On behalf of The Marks Law Firm, L.L.C posted in Child Custody on Friday, August 5, 2011
Obtaining a divorce in St. Louis and across the United States has become increasingly complicated over the last few decades, according to Huffington Post columnist Michael Kretzmer. New ideas about the nature of families and new definitions of relationships have changed the way people think of marriage, divorce, child custody and other facets of family law.
According to Kretzmer, the advent of no-fault divorce in the 1970s was the first of many factors that have contributed to the new complexity of divorce law.
Previously, all of a couple’s dirty laundry had to be aired in open court in order to obtain a divorce. The party seeking the divorce had to expose the failings of their spouse by providing evidence of their moral failings and faults. With the advent of no-fault divorce, couples were typically spared these kinds of painful accusations.
Cohabitation is another modern development that is changing family law. There’s much less societal disapproval of couples living together. Yet when they’ve been together for some time and made a family or accumulated assets together.
A more recent change in family law is the approval in a handful of states of same-sex partnerships or marriages. New York is the most recent state to allow same-sex marriage.
Kretzmer lists a few other factors that are making divorce law more complex. They include the stricter enforcement of child support (courts are in recent years increasingly asking both parents to contribute financially to the raising of their children) and alimony, surrogacy, and child custody disputes in which some fathers play less of a passive role than in the past.
Source: Huffington Post: “America’s Relationship with Divorce: ‘It’s Complicated'” by Michael Kretzmer: July 27, 2011