San Diego Divorce Mediation
Lessons From Marriage Story (Netflix Movie)
Have you seen the movie Marriage Story that is all the rage right now on Netflix? It has serious oscar buzz and I want to recommend that you check it out. This film will give you a very real story showing how the adversarial court system breeds bad divorces for families.
Spoiler Alert – some general plot lines are discussed in the following paragraphs
Despite the title, Marriage Story is a film about a divorce. The film is like a car crash: You watch two mature, intelligent, and caring people transform into monsters with full self-awareness of the destruction as it is happening. It’s brutal, it’s terrifying, and it is a very realistic portrayal of what parties experience during divorce when they each hire lawyers to battle it out in the court system. This fact pattern is why I chose to focus my practice on family mediation exclusively.
The film begins with a voice-over as a married couple explains all the things they love about each other. This turns out to be an exercise given to them by a mediator for their impending divorce, hoping to encourage them to remember why they fell in love in the first place. The two have agreed to not use lawyers and simply go through mediation, hoping it will be easier in their young son. Over time one spouse hires an attorney described as a real shark and the other spouse inevitably follows with the same tact. Soon the divorce system causes them to go to all-out war in court, and they both begin to use lurid personal details about each other.
The two despise each other and resort to communicating exclusively through their attorneys.
The two lead characters have experienced a bad divorce. The myth of winning took hold during their litigation and they allowed their real needs to be dominated by the legal contest. They are like millions of others who are left unable to trust each other, with much less property, harmed and damaged children, and a compromised future as a result of the adversarial divorce system.
Our San Diego divorce mediation practice offers a true alternative to litigation. As a mediator, we work directly with both divorcing partners, with their lawyers in the background, and most of our cases are resolved within 4-6 weeks. Couples do better in the aftermath because the mediation divorce process does not drain their emotional and financial resources. Whereas divorce litigators can only see a case through the eyes of their one client, as mediators we see the case through the eyes of both spouses as we help them problem solve. And cooperative problem solving is one of the key advantages of opting for a San Diego divorce mediation lawyer to help negotiate your separation as a neutral party.
