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Patience is very important in a divorce case for a variety of reasons. A lot of people present and want the case over yesterday, understandably. I mean, they just, they don’t want the process to linger. Nobody would. But sometimes it pays off to be patient. For one, nobody’s at their best when they’re getting divorced, right? And now you’re overwhelmed with all of this uncertainty, all these issues you’re hearing, all this legal advice, you’re kind of drinking from the fire hose, you’re not really sure what’s going on. That’s not really the ideal time to be making big life decisions. So I try to get clients to take a beat, relax, get settled in, because it can be a lengthy process.
And when they’re adjusted and when they have sort of caught up and they understand what’s happening, they’re going to make much better, more clear eyed decisions than they would if they were rash and emotional in doing it. So where it tends to pay off. From a financial standpoint, I can think of a couple ways. One is you don’t always know what you need to know. We may have a spouse who doesn’t know the first thing about the family’s finances. Well, how is he or she going to make decisions if they don’t know what they have? So naturally you would take the time to do that, right? To make sure you’ve accounted for everything, make sure you know what’s there, make sure you know what is fair.
And I think from a custody standpoint that patience can also be very critical because if you find yourself in a situation where you have a custody contest, people will eventually regress into their old habits, good or bad. And so it just gives a more authentic sample for the court to decide, or for the guardian to decide, or for the parties to make assessments in how they arrive at an agreement as well.