Sundering the Bonds of Marriage

Heh, no, I didn't go and get married while nobody was looking... but I'm in the weird position of having multiple friends getting divorced simultaneously, which practically forces me to ponder the whole process and consequences involved. All you Spokane-living ladies looking for a sedentary, reclusive, late-30's gamer guy are still in luck... well, really, if that's what you're looking for, I might well not be looking for you, but I digress... :)

So, marriage isn't quite the "until death do us part" thing it was in decades past, and society as a whole seems to have come to grips with that... or, at least, I can't remember the last time somebody mentioned somebody else being divorced with the disdain that phrase might have brought up in the 50's. That said, shouldn't there be a "streamlined" option at least available these days? I mean, when both parties are agreed that their marriage needs to end, and neither is submitting that the other isn't a fit parent (in the cases where children are involved), wouldn't it be nice if there was a "standard" template, based on relative incomes or some such, that people could agree to for the "major" items, get that signed off on and enacted, then deal with the emotional minutae at their leisure... or, if either party failed to sign off on such, that it would be a big, red warning flag for the other side that things are about to get messy?

One friend is well into the process, was looking for what he considered a reasonable, amicable separation after his wife filed on him, and was accepting of what was going to happen to his marriage... until the wife's plan made its way to him, complete with terms for spousal support and child support that would grind him into the dust... despite their living mere blocks from each other and maintaining joint custody of the children. Another is just starting the process, and is also looking for what he considers as reasonable, amicable separation terms... but is getting pressured by his wife in I-don't-know-how-many ways, but including first restricting his blog from public (non-invited) view, then more recently preventing those people from commenting on what he puts up on the blog. The sad/scary thing is, I can't help but see parallels between the two cases... I can't say "this is the way it is", either intentionally or not, but, from what I've seen, it's like the wives in each case, seeing the end of their marriages in sight, are using the divorce process to punish their husbands and exert as much control as possible while they still can... and a big part of that control rests in the fact that the husbands care so deeply about the welfare of their children.

If there were a basic template available (and preferrably established by state law, so there's only one template to consider for any given divorce), there would still inevitably be problems, but not on the scale I've witnessed to date... get children, housing, and other major property separated and settled as quickly as possible, and allow either party to exclude individual items, or reject the template as a whole... but anything covered by the template should not be able to be revisited at a later date. If that were the case, then there would be a lot less of the petty power games and lawyerly weaseling to deal with in many cases... and both parties would know that there was fun on the horizon in the others.