I’m still pretty drained from my hearing a couple days ago. These are life-changing events, and the fallout is pretty heavy stuff. However, as I sat in the courtroom, I saw a few other proceedings that were worth commenting on, and may give readers some important perspective.
Family law is messy business — not for the faint of heart. One way or another, families die, and commissioners and judges are butchers of sorts who cut the carcass into what are supposed to be salvageable pieces. If young men were forced to attend these hearings as part of their education, I think we’d see even less enthusiasm for marriage than currently exists.
In the first hearing, a man was dragged from Spokane to Seattle – some 300 miles – on short notice to attend a contempt hearing on child support. Evidently, he had been taking care of the kids himself until a month prior to the hearing, and as soon as the ex got them back she took him to court for money. The man was disheveled and tired, and asked the judge for some time to respond. He was given three weeks. Presumably, he drove five hours back to Spokane that day and began looking for the money to pay an attorney to represent him in court. Now he’ll be even farther in the hole.
Next, came a young Singaporean Chinese woman, looking humble and dressed in modest, cheap clothing, represented by a seasoned lawyer. Turns out she was sitting on a Ferrari, a BMW and about a million Singapore dollars (roughly $800,000 USD), and her ex-husband wanted at least half of the value of these assets back. Problem is that she’d hidden the money very carefully, and nobody could find a trace of it. The ex-husband was demanding the sale of the cars, which she refused to do (how’s a girl to get around without her Ferrari and beamer?). The lawyers for both put in long arguments in the case, but the result was inconclusive, because the commissioner ultimately said he couldn’t make a decision either way until he saw the hidden assets. He ordered the woman to show where she was keeping the money, but as far as I could tell there was not much in the way of coercion involved. The ex-husband in Singapore will likely never get anywhere near half of these assets.
Perhaps most relevant to the average Spearhead reader, there was a separation hearing as well. This is the hearing that, for all intents and purposes, determines custody. In this particular case, the husband and wife had a falling out, and there had been some domestic scuffles, apparently initiated by the wife, who was clinically diagnosed with mental problems. The man, under intense pressure during the separation, had recently taken to drink. For some reason that I cannot fathom, he decided to tell his estranged wife about it, saying he’d sober up. I can only speculate that perhaps he was making some attempt at reconciliation, and thought that with some effort at a clean lifestyle they’d both be OK. Very big mistake. Naturally, her lawyer chewed him up over that, calling him an “alcoholic” and “an extremely heavy drinker” for admitting to putting away a six pack every night for a few months while under pressure from a deranged, violent wife. Needless to say, he lost custody, but in all fairness the drinking was just a convenient excuse for the court — he would have lost anyway. Where he is really screwed now is that his ex can demand that the state monitor him for compliance with various treatment programs for years, whether he had a long-term problem or not. In being open with his wife about this issue, he has now handed her a big hammer with which she can repeatedly bludgeon him as long as their children are minors.
Mine was the fourth case. Now, after reading my results from my hearing, and comparing them to the three that came before, perhaps skeptical readers can understand why I did not leave feeling that I had “lost.”
For young, unattached men out there, I highly recommend a two hour visit to the local courthouse to watch what happens in there. Just knowing how it works will give men a good basis on which to make a decision about marriage and children, and a realistic idea of what to expect if things turn sour. Also, it will help them avoid the most common mistakes men make when they have to go through it themselves. Fortunately, court is public, and anyone can see these hearings for free.
