Blog

A fairly outstanding 62% of all married couples own a pet together, and while the law regards pets as a kind of property, quite often the couple that owns the critter has a very different (and quite passionate) view of the pet’s personhood. If they both love the animal — especially if they have no children or other pets — ...

“Cuck” is one of the new insults-of-the-moment, being somewhere behind “Snowflake” but above “Cupcake” on the list of insults-of-the-moment, and it’s a fascinating one insofar as it is built on a myth…but it’s a myth that nearly everyone buys into with gusto. A cuck is someone who is soft, pansy, effeminate, and weak. The interesting part, though, is that it’s ...

Humans have a very odd psychological tendency to focus on the wrong problems, and martial problems are no different. The new strife du jour is called ‘pphubbing‘ — a portmanteau of ‘phone’ and ‘snubbing,’ with an extra ‘p’ at the beginning for ‘partner.’ Phubbing is when someone (your spouse, in the case of pphubbing) ignores you in favor of their ...

The recent swearing-in of our newest Commander in Chief had left no small number of people openly talking about emigrating from the United States. While that’s a much more difficult task than many people realize, it can happen — which leads us to wonder, what happens if someone who shares custody of a child should move to a different country? ...

Child support orders are made by taking a lot of factors into account and applying a huge, legally-ordained formula that filters those factors together and comes to an amount that must be paid each month. But as powerful as that formula is, the one thing it cannot take into account is the passage of time, and how likely it is ...

There are some stories common to American culture that have known roots in real events or people. The Robber Barons. The hippies. The Lone Ranger. But then there are other ideas equally common to American culture that are just stories we tell each other. Some have absolutely no basis in reality, like the ‘razor blades in apples’ story. Some are ...

In December of 2016, every state had its own laws about how military divorces handled pensions. Most states handle all pensions the same way: by giving the spouse a percentage of the pension equal to the percentage of years-married to years-worked, divided by 2. For example, if you worked for 20 years to earn your pension, and you were married ...

Divorce is hard. But it’s not just the emotional rollercoaster and the adversarial headbutting in court — even after all that is over, you wake up the morning after and you face the task of reconfiguring your life. That’s difficult enough when you’re only taking care of yourself…if you have a child or three, the challenge grows exponentially. It gets ...

I was talking over a minor but interesting case with a few of my colleagues this week, and someone pointed out the lesson to be found. I liked the example enough that I decided to turn it into a blog post. The case is Bergh v. Bergh [PDF], and in short, the story is this: Two fairly well-off people were ...

In our last post, we talked a bit about how a couple can easily end up skipping the ‘let’s talk to a relationship counselor’ phase of a large martial dispute, and end up going straight to ‘let’s get a divorce.’ That’s a shame, and to help combat it, we introduced a few steps designed to make sure ‘the talk’ about ...