Posted on August 16, 2014 in Divorce

The gender gap in education has been reversed. In recent years, women have outpaced men in earning college degrees and in graduate school enrollment. Some sociologists have noted this could be a potential problem for marriages in the future since old data showed marriages in which the wife’s education surpassed the husband’s were more prone to end in a divorce.

However, a new study being published in the American Sociological Review reveals that those concerns may be overblown. The study, performed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Northwestern University, examined marital success rates over the last 50 years and correlated them to the education levels of the spouses.

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 Posted on August 12, 2014 in Divorce

One decision several people make after getting a divorce is returning to college. This can be a beneficial way to get a fresh start in life. It can also be a good step to entering or reentering the workforce for spouses who opted to stay home and care for the children rather than working outside the home.

Returning to college after taking some time off has both benefits and challenges associated with it for the non-traditional student. Going to college is always a big decision, but that is especially true for those returning to college, so recently divorced potential students should consider their options carefully.

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 Posted on August 09, 2014 in Child Custody

In divorces that involve children, the parents’ paramount questions are often related to custody and include concerns such as how custody is determined or the various types of custody. One common issue that arises when determining the answers to these concerns involves how siblings affect the custody process in general. Siblings’ relationships with each other can often be very close, and the existence of these additional close relationships may complicate the custody process.

Generally, there are two major concerns related to siblings and custody. These include whether the court will keep the siblings together and whether siblings are allowed visitation rights to the other siblings. Unfortunately, neither question has a concrete answer. Family law is a discipline with many unique scenarios. However, there are legal guidelines within which courts will work.

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 Posted on August 05, 2014 in Divorce

A past post on this blog highlighted the disparate impact that divorce has on girls because marriages with firstborn daughters tend to end more frequently than marriages with firstborn sons. That post highlighted a study that posed a variety of sociological explanations for that gender gap, such as fathers feeling more obliged to provide a male role model for sons or parents’ inaccurate perceptions that girls are more costly to raise increasing stress within the marriage.

Now, a new study has discovered a possible biological explanation for the gender imbalance in divorce. This explanation is known as the female survival advantage. The female survival advantage is a term for the generally-observed fact that women appear to be more physically resilient and more likely to survive than men. This trait carries over throughout all stages of life. In fact, men have documented higher mortality rates for all ages from zero to 100.

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 Posted on July 30, 2014 in Alimony/Spousal Support

One of the key portions of any divorce proceeding is the determination of spousal support, also referred to as alimony. This is the money that one former spouse pays to the other to support them as they transition back to their single life. The current system of calculating spousal support is based on a wide array of factors, including things like both spouses' incomes and property, the spouses' needs and earning capacities, the standard of living that occurred during the marriage, and the duration of the marriage. This has led to spousal support amounts being somewhat unpredictable at times.

Now, a new bill that is currently awaiting the governor's signature plans to reform that. The bill will not remove those factors from play entirely, but it will provide more concrete guidelines for judges to follow. The bill adds a new method of calculating support terms and the amount of time that the supporting spouse will be required to pay support, which will now be based on the length of the marriage. Additionally, the bill provides more strict mathematical formulas for calculating the amount of spousal support that a person will owe.

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 Posted on July 24, 2014 in Same Sex Marriage in Illinois

On November 20, 2013, the Governor of Illinois signed a law legalizing same-sex marriage in Illinois, and that law went into effect on June 1, 2014. This new right to same-sex marriage has attracted many people from out of state seeking to get married in Illinois because their home states do not yet recognize same-sex marriage.

However, an old Illinois law, Section 217 of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, may prevent the marriages from being legitimate. The law voids marriages in Illinois if they take place between people who live in a state that would not, itself, recognize their marriage. This means that a marriage between a same-sex couple, whose home state did not allow same-sex marriage, would be void.

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 Posted on July 21, 2014 in Divorce

A pioneer longitudinal study has recently revealed that people who end troubled marriages when they are middle aged, colloquially referred to as “silver splitters” or “grey divorcees,” can often find later marriages to be much happier. The study in question, the "Grant Study," tracked young men over their whole lives, starting in the 1930s. The study, which focused in part on relationships, recorded whether the participant got a divorce, how long the participant’s marriage lasted, whether the person remarried, and the qualitative happiness of the marriages using periodic survey questions.

The Grant Study

The Grant Study, formally known as the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School, began in 1938, when researchers started tracking the lives of then 19-year-old Harvard students. The study began with 268 participants, but only 242 remained following World War II, in which many of the men fought. The researchers required participants to answer periodic surveys about their families and their relationships, usually annually or every other year. This allowed the researchers to track marriage length and marital status.

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 Posted on July 19, 2014 in Child Support

Even after going through the entire divorce in court and getting a divorce decree finalized, the process may not be over. The aftermath of a divorce involves a variety of practical issues, among them collecting child support. While many parents readily keep up to date on their support obligations every month, some require legal enforcement or collection activities before they pay their court-ordered sum. One such method of legal enforcement is to use a wage garnishment, also known in Illinois as a wage deduction order. This is a type of court order that pulls the child support payment directly from the supporting parent’s wages without letting it get into their hands.

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 Posted on July 15, 2014 in Divorce

People commonly treat their finances as a personal, private matter, and not something to be discussed with others. However, that changes once they enter a marriage. Couples join their lives together during a marriage, and that includes joining their finances. They have to share bank accounts, take on debt together, and make purchases for the marriage as a unit. Not every couple does so successfully though. Instead, some spouses end up being financially unfaithful.

A recent survey by the National Endowment for Financial Education discovered that one out of every three adults who have been in a relationship with combined finances admits to lying about money. Some people even lied about such basic topics as the amount of debt they owe or the amount of income they earn. Seventy-six percent of people who responded to the survey also said that when dishonesty about money occurred, it had an effect on the relationship. It even ended in divorce in 16 percent of cases.

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 Posted on July 11, 2014 in Divorce

The law often cannot keep up with rapid changes in modern technology. This can lead to legal gray areas and open questions in the law. One recent example of this involves advances in reproductive technology. These advances have made the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) more common. This type of treatment involves extracting sperm and egg cells from the couple and creating embryos from them in a lab. Doctors then implant some of these embryos in the woman, and the rest are often frozen in case the couple chooses to use them at a later date. These frozen embryos can present challenging questions in the context of divorce, a topic that Illinois courts have only recently begun to address, starting with the case of Szafranski v. Dunston. This case is an example of a significant divorce issue, which arises when the wife would like to keep the embryos for future implantation, while the husband would prefer to have them destroyed.

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