What is your best life advice for a recently divorced client?

What is your best “life advice” for a recently divorced client? The Best Advice I Ever Gave My Clients After Divorce. Family Lawyers’ Best Life Advice for a Recently Divorced Client. Divorce recovery advice.

Q: What Is Your Best Life Advice for Recently Divorced Clients?

Steven Peskind:

Don’t make any major decisions for one year after the divorce. In other words, don’t get remarried. Don’t go out and necessarily buy a new house. Keep your options open and give yourself an opportunity to air out your life. Figure out where you’re going with your life, what’s important to you, and take a break for a year.

Barry Gold:

The best life advice for a recently divorced client is to get out and live. That is not you only live once. It’s not the YOLO advice. It’s that you have been through a very difficult process. So, live it in the sense of back out. Do what in a lot of the 12 step programs, probably they’ll talk about people. Do the next healthy thing. There is a next healthy thing, whether that is to join the gym, to get outside for a walk, to reconnect with a place of worship or friends that you haven’t been able to. Get out there and do the next healthy thing. They are out of that prison, so to speak. Understandably, if there are children involved, they are still going to have some co-parenting responsibilities till the children turn 18. And some parents would tell you basically for life, they have that, but you are no longer under that same burden as you were during the case.

So, get out and live it. That’s good advice. And be very, very circumspect about remarrying within the first year or two. It’s just notorious how unsuccessful second marriages are in rebound relationships. So, it’s really important to be very careful. Approach that with a great deal of circumspection and probably come back to your lawyer before you embark on that and talk about getting a prenup. It certainly would be a good idea. The prenup is the most tangible way that one side gets to tell the other side, I am marrying you for love and not for financial gain. It’s putting your money where your mouth is, but that way the client can be assured of that. This person is not marrying me for my stuff. They are marrying me because they love me.

Scott Friedman:

My best life advice for a recently divorced client is before you get into another relationship, figure out what really is important to you and what is going to make you happy and satisfied. I think, generally speaking, our society in my generation married too young and didn’t recognize what was it about themselves before they went into a relationship, a permanent relationship. I think your generation and the generation right underneath you have figured out that they don’t need to get married right away. They can explore themselves. They can explore who’s out there. But when you get divorced, I think sometimes people think I need to get right back into another relationship. And if you do that, generally speaking, I’m sure there are exceptions, you still haven’t figured out what you need, what you want, what’s important.

Joe Booth:

See your tomorrow. One of the things that makes it really hard to help people and help them and advise them in a new life after a divorce is that so many people are unable to envision the next step in life. They can give you a lot of lists of what they don’t want, and they’ll tell you they don’t want new relationships. They’ll tell you that they don’t want to ever fall into those traps again, et cetera, but they don’t just spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they really do want and what opportunities there are there.

I think anybody that’s been in a long-term relationship will on occasion six months, a year later suddenly realize that they’re doing things that were dictated by that previous relationship. And there’s simply no reason to do it anymore. It’s just part of that baggage that you carried forward. And there is some real interest in you’re the only one that’s going to be hurt or you’re the only one that’s going to benefit from being able to pick up your life and carrying forward. And to be able to see tomorrow is really, really important. A twin to that, in retrospect, is to figure out how to leverage and work gratitude in the most important ways, that grateful people are always healthier, happier, and more optimistic. And so, you have to figure out what about your journey that you can be grateful for. And it’s hard for some people to accept, but there’s a lot very often. And if they’re grateful for yesterday, they see a much brighter tomorrow.

Randall Kessler:

Be happy. Even if you have to make yourself happy, don’t look in the past. A friend of mine wrote a book called the Good Karma Divorce, and I invited her to speak to a bunch of CPAs, forensic accountants. And she said, “Randy, I’m touchy-feely, how am I going to convince them?” And she said, “I got it.” When the clients are talking to the lawyers, they’re talking about what he did in the past. When you talk to your CPA, you’re figuring out your future. You’re coming up with what it is going to take to live on. Look to the future. You can’t change your past. You can only change the future. So, if you’re recently divorced, there’s a big world out there. And the nice thing is you’re divorcing in the 2020s, not in the 1900s, when you might have been the only person that was divorced and there was a stigma, and your kids didn’t want to invite people over because they didn’t want to say my mom and dad don’t live together anymore. That’s not a thing anymore.

Kids go to school, and they say, “Hey, who are you spending the weekend with? Your dad or your mom?” I mean, it’s normal for good or bad. You’re not alone. And there are a lot of people out there in the same position and get out there. Don’t stay home. Get over it as fast as you can and just go out and live.

Miles Mason, Sr.:

My best life advice for a recently divorced client, number one is get into therapy, right? Have somebody that’s a professional listen to you and give you good feedback on what you’re thinking, because divorce is a grief event. You’ve got to recover from it. And you’ve had an erosion of trust of one of the most important relationships you can have. And so, before you jump into another relationship, I think it makes a lot of sense to get into the therapy.

Second piece of advice is what I call “Join and Go,” all right? Get you a plan. First, figure out something to do that’s social that you normally don’t do and go and do it. Number two, if you need to learn about business or join another professional association or something, pick up something new and go. Join and go. Third, do something in community service. If you like animals and you love your dog, go volunteer at the shelter.

If you want to go and raise money for the shelter, join and go. And then finally, do something physical. If you played tennis a few years back, join a tennis league. Go get you some lessons. Do something but join an organization and go. In Memphis, we’ve got great cycling groups. We’ve got running groups. We’ve got every kind of group you could possibly imagine. And if you’re in the country, join a group that’s statewide, travel to them. What it’s going to do is force you to meet new people, make new relationships, and start a new normal. Okay? Join and go.

Thank you for contributing your experience and expertise to our “Top Family Lawyers Answer Divorce Questions” video series.  You are the best. Cheers!

Randy Kessler
Atlanta, Georgia
Kessler & Solomiany, LLC
ABA Family Law Section, Past Chair

Melissa Avery
Indianapolis, Indiana
Broyles Kight & Ricafort, P.C., Of Counsel
ABA Family Law Section, Past Chair

Joseph W. Booth
Lenexa, Kansas
Law Offices of Joseph W. Booth
ABA Family Law Section, Co-Chair of Publications Board

Scott N. Friedman
Columbus, Ohio
Friedman & Mirman Co., L.P.A.
ABA Family Law Section, Past Chair

Stephen N. Peskind
St. Charles, Illinois
Peskind Law Firm, PC
ABA Family Law Section, Author

Barry L. Gold
Chattanooga, Tennessee
McWilliams, Gold & Larramore
TBA Family Law Section, Past Chair

Miles Mason, Sr.
Memphis, Tennessee
Miles Mason Family Law Group, PLC
ABA Family Law Section, Author