Is Facebook a Marriage Killer?

There is a lot of talk right now on the Internet, in news articles, even from church pulpits, about the social networking site, Facebook, being a “Marriage Killer.”  Some lawyers are saying that Facebook is a major factor in one in five divorces.  I haven't seen that in my practice, but my we may just be behind the times here in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, which--while lovely--is often not the trendiest of places.  Other lawyers will tell you that Facebook accounts are a major source of information that they mine to get dirt on cheating spouses. There are preachers telling their congregations that, if they value their marriages, they will go home right after the service and cancel their Facebook accounts.  You can find some of that discussion in the articles linked here.  If you want more, just Google “facebook marriage killer” and you will have reading material for a week.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334482/The-marriage-killer-One-American-divorces-involve-Facebook.html

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1334482/The-marriage-killer-One-American-divorces-involve-Facebook.html

http://business.ezinemark.com/facebook-has-become-a-virtual-marriage-killer-3192fd81c35.html

For the record, I am not a member of Facebook or any other social networking site.  I don't have anything against them, they just seem to soak up a lot of time that I need to spend on other things.

My wife, Kathy, and I are co-authors of the book How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers.  Facebook is not one of the marriage killers we list.  But, since the phrase “marriage killers” in the title, I feel compelled to put in my oar and, as a person with a naturally contrarian and argumentative personality, I am going to voice an opinion that on the subject that appears to be a minority view.

My position is simply this:  Facebook is not a marriage killer.  Or, at least, it is no more a marriage killer than the telephone, the automobile, women working outside the home, the social acceptability of men and women mixing socially without their spouses, cell phones, email, internet chat rooms, instant messaging, and text messaging—all of which were derided as greased poles to the perdition of adultery in their time.  The real marriage killers at work here are the same ones that have been at work since the beginning of time, Lack of Commitment, Boredom, and so on. 

These situations and technologies merely provide means and opportunity for adultery.  They are not the cause.  Let’s be honest.  When you “friend” an old flame on Facebook, maybe it is just for the purpose of getting caught up and talking about old times.  These are certainly reasonable and innocent objectives, if those are really what you have in mind.  On the other hand, if what you are really going for is a little excitement—not an affair mind you—just a little excitement, some flirtatious banter, a little whiff of the heady powder smoke of danger, then we are talking about something entirely different.  You are turning to someone outside the marriage for something that you should be finding inside the marriage.  Your interest is sexual.  It may not be overtly sexual.  It may not be intensely sexual.  But, it is sexual nonetheless. 

When you turn outside the marriage to a live person for some kind of sexual excitement or gratification, you are (1) showing that there is something lacking in your marriage and (2) putting your marriage in danger.  (See my post to this blog on April 7, 2007 on Infidelity for a discussion of how “innocent” flirtations can sink a marriage).  Plus, you are taking the first step down the road toward having sex with someone who is not your spouse.  In the real world, most people who stray usually do so by baby steps.  They don’t just wake up one day and decide, “Hey, I’m going to start screwing around.  What a great idea!”  Rather, they gravitate into a relationship with another person that gradually becomes more intense until it escalates into having sex with that person.  These things all start somewhere, and--apparently--Facebook is one such place.  

Better to avoid that path entirely. 

Accordingly, I don’t think that, to preserve your marriage, you need to log in right this moment and cancel your Facebook account or never join in the first place.  From what I hear, Facebook is a valuable and fun social tool that can be a real help in keeping in touch with friends, reconnecting with people from your past, and maintaining relationships with distant friends and family.  If you do have a Facebook account, however, I would strongly recommend that you carefully and objectively review your “friends” list.  Take a hard look at everyone on that list who is a credible adultery partner for you and ask yourself honestly both what your true reasons are for being in contact with that person and what is really going on in all of your communications with that person.   

You know whether what is going in is pure friendship or whether something sexual is happening.  If the latter, you need to cut it off immediately.  The dangers are too high, and the temptations are too great.  Don’t tell yourself that “it is just an innocent flirtation.”  That doesn’t work any more than, “I’m just going to eat one cookie.”  Plus, as I mentioned in my post on adultery here back in 2007, even the “innocent flirtation” takes energy away from the marriage that may be necessary to sustain it.  That excitement and sexuality needs to be channeled into your marriage, not drained into the dead end of an extramarital relationship, even if that relationship never becomes overtly sexual. 

Facebook is a mere instrumentality.  In a murder, the responsibility does not lie with the tool, it lies with the murderer.  Same with marriage. BUT, just because the responsibility for the shooting does not lie with the gun, that doesn't mean you want to play with a loaded revolver, much less point it at your own head.

For more information or to order our book about marriage killers, go to our web site http://www.honsingerbooks.com.  

Why So Many Divorces?

The statisticians tell us that about half of all marriages end in divorce.  As do most people who work in family law, though, my wife Kathy and I often wonder why there are SO MANY divorces, and why divorce is so much more frequent now than it was only a few decades ago.  Here are my, distinctly unscientific, theories on the subject.

1.  The family is no longer the primary economic unit of society.  Back in the days of my grandparents and grandparents, most Americans lived on farms or worked in small, family-owned businesses.  Mom, dad, and the kids all worked together tending fields, herding cattle, or stocking the shelves.  My great-grandfather, Q.K. Barber, was a cattleman on the prairie between Baytown and Liberty, Texas, and he worked all day on his own land within a several hundred yards of his wife and daughters, and within a few miles of similar spreads run by his brothers and sisters.  The family was together, or at least close to one another, all day, almost every day.  Shared work, shared hardship, shared triumphs, shared experiences bound husband, wife, and children together into family units that were much tighter than are most families today, in which husband and wife go off to their own jobs, kids are off doing their own thing, and folks are lucky to see each other over dinner a few nights a week.

2.  The family is a far less important social unit of society.  In our rural, agrarian past, the husband and wife typically did not have circles of friends with whom they would go out drinking or for card night or game night or girl's night out or whatever. Husband and wife were each other's best friends and were each other's primary social outlet.  Not only were there fewer opportunities to stray, this relationship was just one more set of ties, one more layer of glue, that held husband and wife together.  These two factors, husband and wife working apart from one another and then doing much of their playing apart from one another, cannot help but lessen the number and the force of the bonds that hold them together. I am convinced that one of the things that has held my marriage to Kathy together through some of the tough times has been that we work together and are each other main source of friendship and companionship.  We spend almost all of our time together.  Sure, sometimes we rub each other the wrong way, but mostly this fact means that we have so many bonds, so many shared experiences, so much that we do together, that it would take a nuclear device to drive us apart.

3.  Popular culture does not foster realistic expectations of love and marriage.  The love stories that we see on movies and on TV, that we read about in books, and--as a result--that we imagine for ourselves these days, are full of the mythos and magic of love and nearly devoid of sweat and tears that it takes to make a marriage work. The song says that "Love Will Keep Us Together," when, in reality, love will only bring us together; it takes commitment, courtesy, caring, and communication to make it stick. People think that once love has brought them together, some sort of ethereal magic will ward off all of the evil forces that might serve to drive them apart. To the contrary, the world is full of forces that strive to drive the couple apart and that, if not actively fought against by the couple almost every day, will certainly succeed, if not in causing them to divorce, at least will serve to make them unhappy.

4.  Popular culture does not praise and reinforce the traits of character and conduct that make marriages strong.  There was a time when adults in our culture were portrayed as mature grown ups, committed to their families, and bearing adult responsibilities.  Whatever their dramatic deficiencies, television programs like Leave it to Beaver and The Brady Bunch showed Ward and June and Mike and Carol holding down professional positions, making sure that the house was clean and meals prepared, providing structure and discipline for children, paying the bills, and generally getting the job done.  Adults in family sitcoms now are generally immature, incompetent, disorganized, histrionic, and in most cases indistinguishable in their level of gravitas from the children in the show.  Indeed, much of the comedy in many of these programs is derived from the unflattering contrast between the maturity and sensibility of the children relative to the childishness of the adults.  This is not to say that TV writers can or should reset the clock to 1969, but perhaps we would all be better off of television and movies that portray families would contain more examples of adults who have their acts together and who act their age.  Many young people, particularly young men, seem to aspire to a protracted--if not eternal--adolescence (only with more money) in which they hang out with their friends, drive cool cars and buy neat stuff (the guys in these movies and shows tend to live in pads that have basketball hoops, pinball machines, sports posters, and other teenage trappings writ larger and more expensively), even if they are married and have kids.  I have heard the term "family man" spoken on these shows often with derision, rather than respect.  The prototypical sitcom husband and father of 2011 is not Ward Cleaver, but Homer Simpson.

5.  Not only does our culture not reinforce marriage, there is much in our society that seems actively dedicated to destroying it.  The media portray adultery, if not with approval, then at least in many cases without strong condemnation.  Many parts of our society wink at affairs (a trait once seen only in the very rich).  The gals in Sex and the City (I am told) bounced into and out of the beds of the married and single alike. In fact, there is even a well-financed, widely advertised dating service the explicit purpose of which is to help people tie up for extramarital sex.  No, I won't post the link or give their name here, but their motto is "Life is short.  Have an affair."  The company web site boasts offers an "affair guarantee" and touts the company as "the most recognized name in infidility . . . . We are the most recognized and reputable extramarital affair company. . . . We are the most successful website for finding cheating partners."  The website says the company has over nine million clients.  Makes me want to barf.  No, my sexual conduct has not always been the most praiseworthy (although, in all of my three marriages, I never cheated on a spouse), but the idea of a company actually being in the business of facilitating a kind of conduct that is not only illegal in many states, but that is also enormously destructive emotionally, socially, and economically just plain blows my mind.  The difference between that company and a dealer in illegal drugs is one only of degree.

In America of the Twenty-first Century, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that marriage is under attack on many fronts.  If you want your marriage to endure, you must defend it.  Our book, How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers, puts in your hands some very simple, robust, and powerful weapons for doing so.

Overall, we need to recognize that, these days, the seed of marriage does not fall on the fertile soil that was there to receive it a generation or two ago.  That does not mean, however, that the seed is destined to die.  Rather, it means that, if the seed is to grow, WE must nurture and water and fertilize it ourselves.  Now, more than ever, each marriage stands on its own, to flourish or perish based on the individual efforts of its members. If you are married, you must remember that society will not sustain your marriage, popular culture will not sustain your marriage, government will not sustain your marriage.  If marriage in America is going to be saved, it will be saved one couple at a time.  As with so many other things in our society, we need to build from the bottom up.  The strength of the building comes from the foundation in the ground, not the satellite antenna on the roof.  Saving your marriage is up to you.

Working with Your Divorce/Custody Attorney: Part Two

As my earlier post on this subject is one of the most widely read in the history of this blog, and as there is a lot more to say on this subject, I thought a few more pointers on how to work effectively with your attorney in your divorce or custody matter might be in order:

1.  Be HONEST with the attorney.  Surprises are bad.  Very bad.  I remember one custody case in which the father of the child showed up at the custody trial with his nose the size of Montana and the color of Barney the Dinosaur.  It turned out that, four days before the trial, my client (the mother) had slugged Dad WHILE HE WAS HOLDING THEIR BABY, knocking him flat on his back.  Luckily, an aunt caught the baby while dad was going down.  My client had not bothered to tell me this in advance.  In fact, I learned of the event only during the father's testimony on direct examination from her attorney.  The look of horror on the judge's face on hearing about these events was priceless (even as it made my heart sink).  Needless to say, my client had her head handed to her.  Had I known of this event in advance, I would at least have been prepared for it and might have moved for a continuance or done something else to lessen the impact.  As it was, I was caught with my guard completely down and could do nothing except try to keep my face from conveying to the judge the surprise and shock I felt.  You can tell your attorney anything that relates to your case:  it will remain a secret that the attorney will take to the grave, and the attorney will not judge/condemn/or work less hard for you because you have told the truth.  Those are the obligations of our profession.  It is far better to endure the embarrassment of telling damaging facts to your attorney in the privacy of the office than to have them come out as a surprise in an open courtroom.

2.  Remember that "no contact" means "no contact."  If there is a protective order or injunctive decree that tells you to have "no contact" with the opposing party in the case, the court means what it says.  No letters.  No emails.  No phone calls.  No St. Crispin's day cards.  Nothing.  I just had a client arrested and booked for sending his soon to be ex spouse a non-threatening letter about some basic family business.  He had to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, surrender his firearm, and pay a fairly hefty fine.  Now he has a criminal record.  If you have doubts about whether you can send a particular communication, ask your attorney.  These issues can also work against you in your case, particularly if it is a custody matter.  When the judge determines which parent the child will live with, part of that decision hinges on which parent the judge believes will do the best job of FOLLOWING THE COURT'S ORDERS.  If you get convicted for violating a court's no contact order, it should be no surprise to learn that this fact will work against you.

3.  Understand that litigation takes a long time.  If your case is going to court, don't expect it all to be wrapped up in a month, or two, or even six or seven.  It is not unusual for a contested domestic relations case to take more than a year from Petition to Decree, even if all the attorneys and parties are doing their jobs diligently.  Between the procedural delays imposed by the court rules, and the congested dockets of many courts, it just plain takes that long.

4.  Comply promptly with all requests for information.  If your lawyer asks for a particular document or some piece of information, it is because he or she needs it to do what he or she is doing.  Every day you delay responding to the request delays your case.  It is not unusual for a client to take two weeks to get me the information I request, and then email me the next week berating me for how "everything is taking so long."

5.  Recognize that the Court is there to decide the case, not provide you with emotional vindication.  Courts exist to resolve disputes.  In a domestic relations case, the Court's job is to grant the divorce, divide the property and the debt, determine who gets alimony and how much, decide the custody issues, set up a visitation schedule, and award child support.  It is not the job of the court to punish your ex for being a drunken, verbally abusive, lazy, slovenly lout who ignored your emotional needs.  Alimony and child support are awarded based on need, not as damages for being married to a jerk.  Property and debt are generally divided in more or less equal fashion between the spouses, not based on which spouse was nice and which was naughty.  Maybe it used to be that way, but it is not any more.  Yes, if one spouse actively stole community assets, gambled away thousands of dollars, or spent huge sums on illegal drugs or to stay drunk all the time, there ARE often remedies to the "victim spouse" in terms of property distribution, but this does not happen very often.  Most often, the property and debt are split down the middle, even of one spouse directly caused the divorce by having a notorious sexual affair.  Sorry.  Courts do not rule based on which side is morally superior; they decide cases based on the facts and law.

Web Page Issues

Those of you who browse with Safari or Chrome, or who browse from mobile devices, might have not been able to see most of the text on the web page we created for our book How to Save Your Marriage From 12 Top Marriage Killers. By the time you read this post, the problem should be corrected.  We apologize for any confusion, consternation, conflusteration, or any other negative "con" word that might come to mind.

The site is http://www.honsingerbooks.com/, and is pretty basic now.  More content and features are on their way.

The Book Has a New Web Site

We have just put up a web site for our book How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers (by "we" I mean "Kathy" who, in addition to being a brilliant writer is a talented web designer) which can be found at www.honsingerbooks.com.  There is not much there at present, but we will be beefing it up over the next several days to contain more information about the book, news about events relating to its promotion and availability, and additional tips on saving your marriage, and related information.  There is also an email link for readers to communicate with us (honsingerbooks@gmail.com).

Talk to Us. Please.

Kathy and I wrote the book, How to Save Your Marriage From 12 Top Marriage Killers based on our experience with the real-world couples who have come in our office as part of our family-law practice.  Now that we have published a book that is apparently being widely sold and read, we are very interested in hearing about people's experiences with the book.

If you are a reader of our book (which we are starting to call "The Little Blue Marriage Book") we want to hear from you.  Please tell us, not only whether you found the book readable and enjoyable, but--more importantly--how things worked out for you when you put the book into practice.

This input matters to us.  A lot.  For lots of reasons.  Here are the most important:

1.  We plan future editions.  We want to refine the advice contained in the book based on the experience of real couples.

2.  We plan future books.  We want to base those books on a broader foundation, including what we hear from couples out there trying to work on their marriages.

So, we would like to hear from you.  You can either post a comment on this site, or email us at honsingerbooks@gmail.com.

 

Back in Stock!!!

Our book, How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers, is now back in stock at even more bookstores, including Books a Million, Powells, and Better World Books, not to mention Barnes & Noble as pointed out in an earlier post.  Let's hope that these folks ordered more copies this time so that they won't sell out as fast.

If you want to order the book directly, please see my earlier post about purchasing it with a discount code at Createspace.com.  You can get it there for $10.00 plus postage.

The Old Stew Meat Just Ain't What It Used to Be

I am the family chef, and have been cooking since I was a teenager.  This is not unusual given my background, as my mother is Cajun and I grew up in Lake Charles, Louisiana.  Many, if not most, Cajun men cook.  In fact, it is a widely-held belief in South Louisiana that you aren't a "real man" unless you can produce a reasonable variety of delicious meals out of a big black cast iron pot.

Some things about cooking are eternal--like how a big black cast iron pot does something magical to stews and gumbos and other meat dishes.  Other things are not, like the meat you get from the grocery store.  The meat you buy now is just different from the meat I learned to cook with.  Take, for example, beef.  When I make stew, I usually don't buy "stew meat" as it is overpriced.  I shop for sirloin or round steak on sale, and then cut it into one inch cubes, just like my mother did (and probably still does--she is in her early 70's and still cooks).  Back in days of yore, I would throw that meat in a hot cast iron pot with a few tablespoons of oil, quickly brown the meat, then brown the onions with the browned meat, then add water, potatoes, carrots, garlic, and seasonings, then simmer, and it would be stew in about an hour and twenty minutes.

NOW, I buy the same cuts of meat, cut them the same way, throw them in the same kind of pot with the same amount of oil, and the meat generates about a cup and a half of brownish liquid that I have to boil away before the meat will really brown (instead of just turning a sickly gray).  I really don't want to know what this stuff is or where it comes from.  I just know that I wish it weren't there so I could get about my business and brown my beef.  It adds about fifteen minutes to the process of cooking stew.  If there were a farmer's market or small butcher shop nearby, I would try buying my meat there, but that is just not an option in Lake Havasu City, Arizona.

Chickens are different, too.  When I make chicken and sausage gumbo, the chicken tends to fall apart sooner into lots of mushy, stringy bits instead of cohering as recognizable pieces.  When I can find them, I try to make my gumbo with stewing hens, which have more flavorful meat and pieces that hold together longer, but I have a hard time finding these where I live, as well.  Either the chickens are being bred to be tenderer, or they are being shot full of stuff that has changed the way the meat cooks.

On the other hand, there are lots of good things about the modern food world:  the higher quality, variety, and flavorfulness of frozen foods, the wider variety of produce, the larger and better organized stores . . . change and progress are not all bad.  I just hate that murky brown water at the bottom of my pot when I am browning my stew meat.

Waaaah, waaaaaah.  Life is still good, but I wish that, like when I was a kid, I had relatives in the cattle business from whom I could buy beef I knew didn't have funny stuff done to it.

Buy "How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers" Direct from Createspace at Deep Discount

It has come to our attention that some booksellers are managing to sell our new book, How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers for vastly in excess of list price.  In fact, it seems that one guy recently got about $30.00 for a copy.  If you read this blog and want a copy of the book, we don't think you should have to pay list price, much less thirty bucks.

Accordingly, readers may purchase the book directly for $10.00 plus shipping by going to this page:
https://www.createspace.com/3572687

On the shopping cart page, there is a blank at the bottom of the page that is labelled "If you have a discount code enter it here."  Enter the following code into the blank to receive your discount:  DLTWEULT. This is our preferred purchase channel, by the way, because the authors (my wife, Kathleen, and myself) receive somewhat higher royalties from these purchases than from those sold by Amazon or in bookstores.

Our "How to Save Your Marriage" Book Back In Stock at Barnes & Noble and Elsewhere

Our new book, How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers has recently been in stock with several major booksellers in addition to Amazon.com, but sold out quickly.  Apparently, the savvy folks with at least some of those entities have re-ordered the book (we hope, in greater quantities than before) and now have it back in stock.  So, once again, you can order the book from Barnes & Noble for $10.79 plus shipping.  Just go to www.barnesandnoble.com and enter "honsinger" in the search box.  Our book is the first search result.

Get them while they're hot!

Of course, if your favorite seller is out, the book can always be obtained from Amazon.com, as it is a "print on demand" book.  If you order it, they will print it for you and have it in your hands in a few days, even if other sellers happen to be out at the time.

Actually . . . Another Day or Two on the Coupons

There is a slight delay on the electronic coupon availability for ordering our book at a discount direct from Createspace.  It will take a day or two to get it set up.  Sorry for the inconvenience.  Until then, you can still get How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers at the list price of $14.99 on Amazon.com.

Discount Coupon Coming Soon

Some merchants are charging nearly $30.00 a copy for our book, How To Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers. So that readers of this blog can get the book, not only below that inflated price, but also below the $14.99 list, I will be posting a link on this site tomorrow that will enable you to order the book directly from the publisher for $10.00 (plus shipping) with an electronic coupon/order code. Until then, you can always get it at list on Amazon.com by following the links in the earlier posts about the book or by going to the Amazon.com site and typing "Honsinger marriage killers" into the search box. That will take you right to the page for the book. Also, we have a limited supply of copies onhand in the office and will respond to email requests for autographed copies on an as available, time available basis. Please send requests to law@honsingerlaw.com.

Working with Your Divorce/Custody Attorney

I've been in this business for a long time (I handled my first divorces and custody cases more than twenty years ago) and I never cease to be amazed at how poorly many of my clients manage their end of the attorney/client relationship.  Now, I'm not really condemning them, because they are going through a really stressful period of their lives and many of them have no experience in working with an attorney, so I don't have any right or reason to expect much, but if they would do a few common-sense things, their lives would be a lot easier (not to mention MINE), AND their fees would be a lot lower.

So, if YOU have a family law case and have an attorney, or are planning to retain one, here are a few things you can do to make the relationship work well, and save you legal fees to boot.

1.  Be organized, especially for your first consultation.  If the case has already been filed, bring with you everything that has been filed, or that you have been served with in the case, preferably in order of the date filed, with the oldest on the bottom and the newest on top (this sounds odd, but we attorneys are used to documents being arranged in that order).  This is especially important if the case has been going on for some time.  If you don't have all the documents, save yourself a lot of money by going to the courthouse and ordering a complete set and presenting them to the attorney. If you retain the lawyer, he or she is going to have to get all those documents anyway, and you speed things up by giving the attorney the lot of them from the beginning.

2.  Follow advice exactly.  This is particularly important if there are protective orders or other specific rules you have to follow.  Many of my clients have gotten in trouble when they sent one "innocent letter" to the opposing party, notwithstanding my advice that the existing protective orders prohibit ALL contact of whatever kind.

3.  Provide ALL requested documents, exactly as requested.  If the lawyer says he or she needs all your bank statements from six months before the date the divorce Petition was filed up to the current month, don't just provide the most recent six months from the date of the request and neglect to provide the records from the other months, while arguing to your attorney that you "don't see why she needs all those other records."  You can bet that the attorney is requesting them because some rule requires that exactly those records be produced to the other side, no ifs ands or buts.  Making the attorney request these documents from you repeatedly only costs you more money.  The attorney isn't asking for the records because she has a record collecting fetish or just because she needs even more piles of paper filling her file cabinets and cluttering up her office.  She needs the records, for those dates, in that form, or she would not ask for them.

4.  Take notes.  Bring a note pad to all meetings with the attorney and use a notepad when you call the office.  My clients spend huge sums of their money asking me the same question three or four times.  Better yet . . . .

5.  Ask your questions by email.  There is hardly an attorney on the planet any more who does not make liberal use of email.  If you ask a question by email, you get a precise, well thought out answer (as opposed to the off the cuff answer you MAY get on the phone) that you have in writing to refer back to again and again, and to read over and over until you really understand it.

6.  Show up for appointments on time.  Your attorney has set time aside for you, and may have appointments after you that will be thrown off if you are late.  Be punctual and, if you find yourself unavoidably late, call the office and tell them you are coming and, if you are going to be significantly late, consider offering to reschedule.  Many attorneys have very busy schedules that have little leeway for the unpunctual.

7.  DO NOT just drop by the attorney's office, except to drop off and pick up documents when you have been requested to do so.  There are few things more disruptive, especially in a a small law office, then having one or more unexpected clients just show up (many times, more than one client will pick the same time to appear and demand attention from a small staff and/or the attorney who may have other things scheduled or have planned to use the time in question to attend to the mountain of work on the desk).  An attorney is a busy professional, similar to a your family doctor.  Call and let them know you are coming and, if possible, make an appointment for a particular time so that the attorney or the staff can give you the attention you deserve.

8.  Have reasonable expectations regarding time.  If you retain an attorney on Monday Afternoon, don't expect to have your complex Petition for Modification of Custody, Parenting Time, and Child Support done by Wednesday morning.  A week to ten days is an entirely normal and reasonable time frame for a law office to generate even the most routine pleadings except in a dire emergency, given how tight most attorney's schedules are and the extent to which their attention is demanded by court appearances and "hard" deadlines.

9.  Have reasonable expectations regarding return communications from the attorney.  An attorney is not like an insurance clerk, working at a desk processing one file after another in the order received from eight to five every day.  Rather, many attorneys, particularly those with trial-related practices, must spend much of their time out of the office attending hearings and conferences, meeting with opposing counsel, investigating cases, and engaged in other activities that keep them away from their desks, sometimes for days at a time.  And, when an attorney who has been out of the office for a three day trial gets back in the office, there are often so many urgent phone messages and emails to return that it can take a day or two to get through them.  I have explained this to client after client, yet I frequently will get a phone message from a client on Tuesday and, if the call is not returned by Wednesday morning (even though my staff has told the client that I am in a three day trial out of town), I get home to find three angry emails in my in box complaining about how I "never return phone calls."  When the staff tells you that the attorney is "in conference" or "out of the office," more likely than not this is not a dodge but a true statement of what is going on.  I practice in one of the geographically largest counties in the United States (Mohave County, Arizona).  The Mohave County Superior Court holds trials and hearings in three cities, Kingman, Bullhead City, and Lake Havasu City, each of which is about an hour's drive away from the other, and there have been weeks in which I have had to appear personally in all three (indeed, there have been individual days in which I have had to be in two of the three).  I often meet with opposing counsel in Bullhead and Kingman, which can keep me out of the office all day.  Unless I am going to give up all of my evenings and weekends to returning phone calls (not a good idea when one is married has a 14 year old daughter), there are going to have to be times where it may take a several days for people to hear back from me.

10.  Be specific when referring to documents.  Every court document has a title--it usually appears a few inches down from the top of the page, opposite from the part of the case caption that gives the names of the parties, and often right below the case number.  Every letter has a date.  Often I spend the five minutes of a phone call with a client trying to ascertain what document they are talking about.  The client says, "I am really upset about this letter I got from the court saying that I have to . . . ." when the client actually got no letter from the court and certainly nothing that says that they have to do what they think they have to do.  On the other hand, if the client would tell me, "Hey, Paul, I have a question about the Order to Appear that I just got in the mail from your office," then I would be able to give useful help right away.

The attorney/client relationship is a two way street that requires hard work from both attorney and client.  If you work with your attorney and bear in mind a few simple facts, you can make things move more smoothly and far less expensively.

Marriage Killers Book Easy to Buy on Amazon, but Selling out in Brick and Mortar Bookstores

Our recent book, How to Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers, has been in stock in several brick and mortar bookstores but, as best we can tell from their online inventories, has been selling out and is back ordered.  On the other hand, the book is still easily and readily available from Amazon.com (see link at the end of this post) as a print on demand paperback or as a Kindle ebook.

If you have tried or are trying to purchase the book through a local bookseller, they will probably be able to order it for you.  You may wish to suggest that they try to keep it in stock, as it appears to be doing well when book stores put it out on the shelves.

We are eager to hear comments from readers, and not just raves, either.  There are plans for future editions and we want to include in those editions anything we can do to make the book more helpful to real people in the real world.

Here is the link to the book's page on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/How-Save-Your-Marriage-Killers/dp/1460983491

The page gives you the ability to "look inside," so you can review the table of contents as well as read many of the internal pages so you can see if the book is likely to be helpful to you and your marriage.  We believe in marriage and strongly believe that many troubled marriages can be saved.  This book is designed to help you do just that.

Our New Book on Marriage Killers is Selling

For those of you who liked the "Marriage Killers" posts, my wife Kathy and I expanded the idea to book size and have published it under the title "How To Save Your Marriage from 12 Top Marriage Killers." The book is available from Amazon.com and many other sellers. Here is the blurb:

"How To Save Your Marriage From 12 Top Marriage Killers is a psycho-babble-free, easy to use, practical guide to preserving YOUR relationship from twelve common causes for the destruction of modern marriages. This book takes an honest look at Infidelity, Lack of Magic, Incivility, Stepchildren, Lack of Equality, and other, real-world pitfalls of modern marriage, discusses them with the help of case histories drawn from real life, digs down to their practical causes, and offers solutions that you can take right now to the kitchen table and the bedroom to use as tools to start rebuilding your marriage. Enlightened by the real world experience of author H. Paul Honsinger’s more than twenty years as a divorce attorney, and held to understandable plain language by author Kathleen Honsinger’s years of experience writing software user manuals geared for business owners, this book skips the psychoanalysis and the emotional finger-pointing and gets to the nitty gritty, providing real world, usable solutions that ordinary couples can start putting into use TODAY to keep their marriages together."

The book has been available for only about a month, and--while there are no official sales figures yet--it appears to be selling. Several sellers have stocked it and then suddenly sold out (including Barnes & Noble and Booksamillion), and there are all sorts of signs that it is moving on Amazon as well.

The web page for the book should appear very soon at www.honsingerbooks.com. You can view the book's Amazon page here:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Save-Your-Marriage-Killers/dp/1460983491/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302803216&sr=8-1

It is available on Amazon as a print on demand paperback for $14.99 and as a Kindle ebook for $9.99.