236 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
say that the divorce was the best and most important change they
ever made in their lives.
Many of the folks I have represented over the years felt that they
were somehow trapped in a desperate situation during the time
when their marriage started to turn bad. They use the phraseology
of sickness or disease as the analogy for a condition they had to
cure. Interestingly enough, the state of health they strive to regain
is generally not perpetual singlehood but a “new and improved”
happier marriage. Specifically, they want a restructured marriage
that works better for them at a new and different stage of their
life.
The more upbeat view, then, is that in this modern context
divorce has become not so much the antithesis of marriage, but
an essential aspect of a revamped marriage system. I have heard
it argued that perhaps serial marriages are the only way an indi-
vidual can remain happily married nowadays (i.e., by changing
partners as his or her needs change over the course of an elon-
gated lifetime). Divorce may even be an essential adaptation that
permits the institution of marriage as we know it to survive and
to perform the expanded functions we require of it.
If one accepts this view, then it follows that a sensitive and
smoothly functioning divorce process (and, I daresay, sensitive
divorce practitioners) can perhaps work to the benefit of society
as a whole. In this sense the divorce process, while admittedly
focusing on the death of love at least in one relationship, can also
extend to include the concept of the rebirth of love, perhaps in
another context. It may be that the divorce process is a societal
adaptation that simply must be made, given the fast-paced, wired,
supermobile, ever-changing, and option-overloaded world that
faces the modern-day, post-yuppie American.
If indeed a constructively structured and intelligently processed
divorce can serve as a mechanism for fine-tuning relationships in
our constantly evolving society, then it needs to be handled in as
sophisticated and sensitive a fashion as possible. Hence the need
not only for Mel Krantzler’s term “creative divorce,” but also for
an extrapolation of that concept to include the style of “creative
divorce lawyering” that I have tried to emphasize in this book. I
hope you have found it to be useful. Aloha!