Blog

Addiction: it turns the most ordinary of people into unreasoning, selfish jerks — and dealing with an addicted spouse is easily difficult enough to seriously threaten any marriage. But what exactly is addiction? More importantly, if we get a good grip on what it is, can we discern which addictions can be overcome and which should be (lovingly) walked away ...

It’s perfectly normal for a couple to get married with dreams of a happy life together. But many marriages end in divorce — the standard wisdom is that every year, 2% of all existing Michigan marriages end. But while the number of divorces has remained remarkably steady since the 80s, the reasons divorces happen have change. According to a recent ...

Many people are under the mistaken impression that getting their divorce annulled is somehow going to be faster, easier, or cheaper than getting a divorce. The fact is that every single element of a divorce that makes it a drawn-out, painful affair must still be dealt with in an annulment. There are still custody battles, martial estate division issues, and ...

Have you ever flown on an airplane, and heard the flight attendant tell you that it’s critical that, should the oxygen masks drop down, you always fix your own mask to your face before you attempt to help your children do the same? Have you ever wondered how they could ever expect a parent to follow those instructions? The answer ...

The Supreme Court’s ruling last month that marriage was a human right that could not Constitutionally be denied to homosexual couples was, in a word, correct. But that fact doesn’t necessarily mean that Michigan’s state laws will ever give the appearance of complying with the ruling…or that the rest of Michigan’s laws will ever comply with the spirit of the ...

We don’t usually directly address issues that are current ‘pop culture’ items, because that’s often a trap — there’s really no good that can come of getting embroiled in it. But in this particular case, this oh-so-viral Tsimhoni case of the judge who found a trio of children to be in contempt of court and sentenced them to time in ...

One of the more devastating circumstances we’ve seen at Gucciardo Law goes like this: two people split up, and the one that was ‘the breadwinner’ signs an agreement to split the marital estate in a certain manner with the spouse that was the ‘homemaker.’ At the same time that the breadwinner is signing the agreement, however, they’re also (secretly!) filing ...

Research has shown that the commonly-known ‘Seven Stages of Grief’ are quintessentially fictional. Even the author of those seven stages originally conceived them as a very rough guideline, never intended to be a strict sequence or even necessarily always appearing. Nevertheless, the ‘stages of grief’ concept is an enormously powerful tool for achieving self-understanding in a moment of intense emotional ...

Deep, gut-wrenching anxiety. Drive-you-literally-insane guilt. And shame…shame enough to make you down a pint of Hubby Hubby and come back for seconds. That’s what’s on the menu when you look at your child and consider sitting them down to tell them that their parents are about to get a divorce. How do you explain it? How do you tell them ...

There’s not a lot more intimidating than having your lawyer hand you a giant stack of papers that are chock full of jargon, formulas, and little grids to fill out — and then hearing him say “bring this back as soon as you possibly can…it’s important.” How important are we talking? When it’s the documentation of your financial status used ...