Are marital mistakes threatening the outcome of your divorce?

No one is perfect in their marriage. Although a lot of couples can work through their mistakes and their shortcomings while protecting the integrity of their marriage, sometimes that just isn’t possible. And some marriages fall apart simply due to changed priorities or falling out of love. Regardless of how your marriage falters, the mistakes that you’ve made in the past could come back to haunt you. If you don’t know how to appropriately handle your spouse’s attacks in that regard, then you could wind up facing outcomes that are contrary to what you hoped to get out of your divorce.

In this post, then, we want to look at how marital mistakes could come into play in your divorce and how you may be able to mitigate their impact to protect your interests. Hopefully then you can enter the divorce process with a strong legal strategy that gives you confidence that you know how to fight back against your spouse when they go on the attack.

Regardless of the type of mistakes you’ve made, there’s a good a chance that your spouse is going to try to use them against you. Here are some of the ways that they might do that:

• Arguing that they’re entitled to a larger portion of the marital estate: Your spouse might argue that your bad acts entitle them to a larger share of the marital estate. This could be especially true if you’re accused of engaging in financial mismanagement or an affair during your marriage. If your spouse is successful here, then you could be left in a difficult financial position once your divorce is finalized.
• Claiming that your actions warrant spousal support: Similarly, your spouse might claim that the mistakes you made leave them unable to be self-sufficient post-divorce, thus warranting a request for alimony. For example, if your spouse can show that you engaged in coercive behavior that prevented them from working or obtaining an education, then a court might see you as responsible for your spouse’s inability to obtain gainful employment post-divorce and therefore order you to pay spousal support.
• Arguing that you’re unfit to parent: If your spouse lobs accusations that you’ve engaged in substance abuse, domestic violence or adultery, then they may try to use your alleged character flaws to claim that you’re unfit to parent your child. Even if they can’t completely block your access to your child, they might argue that your time should be restricted or occur on a supervised basis. The crux of their argument here is that your character flaws pose a threat to your child’s best interests.

You may have some options. These include the following:

• Attacking the credibility and reliability of the evidence presented by your spouse so that the court finds it untrustworthy.
• Demonstrating that even if you made a marital mistake, it has no bearing on the legal issue at hand.
• Highlighting marital bad acts attributable to your spouse so that it’s clear that you aren’t the only one responsible for the marriage’s deterioration and the circumstances relevant to the legal issues being addressed.
• Using the rules of evidence to try to block evidence of marital bad acts from being used against you.

Marital mistakes pose a real threat to the outcome of your divorce. That’s why it’s imperative that you anticipate where you’re vulnerable to attack and find ways to counter your spouse’s assertions. By doing so, you’ll effectively protect your interests and stand a better chance of securing the divorce outcome that you want.