The Importance of Remaining in the Marital Home During Divorce
You do not plan for marital problems. You go into a marriage hoping that you are going to spend the rest of your life with the person that you love, but it sometimes does not work out.
The truth is, marital problems can sprout up over time, causing conflict that can result in a divorce. While the experience can be emotionally blinding, you cannot allow your struggles to cloud your actions, when it comes to your post-divorce future. As a man in the process, you cannot afford many missteps.
Legal help
That starts with contacting a family law attorney, who can help you navigate the challenges associated with the divorce experience. They can help you understand what is at stake and fight for your future and the future of your children.
One of the most significant ways that you can approach this situation the right way is staying in the marital home.
Staying home
As difficult and possibly volatile as the situation may be, it would be beneficial to your case for you to remain present. Moving out of the marital home is one of the most common mistakes that men often make when facing a divorce. According to Cordell & Cordell Co-Founder and Principal Partner Joseph E. Cordell, it gives your wife’s attorney the opportunity to label you as the individual who is abandoning the family.
You may think that there are plenty of reasons to want to leave the home. You may think that it is what is best for your children. You may feel that you are sparing them from having to see their parents fighting with one another.
Your wife may attempt to persuade you with concessions during the divorce, in order to create distance between you and the marital home. This also would create distance between yourself and your children, and as an active and loving parent, you need to ensure that your place in your children’s lives is protected.
That means staying put and showing the family courts that your children come first and allows you to foster the narrative in family courts that you are the devoted parent that you claim to be.
There are instance when leaving the family house is a necessary part of the process. These instance often involve the implementation of a protection order.
Issues with protection orders
Protection orders often are used in family law cases as a part of a much larger strategy to get a leg up in a divorce or child custody case. Given the emotional toll that the divorce process can take, some find themselves utilizing protection orders as expedient means of obtaining custody of the children or forcing unwanted spouses out of the marital home.
In many cases, they are obtained on an “emergency” basis without notifying the defending party. Furthermore, the hearings attached to these orders of protection often are scheduled weeks later, allowing for a sense of a new normal to develop. This helps build the accusing spouse’s narrative and prevents the defending spouse from being the parent that their children need.
Facing the aftermath
If you are facing a false order of protection and it is found to be the case, you still face the stigma that you are the abuser that the order implied. You still have to deal with the social ramifications of the false narrative that affected everyone in your life.
You also have to figure out a way to be a co-parent with someone that would utilize such a legal device, in order to remove you from the home that you once shared together, as well as the lives of the children that you still share.
These are challenges that require the assistance of a family law attorney, who can help ensure that you have that place in your children’s lives and that your post-divorce future is legally and financially protected.
While it is important not to leave your marital home early on in the process, it also is crucial that you understand that you need to be able to create a home for your children in the future. That requires having the means to do so, and if you are not protecting yourself with the experience of a family law attorney, that future may be jeopardy.
By trusting your future to a legal professional, you are putting your future and the future of your children first.
