If your marriage isn’t an entirely happy one, then at some point, you and your spouse might start to discuss divorce. Once this happens, you’ll soon realize just what a big step this is and what is involved, and this can be a worry. Are you sure you’re making the right choice? Divorce is complex, confusing, stressful, and expensive, and although it can be exactly the right thing to do in some cases, in others, it would be an error, and therefore a waste of time and money.
How can you know what is right for your particular situation? The answer is to have a trial separation. If you are able to live away from one another for a reasonable period of time, you can see how it would be if you were divorced and decide whether that’s the right thing for you or whether you want to give your marriage another try. With that in mind, here are some tips for having a successful trial separation.
Professional Help
Trying to work out exactly how you feel when it comes to your marriage, love, and everything else involved can be an impossible task, and in many cases, the couple may well – separately – ask their friends and family for advice. Although the responses will be well-meaning, they may not be helpful, and they will be colored by someone’s personal opinion on your spouse and on divorce in general.
This is why it’s best to get professional help if you need it. This could come in the form of couple’s counseling, mediation, or even the Pasadena Family Law Group if you need more specific advice regarding divorce and everything it involves. Knowing all the facts and talking things through either alone or with your spouse in the presence of a professional is a good way to see if the separation is working and what you should do next.
Have An End Date
A trial separation is not the final step; that’s the entire point of it. This means that there must be an end date organized before you begin. You’ll need to decide whether the end date should be a matter of weeks or months, but it should ideally be within the time frame of between two months and a year. Any less than this, and you won’t have given the separation enough time to answer the questions you have about your relationship, and any more than that and you are just delaying the final result. During this time, you will need to think about the state of the relationship and determine whether you can put it back on track and, if you can, whether you want to.
When there is no time limit, it would be easy for the separation to become much more permanent without you really realizing what had happened. You’ll then move towards getting a divorce without ever having the chance to talk as a couple about how the separation went.
Living Arrangements And Bills
During a trial separation, you’ll need to live separately. This can be one of the sticking points, but it’s an essential part of the trial – if you are still living together, you will fall back into old habits, be miserable just like you were before, and nothing will ever change.
Therefore, the living arrangements and who is going to contribute towards the bills is a crucial discussion you’ll need to have before the trial separation begins – it will be too late after. The split of the bills and who is going to live where is something only the couple in question can determine, and the answer will be unique to each couple. The only thing that can be said for certain is that something has to change for the results to be worth anything at all.
