There are 4 steps to obtain a divorce in Australia: separation, agreeing on how to split your financial assets, agreeing on how to pay and care for your children, and lastly, applying for a divorce and dissolving your marriage.
In Australia, a divorce takes about four months before it is officially granted by the court. This time is calculated using the date you first filed your application in court until the date when a divorce order is issued by the court.
Individuals experience four psychological stages during divorce: deliberation, decision, transition, and healing.
Many people consider the separation phase to be the most difficult. This is the time between when you decide to get divorced and the date you actually get divorced. This period often presents the most uncertainties about child support, visitation, alimony, division of assets, and more.
Divorce with school-aged kids (5 to 13 years old)
The school-aged years are probably the worst age for divorce for children; the potential for emotional trauma from divorce is highest at age 11.
In the throes of divorce, people experience the pain of disrupted emotional attachment. The roots of emotional attachment go very deep in our lives. Establishing and maintaining attachment is the most crucial thing at the earliest point in life; without it, we would have died as an infant.
Divorce is disruptive enough for children of divorce without their parents involved in heated disputes. As a result, I take the approach and utilize what I call the three C's of Divorce with my clients and opposing counsel. Communication, Cooperation and Clarification.
While there are countless divorce studies with conflicting statistics, the data points to two periods during a marriage when divorces are most common: years 1 – 2 and years 5 – 8. Of those two high-risk periods, there are two years in particular that stand out as the most common years for divorce — years 7 and 8.
Individuals may go through several stages of mourning or grief. The emotional intensity of this period usually reaches a peak within the first six months of separation. However, the grieving process may take as long as two years.
In summary, a wife in a divorce settlement in Australia is entitled to a fair and equitable share of the assets and property accumulated during the marriage. This may include a share of the family home, vehicles, savings, and investments, and any superannuation that has been accumulated during the marriage.
A Fast Divorce Process
The fastest way to get a divorce and the one that's most efficient is filing a joint application. Filing a joint application means you don't have to bother with the official and legal serving divorce papers process.
The sole applicant will need to pay a fee to legal professionals, and additional fees to serve the application to their partner. In this case, the partner who is being served with an application for divorce will not need to pay any fees.
The fifth and final stage of divorce is acceptance. This is when couples have come to terms with the fact that their marriage is over, and they are moving on with their lives. Couples may still feel sad and lonely at this stage, but they have typically made peace with the decision to divorce.
The emotional process can be broken down into 5 stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
A study led by the American Sociological Association determined that nearly 70% of divorces are initiated by women. And the percentage of college-educated American women who initiated divorce is even higher.
Lack of commitment is the most common reason given by divorcing couples according to a recent national survey. Here are the reasons given and their percentages: Lack of commitment 73% Argue too much 56%
Men Are More Likely to Remarry
This data indicates that men are consistently more likely to attempt a second marriage than women. Over the past decade, there has been a decline in remarriage rates for both men and women.
The Four Horsemen are four communication habits that increase the likelihood of divorce, according to research by psychologist and renowned marriage researcher John Gottman, Ph. D. Those four behaviors are criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt.
After watching thousands of couples argue in his lab, he was able to identify specific negative communication patterns that predict divorce. He called them The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and they are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.
What Are Irreconcilable Differences? “Irreconcilable differences” technically means that an individual and their spouse cannot get along with one another enough to keep the marriage alive, and this lack of getting along can cause a whole array of other issues in the marriage.
Perhaps the most difficult period of divorce is the “separation period.” That is the time between when you decide to get a divorce, and the date when you are actually divorced.
The study found that on average unhappily married adults who divorced were no happier than unhappily married adults who stayed married when rated on any of 12 separate measures of psychological well-being. Divorce did not typically reduce symptoms of depression, raise self-esteem, or increase a sense of mastery.
There's a term for this: walkaway wife syndrome. This term is sometimes used to describe instances where a spouse – often the wife – has felt alone, neglected, and resentful in a deteriorating marriage and decides it's time to end it.