WUSA TV News Anchor, Andrea Roane, interviewed TGC Attorney, Jill Breslau, today about South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s marital difficulties.

“Right now it appears that Governor Sanford is more intent upon self-justification than he is on changing himself,” said Breslau.   ”His behaviors have been completely inconsistent with the values he says he holds, and he is glamorizing his relationship, and characterizing himself as a tragic hero, because he has risked everything for it—his marriage, his family, his political life, his reputation.  Only if he inflates the meaning of his affair is it worth all those potential losses.”

Regarding putting his marriage back together, Breslau, who is also a trained psychotherapist, said, “As much as the public finds it irresistible to be judgmental about Sanford’s behavior, a primary purpose of counseling is to have a private, confidential setting where the therapist is nonjudgmental.”

Lemondrop.com has an article about a couple who had been living together in Germany and decided to get married.  Then they got into an argument almost immediately after the wedding.  It escalated into a big fight in which the groom began chasing the bride around with a knife trying to cut her hair.  She called the police and they gave her a restraining order.  They decided to get an annulment on the same day.  The groom spent what was to have been his wedding night in a homeless shelter.

“Divorced, beheaded, died,
Divorced, beheaded, survived.”

– Rhyme about the fate of those half dozen queens that were married to Henry VIII, King of England (1491-1547).  They were, in order:

Catherine of Aragon
Anne Boleyn
Jane Seymour
Anne of Cleves
Catherine Howard
Catherine Parr

Paul Simon, in his famous song, told us there must be fifty ways to leave your lover. I wonder if he counted the two new ways we saw on television this week:

1.  Use Your Reality TV Show.

Monday night, John and Kate Gosselin announced their separation and intention to divorce on cable tv.  This came amid months of tabloid speculation concerning extramarital affairs.  The show got its highest ratings ever.  The parties say they are going to split custody of their eight children equally.  The children will stay in the house and the parties will alternate living there in what is called a nesting arrangement.

2.  Call a Press Conference.

On Wednesday, Mark Sanford, 49, governor of South Carolina, held a news conference and announced that he had been unfaithful to his wife.  He had been missing for several days and told his staff that he was going hiking on the Appalachian Trail.  However, a newspaper report confronted him in Atlanta getting off a plan arriving from Buenos Aires, Argentina.  His public confession came just before the newspaper broke the story of his mistress in Argentina.

Saw my lawyer, Mr Good News
He got me joint custody and legal separation
I’m so happy that I can’t stop crying
I’m laughing through my tears

– from “I’m So Happy I Can’t Stop Crying” by Sting

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee for the U. S. Supreme Court, talked about her divorce in a 1990’s interview that has been turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“I cannot attribute that divorce to work,” she said. ” But certainly the fact that I was leaving my home at 7:00am and getting back at 10:00pm was not of assistance in recognizing the problems developing in my marriage.”

“I have found it difficult to maintain a relationship while I’ve pursued my career,” Sotomayor said.  “I know for me finding personal time is enormously difficult. Finding sleep time is sometimes even more difficult.”

Judge Sotomayor has no children and has not remarried.

Read more on this.

John Bolch, a solictor in England, who writes the “Family Lore” blog, kindly gave us an award.  It is reprinted with his permission below.

May Post of the Month

Sometimes a blog post strikes a particular chord, and you think: ‘Yes, of course, why didn’t I write that?’ Such was the case when I came across the post ‘Fuzzy Logic‘, written by James Gross of the Maryland Divorce Legal Crier (love that name). Often, over the years, I have had clients of a ‘logical persuasion’ (scientists, bankers, accountants etc.) who have clearly expected me to come up with a definitive answer to their problems. Alas, I have to explain, family law does not work like that: there is often no ‘definitive’ answer to a problem, just a series of possibilities. This is what James has posted about, somewhat more elegantly than me, and the post wins my May Post of the Month award. I shall have to remember the Heisenberg uncertainty principle next time…

The prize? A virtual subscription to Scientific American, for James to display prominently in his reception area, just to prove to clients that he is not averse to a bit of logic himself.

I am not in favor of dirty tricks in a divorce.  Others are not so straightforward.  So it pays know what they are so you can defend yourself if they happen to you.  According to English lawyer Marilyn Stowe, the top ten divorce dirty tricks are:

1. Moving the spouse to a different country in order to obtain a more favourable divorce settlement. (In the U.S. however, a spouse can move to more favorable state.  This is called forum shopping.)

2. Covert surveillance of a spouse by bugging the phone, the car, the office — or by employing an enquiry agent. (Private detective in the U.S.)

3. Secretly photocopying every scrap of financial information in the house and office. Also: downloading everything from a spouse’s computer, and later pretending that he/she didn’t realise what he/she was doing.  (Or destroying information after discovery issues in the U.S.)

4. Salting away as much money as possible, ready for that “rainy day”. (Dash Cash)

5. Damage, destruction, or sale of the household’s most valuable contents.

6. Spending money wildly, as a form of “payback”.

7. Assaulting the spouse and the new partner.

8. Using a “friend” as a spy, to gain access to the lawyer’s office and learn at firsthand what is going on.

9. “Conflicting out” the spouse’s lawyer.

10. If all else fails…running off with the divorce lawyer!

Read the complete article at First Wives World.

The Learning Channel is a cable television network in Silver Spring, Maryland, established in 1980 with an educational mission.

Watching Jon and Kate Gosselin is giving us all an education in the difficulties of marriage.  The reality tv show has become a sensation in its fifth season as the husband and wife raising eight children are suddenly becoming unhappily married before our eyes.  There are rumors of infidelity on the part of both spouses.

Ratings are going through the roof as we all watch the marriage disassemble like a car wreck you can’t take your eyes off of.

“Couples squabble. Dealing with eight kids is an overwhelming task,” says Laurie Goldberg of TLC.  “The show will do well as it remains authentic and relatable.”

The couple is under contract for 39 more episodes, so even if their marriage breaks down, we might get to watch them proceed through a divorce.

Lots of my clients are computer consultants, engineers, scientists, economists, investment bankers or accountants.  They ask me questions about their cases and they want clear answers.  Before I became a lawyer, I was a chemical engineer, so I know something about how they think.

In math class there was usually one right answer and everything else was wrong.  They are looking for the one right answer.  I remember staying up all night at college with my study group working through the equations to get to that one right answer.

After math, chemistry and physics classes, law school was a shock to me.  I still recall the first day of Contracts when Professor Joe Covington asked me stand up and explain to the class what “justice” means.  I am afraid I did not do a very noteworthy job of it.

I excelled in classes where the rules were hard and fast, like Civil Procedure, for example.  But I did not fair as well in those classes where the concepts were harder to get a handle on, like Torts.

I can empathize with the puzzled look on the faces of my “math and science” clients when I explain divorce law to them.  It is a human system and humans are full of flaws.  There are no right answers – only probabilities.

They are uncomfortable with these fuzzy answers.  But I sometimes remind them that, even in their world, they deal with unknowns, such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, dark matter, string theory and Shroedinger’s cat.