Divorce is not a Four Letter Word

As part of small talk when meeting new people we are all often faced with the question: What do you do? And, not surprisingly, answering "I'm a divorce attorney" is usually met with uncomfortable silence, and then the even more uncomfortable questions and comments:

That must be hard. How do you deal with such sad situations? How do you keep doing it? And so on.

People ask these questions because when they hear "divorce", they think about sadness, anger, affairs, breakups and all of the reasons why we never want to experience divorce in our own life. What they don't think about, though, is what the role of a divorce attorney actually is.

Divorce doesn't have to be a four letter word. In fact, divorce should be thought of as a process. Divorce begins with sadness and anger, but it often ends with relief. I view the job of a divorce attorney as the same as any other attorney. People bring a problem to my office and my job is to bring them to a solution. That problem is that their marriage has broken down before they come to my office and they don't know how to pick up the pieces. Hopefully, when they leave my office clients are no longer focused on the breakup, but instead focused on the future.

I'm not trying to convince anyone that divorce is a good thing. But if a marriage is over, getting through the divorce and rebuilding your life to a point where you can hope again is a good thing.

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