This may not be popular among a group of guys who get off on circle-jerking about being more alpha all the time, but bear with me. Your goal in a divorce isn't to make your ex have the hots for you. It's to be on good terms with everyone involved so you're more likely to settle or win at trial. Although alpha strategies can work, this post is directed more toward the guys who are married to mentally unstable and highly hostile women.

Beta Divorce Strategy

Society wants to see men be more beta, right? Nice guys are good guys. Alphas are jerks who most people in culture want to punch in the face. Yeah, they're attractive to women, but they're still seen in a negative light by everyone else - including your judge, who can do the legal version of punching you in the face and get away with it. Very few alpha men present well in court. Being confident and articulate is powerful. Being the jerk who always teases his wife, AAs her complaints, says no to fitness tests, etc. will just justify to the judge why she's leaving you in the first place. If you can be the model nice guy - the man all the feminists are trying to create - your judge can only think: "He was everything a woman would want. Sure, he made some mistakes, but he owned up to them and tried to make it right. She's the one who's being a jerk by leaving such a nice guy." This isn't the best strategy for every judge, but it works for a lot of them - 4 out of the 5 judges on my current court.

If you want to save your marriage, maintaining frame and being attractive would be the goal. If you want to win at divorce, be the best beta suck-up you can be until you build the evidence you need - not just to influence the judge with your character, but to screw with her too. She's not going to soften up to Mr. Alpha. Be the pandering fool who begs and pleads for her not to leave and offers to buy her flowers every day for a year and give her chocolates on Tuesday just because it's Tuesday. Let her think she's in the position of power. That's when her guard goes down. That's when she says stupid things in front of the microphone in your pocket.

Also, comment periodically: "I know you hate me. I know you want to prove how horrible a husband I've been to you. I can't stop you if you want to do that, and I'm happy to accept the blame for anything I've done wrong. But I still love you. I don't want this to be a big fight [especially if you have kids, bring up how it could affect them]. I'm trying to get together all the documents you'll need to prove how much money we have, how much I earn, and we can figure out how to settle this in a way that I hope we could still be friends after this is over. And who knows, if after some time things start to cool down and you would want me back, I want to do this in a way that could leave that door open." Of course, she's going to scoff at that last part. But if she's even slightly on the fence about the divorce, what you're doing is nullifying her aggression in the divorce process, increasing your chances of settling on favorable terms by reducing her hostility toward you, and opening the lines of communication so you can try to settle between yourselves rather than paying your attorneys to do that negotiation for you.

Again, this strategy doesn't work on every wife and judge, but when it does work it's the best option possible. The thing is, you can't start with an alpha, hard-ball strategy and move to the beta strategy, but you can always go from beta to alpha in a divorce. Alpha to beta isn't believable. You won't be able to convince anyone that the softness you present is sincere or genuine if you've been a jerk for the first half. It comes off as trying to manipulate the court. But if you start beta and change to alpha later, the court just thinks, "Well, what did she expect? He tried to play nice, she wouldn't have it, she pushed him too it." You can always start with the beta strategy, though, and convert to the alpha strategy if that's not getting you very far. That said, hold out on the beta strategy for longer than you think you should because: (1) she needs to see the first few bills from her attorney before she recognizes the cost of her being the only one to want to fight hard, and (2) because sometimes women will test how sincere your beta-ness is, knowing you might be trying to play her to get a better settlement.

Multi-Lane Divorce Theory

Most mentally unstable and hostile women are preparing for a head-on collision with you in Lane A (Alpha). She's going to play the alpha, hard-ball strategy. If you've got a divorce 2.0 judge, you're not going to win in Lane A if you try to collide back. Don't fight fire with fire. Switch to Lane B (Beta) and put some road blocks in Lane A.

  • Lane A is the direct and traditional emotional way to win a divorce case, which is when each side slings a bunch of mud and tries to convince the court that the other side's mud is worse. Her "mud" will be about how abusive you've been to her (whether it's true or not), how lazy you've been all the marriage, that you've been controlling, and that you've generally been absent and uninvolved. Your mud is going to be similar: she's lazy, has mental health problems, never held up her end of the house care, child rearing, etc. and that she wouldn't seek a (better) job when you urged her to. Statistically, I wouldn't bet a dime on winning in that type of a collision. Men are expected to treat women nicer than women to men.

  • Lane B is the indirect and unconventional, yet legally secure statutory way to win a divorce case. Look up your state's statutes and assess the factors, then live by them as perfectly as possible. Alphas ignore the rules and do their own thing. Lane B litigants play exactly by the rules. This makes it very hard for a judge to rule against them and gives the judge easy justification for ruling in his favor because he knows he cannot be reversed for ruling consistently with the statutes. So, while Lane A is an appeal to the judge's emotions, Lane B is an appeal to his sensibilities and the law.

For spousal support, your state will have a list: "The court must consider the following factors: a ... b ... c ... d ... etc." The same thing will be true for child custody, parenting time, asset division, etc. Make sure you're fulfilling those factors better than she is. If your kids have a doctor's appointment, you take them. Talk to the school and make sure your number is the "first to call" on the list and hers is second. Create a spreadsheet that charts your spending for the past year and a half so that you can prove where all of your money has been going - and categorize it as to who spent what. Don't blame her for her excessive spending. Just use the exhibit to address your conservative spending. Let the court look at her column on the spreadsheet on its own. After all, you're not trying to sling mud here. You're simply trying to show that you're a responsible person who does right with his finances, takes care of his home, and is an upstanding parent to his children. Get all of your documents together. Make sure the numbers add up.

If you know she's racking up a lot of debt (or is likely to do so), look up your state's "de facto termination date" case law and figure out what factors the court will apply and start building a case for why the court shouldn't use the day of trial as the division date (thereby giving you half of all of that new debt) and should instead use a past date. Typical factors include: leaving on unfriendly terms, when you stopped living together, when you sought legal counsel, when the case was filed, when you started separating your assets, when you started segregating bill obligations between the two of you, whether or not either of you found a relationship outside the home, etc. You have to be able to show that these and other factors started before she started racking up the debt.

This is how you win on Lane B - by showing the court that you're better than she is, not by showing the court that she's worse than you are. In essence, you're proving that you're a high quality man, not that you married a low quality woman. If the judge has eyeballs in his sockets and your wife is even half as crazy and hostile as you think she is, he'll see it and she won't be able to hide it on the stand, as will be evidenced by all the mud she tries to sling - most of which won't be relevant anyway. Don't fight back. You can try to run both lanes at the same time, but it doesn't often go as well as one might think. If you travel on the low road, you're inherently not on the high road anymore. Due to biases, women can do both. You can't. Pick a lane.

Nullification Planning

To nullify her Lane A you simply have to taint any evidence she might throw at you. Now that you know she's recording you, leverage those to your advantage. Record yourself if you have to. Get her on record while she's off-guard acknowledging that she's not afraid of you or that she's looking forward to something you're going to do together soon. Put her in a good mood. Fake it if you have to.

I had a case recently where the wife was crazy. She broke the court order dozens of times. She would send e-mails to my client acknowledging what she did. But she always ended those e-mails with something like, "I know this may not technically work within our parental plan, but I hope you agree that this is what is best for the children. I only want to do what's in their best interests. If the plan isn't accounting for that, maybe we need to talk about changing a few things." So, when she went back to change the parenting plan and my client wanted to bring up all the evidence proving she was in contempt of court, how do you think that evidence is going to play out? Judge: "Yeah, I can see she violated the plan, but as she said in your own evidence, it's because this plan isn't working. That's why you're back into court. This isn't a contempt issue; it's just evidence that the plan needs to be modified." That was a bitter pill for my client to swallow. Fortunately we had 3 experts all testifying that my client should get custody, so it's a slam dunk on other grounds anyway (order pending).

My point is simply that she did everything she could to nullify and taint any evidence my client would try to present. Every audio recording, every e-mail, every text message, every phone call, etc. They always included in the beginning or the end, something like each of the following phrases, which I encourage you to emulate too:

  • "I'm genuinely grieving at the loss of our marriage and that things are going this way. I really do love you and wish that we could cooperate and make peace through all of this."

  • "Although we have our differences, I know that you mean well. I hope you can see that I mean well in what I'm trying to do too."

  • "I understand why you're so frustrated. I would be too if I only had your perspective. That said, I still think this is what we should do, and I hope you can see from my perspective a little bit as well."

  • "I know we're not going to see eye-to-eye, but I hope you know I'm just trying to look out for the best interests of our children."

  • "I know you're trying to back me into a corner so you can use these e-mails as evidence. I'm not happy about it, but I understand the strategy you're trying to use. Nevertheless, I have to stick to my principles. This is what I think is best/fair/appropriate and I really hope you would be willing to consider this and work toward resolving our differences rather than building a case for court."

  • "I know you are filled with hate for me, but I still love you, even if I know now that it's not going to work out between us."

Most states have a rule that the context of any evidence has to be presented when the other side asks for it. So, if she presents the first two sentences of an e-mail showing how you make stupid decisions or that you admitted to something that looks bad, you can force her to reveal the rest of the e-mail. When the court reads these types of phrases, it often significantly dampens and nullifies the impact of what she's trying to prove because they believe you have a greater genuineness and sincerity behind why you said the other thing in the first place.

It doesn't actually matter if it's true or not, as in the case of the mom I referenced above. One of her conversations was about not taking her son to hockey practice because she had to go to a funeral for a co-worker. My client was unavailable, but offered to have his new wife drive the kid and the mom refused because she didn't like the new woman. Then my client's mom drove in to town (4+ hours) and offered to drive him to practice, but the mom still refused. Instead, the kid sat in after-school-care for 3 hours and missed his hockey practice ... and the mom wrote, "I know you don't understand why I'm not in agreement with what you're proposing. I wish you could see things from my perspective and that we could understand each other like we used to. But until we can learn to communicate better, I think we just need to trust each other that we both want what's best for our kids." It's a very vague statement and offered no actual justification for her idiotic refusal to cooperate, but it sure made my client look like an idiot for making an issue out of it. For the record, she later admitted on cross-examination that she didn't have a good reason for not using my client's wife or mom to get her kid to practice, other than that she simply didn't know them well enough yet.

CONCLUSION

In short, there's value in being alpha if you're trying to attract a woman. But if you're trying to impress someone who lives in blue pill ideologies, like your judge or a guardian ad litem, or even your wife's attorney (and trust me, if her own attorney believes you're a stand-up nice guy, that's a huge advantage) ... sometimes you have to conform to what they want to see in you. You're not trying to convince these people to have sex with you. To that end, being more alpha might be more attractive to your STBE, but obviously you weren't doing it well enough to keep her from divorcing you, so don't expect more of the same to change her opinion about you. Try a different strategy in the divorce.