Divorce is a ten billion-dollar-a-year industry. And that’s without renting a hall, hiring a band or throwing bouquets. Even without the cake that’s a lot of dough.
If you’re lucky enough to get into this racket, you can make a fortune manipulating the laws and helping destroy relationships between people who at one point or another swore undying love to one another. Nobody knows how to pull the plug on this golden goose, nor do they really want to. Most especially not those who risk nothing but who keep raking it in.
Marriage and divorce are currently played out in the courtrooms and on the tongues of gossips; the very nature of the institution has become warped and distorted, a gotcha game of vitriol and betrayal.
How many divorce lawyers are parties to this betrayal between two supposedly civilized people? The honest answer is all of them. This would be an unimportant economic slugfest if it was just between the estranged parties. After all, marriage is a pretty simple contract-till death do you part. Right there is the reason that God-fearing members of the community regularly gave divorced folks the skunk-eye. If they were willing to disavow that basic a contract, what makes you think they won’t disavow anything and everything? That’s why historically, if you were a divorced person nobody trusted you.
Marriage is the only contract that can be dissolved because interest fades or because someone purposefully behaves badly. If you’re an engineer for Google, for example, you can’t just wander over to another company and start working there because it’s suddenly more attractive. There’s promises and responsibilities and the new company would have to buy out your contract. But people seldom think logically when breaking up a home.
Dylan, Bob: The Philosophy of Modern Song, Simon & Schuster (2022)
And of course I have to respond to this insult from the bard.
If divorce is a racket, it’s the only one where the clients arrive sleepless, frightened, and clutching a shoebox of bank statements. No one walks into a divorce lawyer’s office humming a tune about easy money. They come because something important has already broken, not because anyone lured them toward a cash register.
Marriages involve children, shared histories, intertwined finances, and the emotional equivalent of a data center on fire. You can’t “buy out” a decade of parenting, or neatly assign custody of Thanksgiving traditions. Divorce law exists not to warp the institution, but to keep it from collapsing into chaos when love fades or someone “purposefully behaves badly,” as Dylan himself notes.
He suggests that divorce lawyers are “all” parties to betrayal, helping “destroy relationships” that once promised undying love. That assumes there is still a relationship left to destroy. In reality, by the time lawyers enter the room, the betrayal, distance, or dysfunction has usually done its work. Our role is not to pull the plug on a “golden goose,” but to stop the bleeding — to protect children, preserve dignity, and help two people exit a painful chapter without turning their lives into the “gotcha game of vitriol and betrayal” Dylan rightly condemns.
And as for the old fear that divorced people can’t be trusted because they once disavowed a promise? That idea belongs in the same museum as the “skunk-eye.” Modern divorce law recognizes that keeping a broken contract at all costs does not create virtue; it creates misery. Sometimes the most honest act is admitting that a vow cannot be kept as it was once imagined.
So yes, divorce is expensive. Yes, it’s imperfect. But it isn’t a racket, and divorce lawyers are not the villains of the story. Most, but not all, divorce lawyers are actually trying to get to the finish line. There are a few lawyers who see their job to turn over every stone, and make the divorce long and complicated, and sometimes it’s necessary to fight fire with fire. We don’t invent heartbreak — we navigate it. And in a world where endings are sometimes unavoidable, helping people end well may be one of the most humane jobs left