WHY YOU SHOULD ALMOST NEVER SIGN A SEPARATION AGREEMENT
PREDICTING IMPONDERABLES
Andrew E. Carlan, Esq.

Would you enter into a contract full of twists and turns while physically or mentally ill? You say "of course not." Don’t you realize that divorce and the loss of one’s family ranks among life’s greatest stresses? It is the worst time to make important decisions. Just live from day to day until you get your balance back. Don’t let anyone push you.

Parts of agreements or any other stipulation may lie dormant like time bombs for years. Children may be infants when parents divorce. Yet the father agrees to bind himself to pay for their college education. How can anyone forecast the cost? It may be as much as all the child support paid before children reach adulthood. Remember you are agreeing to support a person with all the rights and privileges and supposed duties of an adult. But what the law says and what it does are two very different things. How does that sound to you? What will be your assets and liabilities that far into the future? They depend at least in part on things over which you have no control. They depend on such imponderables as continued good health, the stock market, inflation, a career change you may want to make or one imposed on you by the your employer or the marketplace. Even short-term effects can seem dramatically different between the time you agree to words and actually begin to live under them. The imagination is not so reliable when you make plans for something you have never experienced before. Soldiers don’t know whether they will be heroes or cowards until the bullets start whizzing. It may not seem so bad to get generous visitation rather than physical custody until you experiences the difference between legal definitions and what actually takes place.

If the legislatures and the courts really cared about the consequences of divorce on the well-being of both parents and their children, they would prohibit long-term binding agreements for a term of—say—three years. During that adjustment period only a temporary agreement would be allowed. All arrangements would have to be reconfirmed before becoming final. Legislatures often require important legal changes to be read and passed two or three times before going into full effect. And legislators are not even temporarily out of their minds. That’s the way they always are. Between what seems like a good idea and its actual impact may be a gapping chasm. It is the basic political law of the "unintended effect."