Divorce Rebounding in N. Texas Courts Monday, October 11, 2010 It looks like the real housewives of Dallas are tired of waiting for their princes to become more charming.
While national divorce and marriage rates have plunged along with the economy, Dallas divorces are back on the upswing, giving new hope to a bevy of businesses that count on discord.
This past January, just 823 Dallas County couples filed for divorce, according to data from Dallas County District Court. By March, that number climbed to 1,358.
Through the spring, divorces were up 5.1 percent over the same period last year, although the pace again has slackened a bit. Through the first nine months of the year, divorce filings were up 3.8 percent compared with the same period in 2009.
The mini explosion runs counter to the recent prevailing narrative, with commentators eager to predict that the recession would teach couples to iron out their problems without resorting to divorce.
Ike Vanden Eykel, a man the Dallas Morning News has dubbed a “divorce law Jedi,” anticipated a divorce rebound.
“A year ago, I likened it to a fight at a hockey game: When two players get into it, the referees put them in separate penalty boxes. The recession put them in one penalty box — the same house,” said Vanden Eykel, the managing partner at Koons Fuller. “Once the economy started coming back, this backlog of people started coming out of the penalty box.”
Another Dallas divorce guru, Dr. Richard Warshak, a UT Southwest clinical psychologist who’s often called upon in custody battles and on national TV, said his colleagues have noticed the increasing pace of divorce filings.
Counselors, custody evaluators, expert witnesses, mediators and financial planners will all see more demand, Warshak and Vanden Eykel said.
Warshak’s book, “Divorce Poison: How to Protect Your Family from Bad-mouthing and Brainwashing,” now in its 22nd printing, is a perennial fixture on Amazon.com’s list of best-selling divorce books. In April, just as divorce filings peaked in Dallas, the book jumped from “ninth or 10th” on that list into the top three, he said.
Dr. Stephanie Burchell, a Dallas marriage counselor, says she never saw a drop in demand for her services. In fact, she said, she was surprised at the number of couples willing to “pay any fee and attend as many counseling sessions as it takes to find relief in their marriage.”
At the same time, there was only so much she or any other counselor could do to help couples hang on until the economy improves.
As Vanden Eykel and other family law experts work to split up some of these once-sizable estates, a few other industries can expect to see a renewed interest in their products and services once the splits become final.
Real estate agents, architects and interior decorators should benefit from the new divorce bubble because, as Vanden Eykel put it, “Where once there was one, there are now two households.”
“Regrettably, this kind of upturn actually has an impact on the Dallas area’s business economy,” Vanden Eykel said.
Alan Peppard on Facebook Divorce Reprinted from The Dallas Morning News Friday, October 15, 2010 After seeing The Social Network, ponder this thought before contacting your old sweetheart on the Internet: One fifth of all divorces involve some element of Facebook.
That sobering stat was passed on to me during a Thursday chat with Dallas Bar Association president Ike Vanden Eykel.
Ike is a partner at Koons, Fuller, the fourth-largest family-law firm in the country.
"When we start a case, one of the first things we go to is social networking to see who has shot themselves in the foot," Ike says. "The depth of people's ignorance defies imagination."
In the old days, your spouse's lawyer would produce evidence about you.
"But now, it's evidence produced by you," says Ike. "It's a pond that is stocked daily by the people swimming in it. If you're a fishing lawyer, you're going to catch something."
Jobs Most Likely to Wreck Your Marriage Reprinted from AOL Jobs Monday, October 18, 2010 If your spouse helps people or touches them for a living, be careful -- you might be headed for a divorce. Helping professions and hospitality workers have some of the highest divorce rates in the country, according to a comparison of divorce rates among occupations.
The conventional wisdom is that police officers have high divorce rates. But a year-old analysis of the top 15 jobs with the highest divorce rate that recently made the rounds of the Internet doesn't even list police officers among the worst offenders. Based on data from the 2000 U.S. Census, it found that law enforcement workers had a lower divorce rate than the general population.
Before we try to explain why some of these jobs might have high divorce rates, here are the top 15 professions and their divorce rates:
1. Dancer: 43% 2. Bartender: 38% 3. Massage therapist: 38% 4. Gaming cage: 34% 5. Extruding machine operator: 32% 6. Gaming: 31% 7. Factory: 29% 8. Phone operator: 29% 9. Nursing: 28% 10. Entertainers, sports: 28% 11. Porter: 28% 12. Telemarketer: 28% 13. Waiter: 27% 14. Roofer: 26% 15. Maid: 26%
The national divorce rate in 2009 was 10 percent. It's hard to know whether the above jobs are prone to more divorce or whether more unstable people are drawn to those professions. Professional dancers, athletes and entertainers, for example, have more opportunity to cheat on their spouses because they often work away from home and are surrounded by adoring fans. At least that's Tiger Woods' explanation.
Helping professionals, such as massage therapists and nurses, have a high amount of stress and work long hours, spending less time with their families. Hospitality workers, such as waiters, maids, porters and gaming workers, also work irregular hours in high-stress jobs, and come in contact with people on vacation who might be feeling a little randy and have time and money for a tryst on the job.
No matter what the profession, divorces are highest among jobs where workers face high stress and temptations, said Debra Opri, a divorce attorney in Beverly Hills, Calif.. Those temptations include other women, gambling and alcohol, Opri said.
Jobs that require extensive travel, odd hours and are high in stress can lead to divorce because the worker is away from their spouse too much and doesn't know how to deal with the stress away from home, said Ike Vanden Eykel, a Dallas divorce attorney for 37 years, in a telephone interview with AOL Jobs.
Working odd hours and then spending more time with co-workers instead of a spouse isn't the only thing that can lead to divorce, Vanden Eykel said. "One of the biggest causes of divorce is economic pressure," he said.
"When you can't make ends meet, that adds an economic pressure that you can't avoid," he said, adding that even highly paid CEOs who feel pressure at work can have high divorce rates.
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