Divorce and Communication with Your Spouse

Keeping communication open with your spouse can be crucial to helping to make sure that your divorce goes as smoothly as possible. This is especially true in instances where you and your spouse have children or a lot of property together. While keeping in contact can be a good thing, it is important that you go about it properly. One of the last things that you want is for you to have felt encouraged to communicate with your former spouse only to realize that your spouse is using planning on using this against you in court.

One of the best ways to tell your spouse something is by telephone. While the negative is that you would almost certainly rather not to speak with them directly while going through a divorce, the positive is that you can get instant feedback on a number of different ideas and judge the extent that they, too, are willing to compromise. Another advantage is that it can make it more difficult for your words to be used against you because there is no record of them. In short, talking through the telephone with your spouse can work well in diffusing hostilities.

You may also choose to speak with your spouse through email or text messages. While these are easy to use and do not involve you having to have direct communication with your spouse, they leave a record. Your spouse’s could decide to subpoena these records from your phone company and use such emails and text messages against you. It can be a good idea to make sure that if you decide to send emails or texts to your spouse that you make sure that you try to keep emotion or blame out.

Other methods of communication with your spouse include in person and through your attorney. The former may be unavoidable if you have children and can be quite helpful if you do not mind being around your spouse. Having your attorney send messages for you will likely be very expensive. This is because it is normally considered unethical for an attorney to speak with your spouse if your spouse is represented by an attorney. The positive about doing this, however, is that your attorney will likely make sure that your interests are being cared for as part of any divorce settlement dialogues.

Because only you and your spouse are the only ones who truly know what child custody arrangements are best for your children, or because you are best positioned to understand what property settlement you will be happy with, it is important for you to be able to tell this to your spouse so that the two of you can work out arrangements that work best for both of you. It can often be the case that absent any dialogue, hostilities can arise and make the divorce process more difficult, painful, and unfortunate for both of you.

The above article on communicating with your spouse is informational. It is not professional legal advice, so please do not view it as such. Will Beaumont is an attorney and is only licensed in Louisiana. He has an office in New Orleans and has an office in Metairie.