Many clients confuse negotiation with compromise. They may have "compromised" during most of their marriage until they finally ended up in a lawyer's office, but that is not the same thing as negotiation. Other clients think of negotiation as something done in the back of a smoke-filled room, or by high powered executives in 70 story office towers. Further, despite the recent changes in women's roles, many of my women clients associate the process with masculine conflict and force of will--the very stresses that have driven them to a lawyer's office for a divorce!
Yet, negotiation is a simple human process, occuring in our daily lives and in the ordinary places where we live and work. The Random House dictionery defines "negotiation" as: to arrange for or bring about by discussion the settlement of terms . Negotiation involves cooperation, peaaceful talking, and positive results for both parties.
In contrast, current American divorce laws are so adversarial that they maximize the painful emotional losses during separation. The degree of conflict can increase greatly when the spouses' attorneys begin to wrangle. This unnecessary conflict decreases the ability of spouses to sustain an effective post-divorce relationship.
In the case of a childless couple, on could say, "Who cares? They have no need to see each other after the divorce anyway." Yet, how an individual departs from a spouse affects the future self esteem of both; and in the case of parents, the adversarial divorce process places a severe strain on their relationship with the children after the divorce.