How Do I Protect Myself While Attempting to Reconcile?

Successful reconciliation requires wholehearted commitment. Both spouses must focus on (re)building trust and understanding the other. If you want to reconcile, you need to be willing to take a hard look at yourself and the ways your own actions have contributed to the troubled relationship.

Seeking to protect yourself against your spouse is potentially in tension with the reconciliation process. Squirreling away money, attempting to gain leverage, and otherwise acting in an overly calculating fashion will only ensure failure for your attempted reconciliation. Marriage counselors, mental health professionals, and members of the clergy – not family law attorneys – are the primary resources for reconciling couples.

That said, a family law attorney can assist your reconciliation in ways other service providers cannot.

First, an attorney can provide you with a reality check. To say the least, divorce is no picnic. After speaking with an attorney about child custody, support, equitable distribution, and other divorce-related issues, you may be even more motivated to save your marriage. Dissolving a marriage can be a long, expensive, and, above all else, painful process. A sober understanding of what the process involves — and where you might end up on the other side — may lead you to realize that the cost-benefit analysis weighs in favor of making every effort to save your marriage.

Second, many couples working towards reconciliation find advantages in negotiating and executing a post-nuptial agreement. Post-nuptial agreements can address certain thorny problems in the marriage, including concerns about finances.  A post-nuptial agreement is a binding contract between two spouses. Such agreements can be tailored to your unique goals and situation. For example, if your spouse feels insecure because all the marital assets are titled in your name, a post-nuptial agreement rectifying that imbalance can ease those bad feelings, placing both parties on more equal footing. By taking away that fear and insecurity, each spouse can have more emotional bandwidth to focus on improving the marriage.

When truly committed to saving the marriage, spouses need to work together, often in creative ways, to tackle problems that have plagued the marriage. While it seems somewhat counter-intuitive, domestic relations attorneys are uniquely well-situated to assist reconciling spouses with certain problems.