once he removed that stuff, then we could sit down together and figure out the more ambiguous things like books and music purchased jointly. Moreover, step two had to be done by the deadline we’d set with the lawyer for signing the paperwork. This got his butt in gear and gave us both the incentive to work together to resolve things.
As for money and debts, we had charged a few thousand dollars on my credit cards for a move immediately before the separation. I got cash out of the joint checking to cover his half of that, and then we split what was left over. I stayed in our apartment and kept the security deposit in my name, and he kept the car (it was in his name though we’d paid for it together) as he needed it to get to work. Since I stayed in the apartment and he decided to move to a tiny place, I kept most of the furniture and housewares. He kept the nice laptop. We split the books, music and movies with very little strife. Again, all this would have had to be done even if we weren’t married, and it certainly would have dragged on longer.
I’ve seen several peer couples break up after a long cohabitation, and in all but one case the process dragged out painfully for literally years, with multiple bouts of one [ex]partner sleeping on the couch, trying to room together as “friends” and on and on. That never made sense to me at all, but lots of people I know have tried it and it always ended in tears. When it’s a DIVORCE on the other hand, fewer people try that kind of nonsense. Please note, I’m not denigrating couples who try to reconcile after a separation, I’m talking about couples who are broken up, yet maintain these ambiguous ties that give neither party what he or she wants. In my nonscientific experience, it’s more common for unmarrieds than for marrieds.
