In thinking about your new life without marriage, you need to think about what things you need for the short term and what things you want for the long term. Just as important as defining your personal needs and desires, you should also make it your task to become informed about the rights and duties of separating and divorcing husbands and wives under North Carolina law. Until you know what you can get under the law, you won’t know if your expectations about the end-result of separation and divorce are realistic and reasonable.
This website will provide you with all the basic information you should have about your rights, your spouse’s rights and your respective obligations to each other and any child of the marriage. A number of sources, including you yourself, will provide you with other tools to help you define your needs and goals. Identifying your goals will tell you what you wish to accomplish in the divorce. This website, used together perhaps with other professional advice, can then help you map out how to accomplish those goals.
Short-term and long-term needs
Sometimes a person’s short-term and long-term needs overlap, as they are but different versions of one central underlying concern. For example, you want and need to maintain emotional stability, for yourself and for your children, both now and in the future. But how you achieve the short-term objective of preserving your emotional balance may be different from how you preserve your balance over the longer term. In the midst of the great upheaval and distress you could feel over separating, you may decide you need to locate a suitable therapist without delay. That will be your immediate objective, with the short-term goal of getting focused professional assistance during a period of extreme stress and anxiety. Longer term, you may decide to establish a new exercise or work regimen to provide you with ongoing relief from continuing stresses. Either way, you are planning for your future. It’s just that one part of the plan applies to the near future and the other part to the more distant future.
The same can pretty much be said of all the needs you identify for yourself. You will be developing concrete ideas about what to do to address those concerns now and what to do about those same or similar needs over a period of years. If you find it too hard to identify all your needs, ask someone to help you do that. Similarly, if you can’t quite figure out the best ways to set short- and long-term objectives for yourself, get someone to help you. This website, books, and discussions with friends and professionals can provide you with plenty of ideas and help you rank your priorities.
Keeping an open mind
At the same time, you should keep an open mind. In the heat of the moment, you might identify a powerful need to punish your spouse for what he or she has done to you. As you think more about your urge to retaliate, however, you should come to see that you will hurt yourself more by holding onto hostile feelings. Playing out your anger at or disappointment with your spouse will almost surely reduce the chances for an amicable, cooperative settlement. Worse, a flaring of tensions could precipitate a court battle that leaves you emotionally scarred and financially ruined.
One main premise of this website is that a resolution of matrimonial issues that wreaks havoc with your life and leaves you devastated is the worst possible outcome, and that such an outcome can almost always be avoided. If you focus too much on immediate gratification of emotional urges to get back at your spouse, you will be disserving long-term goals of emotional stability and financial security. If you keep a cool head and plan your future life with carefully thought out objectives, you will be creating for yourself, as best you can possibly do, the kind of life that you want and deserve. You will, in short, be mapping out the best possible divorce for your situation.
Please continue on to read about the how your goals can be achieved..
Divorce and You
