Tareq Salahi has filed for divorce from Michaele Salahi, White House gate crasher and one of the Real Housewives of DC.

Tareq accuses Michaele of desertion and adultery with Journey guitarist Neal Schon.

In the Complaint, Tareq claims Schon sent Michaele a picture of a part of his body via email.

There is no lawyer’s name on the Complaint, but it appears to be drafted by someone who knows divorce law.  There is no mention of a prenuptial agreement.

Real world relationships are tough enough but MapleStory, a free online role playing game, has a divorce rate of 75%.

Andy Chalk writes at EscapistMagazine.com that it costs $25 real dollars to get married in MapleStory.

“I was young, naive, and thought I had met ‘the one.’ says 20 year old Tyler, and 19 year old Seth says “She was only out there to get free things off of me.”

On the bright side,MapleStory divorcees don’t pay alimony or child support and they don’t have to go to court.  I wonder if this will be good practice for  these people when they get married in real life.

This excerpt from an article by Jane Eaton Hamilton struck me as a particularly poignant description of the losses felt by people going through divorce:

“We had lost our wives and husbands. We had lost our best friends. We had lost sex. We had lost our children. We had lost our animals. We had lost our homes. We had lost our furniture. We had lost our gardens. Our incomes had severely plummeted. There were new therapists to pay, and lawyers to pay, and moving costs to pay. Some of us had to replace even the spices in our cupboards and the toilet brushes behind the bowls. We moved without screwdrivers, without our art, without our shampoo.”

News of the separation of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver after 25 years of marriage adds to the growing list of baby boomer breakups.

Last year it was former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper Gore.

About 35% of baby boomers have split from their spouses, and now baby boomers make up the majority of all divorced Americans.

Several years ago a New York judge ordered Brian McGurk to pay his wife, Dorothy McGurk, $850 a month in lifetime alimony and gave her the marital residence because of her disability.

Recently Brian saw an entry on her blog that she was now belly dancing.  Furious, he took her back to court.

Dorothy claimed that her doctor had prescribed belly dancing as therapy for her injuries in a 1997 car accident.  The doctor however did not support that claim in court.

The judge reduced alimony to $400 a month, ordered her to pay her husband’s attorney fees of $5,000 and to give him 60% of the proceeds from the sale of the house.

As Shakira says, “Hips Don’t Lie”.

Karen Stewart, President of Fairway Divorce Solutions, says that in addition to splitting up your CD’s in a divorce, you are also forced to cut off an entire social network that may have been nurtured for years.

“Within a circle of friends, you expect certain people to align with you,” Stewart is quoted as saying in a Toronto Sun article by Tanya Engberg.  “Friends can’t be in both camps, but often they don’t know what to do. Their normal stance is, ‘I think it’s best if I stay out of it,’ but that’s not the way it works. Your family and close friends can’t stay out of it.”

Divorce is an entire life overhaul.  In addition to the end of the romance, you have to accept the loss of your former spouse’s family members and friends that you have known for years.

“For me, I closed that chapter and started all over,” says a 41-year-old divorced father with two children.  “I maintained friendships for a short while, but it became uncomfortable. They do take sides, no matter what they tell you. Parents are always going to support their own child. If you want to start over, you have to cut ties with mutual friends and say goodbye to the in-laws.”

Stewart says that saying goodbye is tough, but inevitable.

by Jill H. Breslau

“He might be cute and he might be furry, but he’s still property.” — Trial judge in a New Jersey divorce case

Reported cases may not reveal the degree to which pet disputes are part of divorce.  But consider these statistics.  Approximately one of every two marriages in the United States ends in divorce every year.  Of divorcing people, thirty percent own at least one dog and thirty-four percent own at least one cat.

Although people often consider their pets to be their children, or at least, like children, the law generally doesn’t see it that way.  When you divorce, your dog or cat is considered personal property.  Courts ordinarily will not arrange a schedule for access with a pet.  As a Pennsylvania judge stated, “Appellant is seeking an arrangement analogous, in law, to a visitation schedule for a table or a lamp.”

While this perception may be distressing—after all, our pets are sentient beings; they express love and loyalty, and we love them, too–some commentators think dealing with pets as property is less complicated and frustrating than accomplishing good outcomes by using a child custody model, which refers to the “best interest of the child,” as the standard.

Courts can determine who will own a pet, not only by considering who paid for the pet, but who has cared for it, walked and fed it, trained it and spent time with it.  And divorce courts have stated that one goal is to make sure that a family pet will be kept safe and free from abuse and abandonment.

On the other hand, a New Jersey court, while declaring that pets are not children, and adhering to the notion that there is no “best interest of the dog” standard, has ordered that a separating couple alternate possession of their dog on a regular basis. This outcome suggests that, at least in New Jersey, a court can order “shared possession” of a pet—as long as it isn’t called “custody.”

And here in Maryland, the St. Mary’s County Circuit Court ordered a husband and wife to rotate custody of their dog every six months.  But this is the exception and not the rule.

Tipper Gore and Al Gore announced in an email to friends that they are separating after 40 years of marriage.  They said they labored over the decision for a long time and reached a mutual agreement to live separately.  The reason given was that they had grown apart.

My wife and I have different pursuits.  She stays home with our children.  She is the president of the PTA.  She is working on a local political campaign.

I manage a busy law office and spend most days puzzling out how to untangle complex financial relationships between divorcing spouses.  Sometimes, while I am in the middle of a million dollar deal, and trying hard to concentrate on some troublesome aspect, my wife will call me.  The fish died, my son made the swim team, what was in that salad we had last week, and oh by the way we need milk.

Do I stop what I’m doing, take a deep breath and redirect my mind to her world?  You bet.

We are different, but we respect the differences, sometimes even finding humor in them.   We have different worlds but they intersect at home, family and raising our children.  We interact, communicate and participate.  Growing apart is a decision you make.  The opposite decision is staying together.

by Michael F. Callahan

We practice family law mostly in the Washington, DC commuting area, which includes DC Superior Court and the County Circuit Courts of the nearby Maryland and Virginia suburbs.  Divorce jurisdiction depends on a party’s residence at the time the court case is filed.  And divorce usually involves at least one party moving from the marital residence (more about that later).   So often there are at least two choices for filing the case even without any planning regarding where to file.

You may have read or heard that the basic law of divorce — grounds, property distribution, spousal support, child custody and child support — is similar in each of the three local jurisdictions.  Why then think about shopping around for a divorce court?

There are clear differences between the jurisdictions in certain aspects of the law.  Because of one of these clear differences, the most important issues in your case might be decided differently in each of the three jurisdictions.  It might be decided much differently (and better for you) in say, Virginia, than it would be in Maryland or the District of Columbia.  Armed with this knowledge before you move, since you’re moving anyway, maybe you’d decide to move to an apartment in Arlington for a while instead of one in Bethesda.

Next time, I’ll discuss how and when to pick the court for your divorce and how to put your choice into action.  In coming weeks, we’ll discuss the various differences in the laws that can result in big differences in the outcome of a particular case.

It looks like Larry King is heading toward his 8th divorce (with 7 wives — he married the last one twice).

I bet you don’t know who had more wives, Larry King or King Henry the Eighth.

The answer is here.