I was recently invited to collaborate on an expert panel and share some insights on how to deal with the stress of life and divorce on hold and self-quarantine with someone you no longer wish to be married to. Here are my best tips.
My best advice or perhaps wish, is to treat each other with kindness and respect, even if that has been absent from the relationship for a long time.
The pressures that we are all under with COVID-19 cause us all to feel stress and anxiety. I don’t think it’s productive right now to compound that with detailed discussions about divorce.
Instead, consider creating an agreement with your STBX about how you are going to live together. It could cover everything from sharing of household expenses, defining essential expenditures, division of household tasks and parenting responsibilities. These are not easy discussions to have when there’s distrust and hurt. Using a mediator to facilitate this discussion makes sense and many are now offering online-video mediation.
I think it is entirely appropriate to continue to prepare for divorce.
You might gather your financial data, research home prices and rentals for options about where to live, and do look at possible parenting time schedules. Unless you are splitting every account down the middle, I would hold off making any firm decisions on dividing the finances. There’s just too much fluctuation and uncertainty right now to be able to make decisions confidently.
Many of the courts are essentially closed and handling only public-safety related matters. That also most certainly means there’s going to be a backlog when they do reopen so you should expect that working through the legal process is going to take you longer than normal.
You can read the full article here: Coronavirus, Self-Quarantine and Divorce: Experts Share Survival Tips
Photo by Jessica Lewis on Unsplash
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