How Divorce Works

Divorced Couple Upset with Broken Home in Background — Divorce may be common but do you understand how divorce really works? Peter Dazeley / Getty Images

Chances are, we all know someone who is divorced -- probably several someones. In 2000, there were over 957,200 finalized divorces in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau says that 50 percent of all marriages entered into today will end in divorce. That's a lot of broken homes, heartaches and paperwork, not to mention money spent on attorney fees and court costs.

But, some say those percentages of future doomed marriages have to be interpreted based on other factors. Barbara Whitehead and David Popenoe's "The State of Our Unions" (2004), which was prepared at Rutgers University for the National Marriage Project, says that there are several important social factors that affect that 50 percent estimate. For example, your risk of divorce decreases by:

30 percent if your annual income is more than $50,000
24 percent if you had a baby more than seven months after you got married
24 percent if you were over 25 when you got married
14 percent if your own parents never divorced
14 percent if you go to church as a family
13 percent if you attended some college

In this article, we'll find out why divorces are easier to get now than they used to be and learn about the types of divorce, what the procedures are and what's involved in the final divorce agreement. We'll explore mediation as an alternative to litigation and see what it takes to get a DIY divorce.

Annulment

Like divorce, annulment also dissolves a marriage; but unlike divorce, it indicates that the marriage never happened. An annulment is often required in the Roman Catholic Church in order for someone to remarry. Grounds for an annulment vary by jurisdiction but usually include:

fraud or misrepresentation (for example, one spouse may already be married to someone else or may have withheld the fact that he or she can't have children)
concealment (for example, the spouse may have concealed a drug addiction, prior criminal record or having a sexually transmitted disease)
inability or refusal to have sexual intercourse with his or her spouse
misunderstanding (for example, differing ideas of lifestyle or desire to have children)

s are most common when couples have not been married for very long. One annulment that made the news in 2004 dissolved the marriage of Britney Spears to her childhood sweetheart Jason Allen Alexander. They were married at a wedding chapel in Las Vegas on January 4, 2004, and by January 5, Britney had filed for an annulment in a Nevada court claiming she "lacked understanding of her actions to the extent that she was incapable of agreeing to marriage because before entering into the marriage the Plaintiff and Defendant did not know each other's likes and dislikes, each other's desires to have or not have children, and each other's desires as to a state of residency." The annulment was granted within a couple of hours.