Until now, our divorce laws-the rules that husbands and wives look to when it comes to answering the questions and solving the problems that they find themselves faced with as a result of their decision to divorce-have been defined by our adversarial legal system. The unfortunate effect of that has been to not only favor the interests of those who have an influence over their enactment, but also to take the decision-making process completely out of the hands of divorcing husband and wives. But it has had two other very unfortunate effects as well, The first was to leave divorcing husbands and wives with a "one size fits all" set of divorce laws that do not fit literally anyone. The second was to disable husbands and wives from doing what they had always done in the past, which was to sit down and work this out on their own.

Divorcing husbands and wives deserve better than this. However, for them to get what they deserve, it will first be necessary to redefine the terms of the debate. It is the purpose of this book to do that.