 As Catherine said, my name is Casey Greenfield. I'm a matrimonial and family lawyer in New York. Family lawyer used to be a euphemism for divorce lawyers. But fittingly enough today, it actually now encompasses a great deal of work that doesn't involve marriage at all, which I'm sure is something we'll get to at some point today. With me I have Wendy Paris, who is, I believe, a Schwartz fellow here at New America. She's written extensively about marriage, family, divorce, and has a book coming out, I believe, the year after next, right? Or next year, depending. Can I finish it? 2015. 2015. OK, the year after next. I was right. I believe tentatively called Splatopia about what it sounds like. Father Daniel Madela, who is a licensed clinical social worker and director at Cognitive Therapy of New York, and is also a therapist in Westport, Connecticut. He's also a director of the Personality Disorders Awareness Network, which is something most of us could probably use. And he is a graduate of the Yale Divinity School and is also an Episcopal priest. Naomi Kahn, I'm very lucky to have here, is a professor at George Washington University Law School here. She teaches family law and has written a trove of articles, books, co-authored articles and books as well, about family law, policy, assisted reproductive technology, and is probably best known on the popular front for a book she co-authored called Red Families versus Blue Families, Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. So I was thinking that we might start today by discussing perhaps an offshoot of the first panel about single parenthood, single motherhood, which is a trend that I think is probably going on in every state, although you can probably speak to this better than I, which is that as families and the culture have changed, so has the way in which people approach the inevitable dissolution of their domestic relationships. And I was wondering maybe, Naomi, if you would indulge us with a brief description of trends that you see either in what's called collaborative law or mediation, as opposed to, say, a litigated dissolution. I think this is something probably we could all talk about. Yes, because we're going to get started. I actually, about five years ago, I teach family law, I teach a very basic course, and I started to have a collaborative family law divorce lawyer come talk to my classes about collaborative family law. And it was something that I've also done a family law casebook. It's something that's sort of like in the back five pages of the family law casebook, but it's become a huge, huge new way for people to think about doing divorce. And for collaborative divorce, there are different kinds of collaborative divorces. And we realize this may seem like a contradiction in terms, so just. Yeah, I mean, one of the things true collaborative divorce is you have to agree that you're going to mediate. You're going to come to some agreement in your divorce and that you're not going to use the same lawyer if that agreement falls apart. And so it truly is an attempt to collaborate on coming to an agreement with the risk being that you lose all of the time and all the money that you've invested in collaborative divorce if you can't reach an agreement. And the advocates of collaborative divorce think it's, I guess, even better than sliced bread, because it really does take away that contradictory aspect of divorce by involving professionals to deal with parenting issues. So children may have their own counsel, certainly have counselors. So it deals with children. It deals with financial issues. And it's also designed to deal with the emotional issues that come up between the parties. And Wendy, I know you've written on what you call the good divorce. And I think that that ties into what Naomi's describing as a way to dissolve a legal bond and look forward to the next step in the relationship. Could you talk for a minute about how you see that, either as the ideal or in practice? Yeah, I think one way that people talk about divorce is that it's a psychological and a legal event and that the one affects the other. So there's a lot of research. Is this very loud? There's a lot of research. And then anecdotal stories about people get started on their divorce. They mean to do it well. They get somebody says, no, you've got to get a lawyer. Take them for all these worths. And it becomes very adversarial. And then issues that happen in divorce like fear, sense of victimization, anger, these things really get exacerbated by the legal process when it's adversarial. So I've been really excited to see people stepping away from that. You see it a lot with mediation. People go to a mediator. And maybe it costs $1,500 or $3,000 to go to a mediator, as opposed to like $150,000 to hire two lawyers. That $150,000 adds to this fear, this anger, this resentment. So yeah, I think it's great. I've also talked to people like my hairdresser, who didn't use a lawyer at all, just read online what she was entitled to, suggested to her husband that he pay her that. He agreed. They filed the paper. They were done for $350. So I feel like collaborative is a spirit, like this. Like it's more of a cognitive thing. Like you want to try to do this together. And so I'm excited to see different ways that that legally can be done. So Naomi and hearing you, this sounds like a no-brainer in a way that we should approach the dissolution of the marital bond, if it's to be dissolved. I know that Daniel sees individuals and couples, both in a therapeutic context and in a, is it ecclesiastical, clerical, whatever. Sorry, no disrespect to the caller context. So I'm very, very curious to hear what you think as someone who watches people together, but also watches them coming apart. And after that, what you think, I'm not asking for your legal advice. Good, that's a good thing. That we'll divide that here, yeah. Well, I guess I'm less excited about collaborative divorce because I think it's an idea that makes sense in theory, and it sounds right. But what I have seen is that children of it, look, without children, if two people want to divorce and go collaborative, that's cool. But the thing is, is that children, I think, get really confused and overly friendly divorces. And I think it leads to, I think, more abandonment fears that is what I've seen and mistrust. Because I think that an overly friendly divorce, child's world really doesn't make sense. Why aren't mom and dad together? They seem to like each other. They seem to get along and so forth. And then I think there's a re-traumatizing aspect, especially when couples get together for holidays or for birthdays or whatever, or family dinners and so forth. Because I think children will always have the wish that the parents will get back together and that's always then dashed. And I think that it creates a lot of confusion. And I think the reasons for the divorce then are hidden and murky and it's all obfuscation. And I think children don't know what to do with that. As you talked, I just, my kids watch the parent trap over and over and over, which involves, I mean, there's the fan, it's the complete fantasy that, and when they watched it, the complete fantasy is that parents who've been divorced of these two twins are gonna come back together and reunite and live happily ever after. And they watched it with friends of theirs from divorced families and their friends from divorced families had exactly that impression that, oh, gosh, maybe they will and it was somewhat destructive for them. I guess, and I should say that it is not, I don't think it's necessarily even a given that as we move forward into the kind of society that was discussed at the first panel, and I think Daniel mentioned kind of offhandedly, it is not necessarily so, I believe, that marriage without children should be even viewed legally as a comparable institution to marriage with children. Obviously, we talk about them very distinctly when we talk about social benefits and psychological benefits and so forth or potential harms to something like a collaborative approach gone wrong, but I don't know what you think about this. I wouldn't be surprised if down the line with changes in legislation and changes in policy, if these even, if the distinction becomes about between marriage and not marriage as opposed to family units with children and family units without children, that's just my kind of off-the-cuff speculation. But yeah. Let me say there are proposals to make, to have to sort of track divorce. See? Yes, yes. Among others, Bill Galston has suggested that there be two tracks that, for example, if there are children that there has to be a longer waiting period. So making it harder to get divorced if children are involved as a way, I think of, I mean, of forcing the parents to reconsider the decision. Well, that reminds me, I was talking earlier before the panel with Daniel about something that exists in the cobwebs of my brain that, for all I know, exists in 15 states by now that, at least in the late 90s, the Louisiana legislature, I think, was trying to push forth a bill on a two-track marriage. But it was ex-ante, it was called Covenant Marriage, that was basically an attempt to... Three states. It exists in three states? This, as I understand it, is an opt-in civil marriage union that imposes greater barriers to divorce or something like that. Oh yeah. And so it's an attempt, I guess, to replicate the religious covenant structure within the civil realm. Right? Essentially it brings back fault-divorce for the people who opt into it. Okay. And so it essentially says you pretty much agree you will not get divorced unless there is fault. Now, if you can prove fault, then... Right, that in 250, you know? Yes, right. But I'm interested to what you're saying about the waiting period, the tracks, because I think, Daniel, you're focused being on the kids of these situations. As we think forward about policy, potential policy prescriptions, I think you have some notion about this, right? Well, I do think that, again, I approach that, yes, that children need to be well-loved, but children need stability and predictability. And so whatever form or fashion a family takes, the disruption of that is, I think, what I'm most concerned about. And I don't think that's ever good for kids. I think there's mitigating factors that can make it better, there's resilience, but in the end, it's hard. And I believe that there should be, as in medicine, an informed consent that I think parents who divorce with children should have a certain number of hours to understand what are the potential consequences to their children. I'm interested, and I mean, that's interesting, but there's a lot of these parent education programs coming up, Sesame Street Workshop is just building one on how to talk to your kids about divorce. There's something called sand castles, which I think is actually mandated in 14 counties in Florida or something, which is a three and a half hour course where kids sit with other kids their age whose parents are getting divorced, so they have a peer community and there's a workbook and they can talk about it. There's another one that a psychologist in New York does, and I think these things are so helpful, can be so helpful to kids. Some of them are teaching resilience, teaching parents how to talk to kids, teaching kids how to problem solve, teaching kids how to identify their own strengths. So I don't know about. But it's so after the fact though, because I mean, resilience is a great thing, but kids who grow up in poverty or in violence, kids with resilience do better, but doesn't mean the violence or the poverty is good. So resilience, see those deal after the fact and they help children process feelings and not personalize, but I'm talking about beforehand. I think that we have to talk about that parents should know what are the potential negative consequences of the disruption of stability in a family. Yeah, I just think it's helpful to. I'm not saying those are bad. Yeah, no, I mean, if you're in a bad marriage and then, you know, there's all this research that shows that what damages kids is conflict. You know, hundreds of studies, conflict between the parents, losing contact with the parent, inadequate resources, and instability. And there's a study by Michael at Cambridge that looks at 400 studies done over the last 40 years about what damages kids. And these are the things he comes up with, not even whether the other parent lives in the house, that that just doesn't seem to track, it's about conflict. So you don't really, I don't think you want to encourage parents to stay in their marriage because it's gonna mess up the kids so bad while they're fighting over the dinner table. Like I don't think that, I don't think the fear, it seems like everybody who's contemplating a divorce doesn't want to do it because of the kids. Like I feel like that fear is almost overblown and it would be better to help kids' parents understand, look, if you're gonna fight, do it outside the house, or let's not get into an adversarial process. Well, let's, one, I think potential risk factor in that is that there is the risk that of veering into a little bit of what the, I believe the right wing calls self-esteem or whatever they call that, that maneuvers like that actually, it may be, are intended to make the adults feel more justified in their decisions regardless of what the reality is. I mean, I think that what you're describing is not necessarily untrue, but it's a pretty common trope, right? That it is better to divide a household that is rife with conflict than to keep it together for the kids, right? And that that's, it's what we tell ourselves. It doesn't mean it's not true. I happen to think it's often true. And anecdotally, I'm sure we've seen cases where it's true, but I do think that that's a kind of adult-focused view rather than a kid-focused view, very much so. Because I think, can I just say that? I think that oftentimes that's what I think about this overly, again, friendly divorce is that it soothes the parent's conscience. Oh, look, we can divorce, and we'll do it really in a friendly manner, and all will be well. I think it's, I don't think the kids are heard. Well, one thing that, I mean, this obviously reminds me of what Katie was talking about in the earlier panel about conflict and stress, or maybe it was, Jason and Katie were both talking about this, that the predictor of the well-being of the children is the presence or absence of conflict and stress in the household. And I think we've all probably seen households where the kids were miserable, and then the parents split up, and then the kids seem much better off. And we've probably seen the reverse happen, and maybe that tracks with when the conflict is visible to the kids. Sometimes it might be legible before the parents split up. Sometimes there might be more fighting after the fact, and more of the, if your dad doesn't tell your dad if he doesn't pay me this week, you're not going over there. That's probably a bad outcome, right? But I would think that the issue of conflict is not necessarily linked to the moment of the split, if that makes any sense. But this does, when you were talking about the cost, for example, of mediation, which is, I think by any measure, factors lower than a traditional adversarial process. And let me back up for one second. At least in New York, which is my jurisdiction, mediation, as briefly described here, is a process by which, not just in divorce, it happens in all areas of at least civil litigation, I mean, civil conflict, a third party who is a neutral, who is sometimes but not always a lawyer, tries to help the parties resolve whatever their dispute is, rather than each of them being separately represented in our traditional adversarial model. There are a lot of advocates for this process, a lot of people who are strongly opposed to it, some, as I am, who are highly skeptical of it. But that's sort of the model of what we're talking about here, when we talk about mediation versus adversarial process. Adversarial doesn't always mean fighting. It here, in these United States, is actually a technical term, meaning, if I'm representing Naomi and Wendy is representing Daniel, we are adversaries, and we will refer to each other as such in court, and we don't even necessarily mean anything bad by it. So when I say adversarial, I don't mean fighting, I mean literally, technically, an adversarial process. Anyway, because of the cost issue that has been raised, it is without question, $40, $1,500, whatever it is, to mediate a dissolution, or to mediate a dispute about child support between unmarried parents, or a custody issue between unmarried parents. You have written Naomi extensively about, I think you call it the class gap in both marriage and divorce. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about how access to different financial resources affects people's decision-making in terms of how to proceed with dissolution, particularly as society changes and wealth distribution changes. Well, it's actually, I mean, contrasting the outcomes of what happens upon divorce versus what happens in other kinds of relationship dissolutions is really, really fascinating, and I'm notwithstanding, Daniel, we say about sort of making sure that children see the conflict. When the parents are married, there's much more likely to be a joint custody order, which then I think requires that the parents exhibit some cooperation or else you'll really, really be scarring the kids. And so there's a huge gap in a variety of different ways when it comes to relationships that dissolve via divorce versus relationships that dissolve non-marrily. And that does, in fact, track the class gap as well in terms of who is likely to get married, but then that also means in terms of who is likely to get divorced as well. But so the different outcomes for based on divorce is not just things, that not just joint custody, but about 15% of people who are divorced get alimony. You can't get that, obviously you can't get that unless there's some money there, but you also can't get that outside of divorce. And when there's been divorce, the custodial parent is also much more likely to get full amounts of child support than when there hasn't been a divorce. So it's important as we talk about what's actually going on with divorce to think about all those families that we were talking about in the earlier panel, that is all of the single parent families where the outcomes post-divorce aren't as good. The other thing is that that recent Pew report on bread winning women showed that although divorced women have their standard of living think they're still in much better shape than never married women. So there's this huge gap that goes on and it also, I mean our conversations before the panel, we talked about it also in terms of what actually happens during the divorce process. Who's most likely to have access to these parenting education programs? And I think, please correct me if I'm mis paraphrasing you, but you've written that there is a, or you've said off the record, that if we were to draw, say, a divorce line, and we're talking about, I guess socioeconomic class here, or just even economic, that those at the very top are the least likely to divorce and that there are also these different patterns in relationship to solution between those who divorce them were never married. If you can, can you speak to that, what you think that's about that those at the top are the least likely to divorce? I mean, I could rattle off random speculations, right? Like, if you have enough money, why do you have to get divorced? You could just stay in separate rooms and you don't have to fight about money. So that's one idea. Actually, that's really important. Money, yes. No, I mean, part of it is, part of it is the later age of marriage among college educated folks that, I mean, it's age of marriage is a huge predictor, not in any individual case, but in general, in terms of who's most likely to get divorced and college educated women are one third as likely to get divorced as high school educated women. And that's because of the much, one of the reasons is the much earlier age of marriage. But the other reasons really are the economics as well. When you're in economic distress, well, gee, then your marriage is also in all kinds of distress as well. And Paul Amato, who's a Penn State sociologist in this great study, looking at who's happy in their marriages and people who don't face economic distress are quite happy in their marriages. And it's not a question of whether or not a woman is working, what's most important, what turns out to be a huge predictor of marriage is whether or not the man, or if divorced rather, is whether or not the man is working. And if the man isn't working, then it's much more likely that the couple's gonna get divorced than when he is working. If the woman's working- I love when scholars support my pet fears that I like invent in my living room, I love this. So, please keep talking, yeah. No, it's just that when women work, it's a question of what's the underlying marital happiness which has, so it's less to do with whether or not women are working and much more to do with what's the underlying level of happiness. And do you think, I guess, Daniel, that there's anything to, again, let me back up. We have talked a lot about alternative family structures or unconventional family structures or changing family structures. I would wager that some of the criticism of unusual family arrangements or messy family arrangements is that they are overly secularized, right? That there's some, call it moral, call it irreligious component there. Would you say based on anecdota, data or data or your own experience as someone who treats religious people and not religious people that people entering into a union, a civil union or marriage in a religious context are going into it with a kind of better view towards the institution or is it, do you see it as like, that's a stop herring or something? First of all, I wouldn't say that alternate family arrangements are secularized, I mean, I think a lot of religions, including my church, are very supportive of what might be called modern family arrangements and so forth. I wouldn't say that, I wouldn't call them secularized, I think the religion and the church blesses those. What there is, there doesn't seem to be any difference as they say among, let's say, Christians of any sort, evangelical, to liberal in relationship to divorce, but it does appear that going to church several times a month is, I believe, associated with 30% less divorce regardless of, again, conservative or liberal, so I think that there's something about commitment in a community that probably supports it. And I guess the question there is a cause correlation one that we're not gonna answer in the next 15 minutes. And I guess Wendy, do you see a policy prescription? I mean, I understand from reading your work and from hearing you talk a little bit that you have a view of things that are maybe more likely to lead to better outcomes, post-dissolution, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but do you see, if you could wave a magic wand and have a policy in place, for example, should everyone have to go through the equivalent of pre-Kana, which is what Catholics have to do before they get married, as far as I know, is there something that comes to mind for you to say, I wish everybody had to do X? I'm nervous about policy prescriptions in terms of invading your family, right? Invading the family life, so, but that said, I feel like we need more marriage education. I feel like it should start in high school, like relationship education. I think if you are looking at divorce, you should have to go to divorce counseling. Again, it's like, do you wanna mandate this? I don't know. Children, absolutely, one of these programs should be very, very accessible. If not, it's very hard, like, I'm doing this book and I just found out about the Sesame Street thing. It gets very hard to find these kinds of things, so I feel like marriage education, divorce education, something about dealing with children, and then there's so much research now coming out of positive psychology about a lot of this cognitive behavioral therapy techniques for helping people deal with what happens in divorce, such as loneliness, there's a lot of research about the benefit of empathy over anger and how empathy can help you reduce your own anger, there's divorce coaches now, and my divorce coach talks about trying to see everything that happens in your divorce as a positive for you, like, what can you learn from this, how can you grow from this, and to not get into thinking, well, he has it better than I do, which is really easy to do. In terms of policy prescription, I think these are some psychological tools that would be very useful, and then I also think... That makes my heart race with anxiety, I just... That you would have to do some kind of... No, that whole idea, that they embrace the positive. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, but that's probably... That's a separate, that's a separate discussion. I'm not trying to advocate divorce, but if you're doing it, if you're doing it, you're doing it. So if you've never had to pay your bills and suddenly you have to, well, that's great, right? That can be a great growth experience. So if you're doing it, I feel like even issues with loneliness, a lot of people are lonely in their marriage, so now you're out of your marriage and you're lonely, so let's take a look at who's in your life and how do you view yourself and your relationship with others, like, is there really good growth opportunities? I guess the flip side of it, and then we will take a few questions if there aren't any, the flip side of that is that, and I'm, you know, I am hearing this as a part of the, as coming, this is the totally other, right? I am adversarial by nature and by profession. I hear that as, maybe I hear that from the perspective of, for example, the client who is the less empowered person in the relationship, the same person who, for example, I would recommend not go to mediation, where maybe you're advising in some ways what sounds like a very Christian or a very, again, positive and empowering view could also be very much viewed as they suck it up. Yeah, but what a great opportunity for that person who's not empowered to say, you know what, why have I not been empowered in my life? And here's my chance. Sure, and I totally get the argument and it totally makes me hysterical. So we have a few minutes left and I'm wondering if there are any questions if people want to. Oh, oh my goodness. I guess the woman in the red glasses frames right here. Yes. I just wanted to make a couple of comments. I guess as always there were some generalities and one thing I learned from divorces is that no two divorces are ever the same. You know, I had to talk to a lot of different people to figure out to learn about loneliness from one person and about how hard to push for a settlement from another. This is the part where we don't quote Anna Karenina, right? Yeah. Another thing that was mentioned is the parent trap fantasy which I agree many kids have. I have asked my grown children, did they have that fantasy? And they said no. And that was because my kids knew when I really meant no and I would say something like there is a 0% possibility. You know, whether it was that you're gonna have candy or go to a whatever. And so when I told them that, it was crystal clear to them. And so I think that's something parents can do. As far as without house, I think the fact that my kids I think came out extremely well was that they had two parents who did put the kids first. I say hate is stronger than love when I see what parents say about the other parent or they'll reveal the philandering and all that. And we were able to go on family vacation for nine years. It's starting six years after our divorce. Nothing in the world was better for my kids. They loved it. So I think the idea of the good divorce, my God, of course, to me. And I'll just say one last thing is that my lawyer who was so Peter Sherman, some of you may know him he's retired now, but he was so fantastic. And he sent us to a therapist to do the custody. He said I'm a lawyer. Why should I help you settle the custody? And I think that was a fantastic thing. There are now some very few law firms now that have on staff parenting coordinators for that non-lawyer parenting coordinators who do exactly that for that reason. Anyhow, that's my two cents or 10 cents. Okay. I guess going down straight down the line there. Hi, thank you for this panel. I have a couple of points. First, the idea of collaborative divorce is, I think you probably have some good points to it as the previous speaker said, but it all depends on there being a certain amount of goodwill between the divorcing parents. And if there isn't, it's really hard to get to that. I understand that the adversarial model sort of positions the parents in opposition to each other, but sometimes that's necessary if they really can't agree. So it sounds like a really great idea, but I think it's not always possible. Second, along with the parent trap family, it seems to, and I don't know exactly what the research is on this, but it seems like the divorced family is being positioned against a perfect intact family. And as we all know, intact families are hardly perfect. And many kids, I don't know what the percentages of kids who come out neurotic from non-divorced families is, but I suspect it's not a whole lot lower than those from divorced families. But my final point is this, and that is that you haven't really addressed any of the structural issues that make it so difficult for divorced couples, specifically, particularly women. We talked a little bit about the economics. Women do certainly, I mean women, because women earn 70% less, 70% of what men do invariably unless they're very high-powered, very high-earning people are gonna end up with a lower salary than their husbands. So they can't provide the kids with all the things that the husband might be able to, and so forth and so on. Plus, there's the whole issue of the lack of childcare, the lack of paid maternity leave, parental leave, all that stuff that make it so difficult. I mean, because divorced women end up being working mothers. Maybe they were working mothers before, but they end up being working mothers, and I think we really have to take into account all of the policies or non-polices in the U.S. that make being a working mother and a working father, but especially working mothers so difficult. Sure, I agree with you, that's something we didn't touch on. Unfortunately, these are short panels. A couple of just, I guess, non-scientific or unscientific things I'd like to say about that. First is there are a lot of women in what might fall under the not financially distressed category of family who are themselves quite financially stressed, because they don't have access to or control over the marital finances at all. So if you were to look at the family unit from kind of on high, you'd see a very secure financial model, but then if you actually looked within it in the micro level, you'd actually see a woman with basically no power who's being asked to show her grocery receipts or her husband, and then when she comes out of the marriage, sure, she might have a lot less money and she might be working a lot harder, but she may well find herself with a lot more control over her financial life and therefore a lot more financial freedom. That anecdotally, I see happen all the time. The second issue is that I think that when, that in the adversarial model, it's not just that some people need it because they can't solve everything through collaborative divorce. I think that's a myth. And I actually think that collaborative divorce is something of a fiction, but that's for something I'll yap about another time. There is also I think a very strong argument to be made that the adversarial model, when implemented correctly, takes the emotion out of it and allows you to get to a solution more civilly. That's, of course, my opinion on this is somewhat extreme, but I don't really like this opposition that comes up over and over that, that it's if you can't solve it yourselves, then you go adversarial. I do also think particularly for women, separate representation is often much more important than is given credit for. You're taking furious notes, Naomi. I feel like you want to say something, yeah. No, I just want to, I mean, the economics post-divorce really, is really an important issue. I mean, it is still true that notwithstanding that 40% of women are the primary breadwinners within marriages, men are still three times more likely to be the breadwinner than are their wives. So there is a mismatch just going into, just within the ongoing marriage. On the other hand, at divorce, there's it's a lot more efficient for two people to live in one household than for two people to live in two separate households. And so there's often just not enough money to go around. The average American's net worth is $77,000, and the average income is about $46,000. Now it's higher, men do earn more, but there's still, the economics really are a nightmare when it comes to living in two households separately. I agree. I agree. I agree. In my splotopia chapter on finances, I see people who often, they get remarried. So you have, this is one, and then there's some new research showing that women's standard of living doesn't decline as much as it was thought, that there was a mistaken study, you know, from the, that study was this horrible study that was repeated, repeated, repeated, repeated, showing that women's standard of living declined 74%. And in fact, she flipped her numbers and it was 26%, and that's not even true if you take into account child support custody, the nice house she may stay in. But what I've seen, again anecdotally, is people who are in bad marriages and they're weighed down and they're having trouble focusing on their career because 40% of their brain power is going to this fight. So then I see people, they get out of those marriages and they're able to focus, and this has happened to me, this has happened to people I've interviewed, so yes, they're working, but they're in control. What you're saying is so interesting to me that women who are living in a well-to-do family but felt no control, and then I've certainly talked to people like that who came out of it, and so I don't know why I was so poor in my marriage and now I make less, but I have more. So I do think that the emotional can affect the financial. I think we have to have one more super quick question and there's one hand emerge. Oh, there are two. I don't know, somebody else decide. I'm horribly indecisive for an adversarial lawyer. He's persistent. Okay, he's persistent with the tie. The tie with the tie here, I guess. The other one might have had a tie on it, so I just couldn't say. So I'm sort of curious, because I think everyone can sort of point to the illustration where divorce made that individual circumstance better off for the kids, for the people that are involved, as well as individual kind of anecdotal evidence that it made people worse off. I guess I'm kind of interested in what the norms are and then what the policy response should be in terms of that, is divorce on balance, something that makes people better off or worse off, and then indicating what that norm would be as kind of the general guidance for policy, what policy prescription should it make divorce easier or harder? My personal pet thing on this, and for all I know it's in the works already, is I think that, I don't know, that anyone who wants to get married should, when applying for the license, not only have to have a waiting period, but should have to pay into the equivalent of a workers' comp fund, which is like the least controversial broad policy, I think that exists in the country, and it should be a dissolution compensation fund that would offset the crippling cost of divorce. I believe that that's because divorce is generally not a good thing and that people shouldn't go into marriage so lightly. That's what I think. In terms of the norms, I'm curious to hear what you guys think. I think people just get married without much thought and that they get divorced when they feel like it, but that's based on nothing. That's just what I think. Yeah, I don't know. It depended on what you're measuring, when you say what are the norms for successful outcome you said? Is divorce on balance better or worse for people in terms of a generality about it? Because making policy based on exceptions or anecdotes is kind of hard. I'm just trying to understand, is it a good thing or sort of a bad thing, whatever indices you want to use for that? Well, I'm gonna say again that instability in a family is always going to be bad, it's gonna be worse for a kid. Except in high conflict. Except, right, which is a worse instability, perhaps. Marriage isn't a set thing. Marriage isn't a set thing, so you're not comparing divorce to a particular type of marriage. Marriages are so variable. And you're also building out of that the preponderance of children who are born into non-marital situations to begin with. Unfortunately, we're out of time, as everyone could probably tell. I could certainly talk all day about this stuff. I wanna thank Wendy and Daniel and Naomi for participating. Naomi is doing a double header here, and thank you all very much, and I hope you never need my services, and I don't know. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you.