Games people play during divorce

One example of mismanagement of community funds is when a business owner pays for the expenses of another party, who is not the spouse, out of business funds. This expense may appear to be a normal recurring expense. On a closer look, the mismanagement is identified. For example, it may be that the cell phone bill for someone who is not an employee is being paid.

One party may have a collection. This may include coin collections, firearms collections, stamp collections, for example. A collection may have been inherited, which makes it separate property. Or the items in the collection may have been purchased with community funds. Sometimes, the very existence of a collection is kept secret from their spouse. A spouse empties shared bank accounts, even when there is no indication that they will be denied a fair settlement.

The other spouse becomes responsible for bounced checks and unpaid bills. A similar tactic is to incur debt after the divorce process has begun, leaving the other party responsible for the bills. One spouse refuses to commit to the terms of the divorce settlement no matter what the other spouse offers. The delay game includes tactics like:.

Some will delay by waiting until the last minute to comply with court instructions. While these tactics can backfire, they are also costly and create unnecessary stress for everyone involved.

When a party to a divorce paints the other as entirely wrong and evil without just cause, they are playing the victim game. As the victim, they portray themselves as getting taken advantage of by the other spouse. I'm just saying the results of some of our life choices often seem as random as the outcome of a casino game.

We may analyze it to death, but ultimately we are all trying our best to beat the odds. Most of us who were in it to win it tried everything imaginable to increase our chances of hitting the happily ever after marital jackpot. Maybe it was marriage counseling, pre and post; perhaps you read all of the marriage advice books and checked every listicle to test the relationship against some criteria for long haul success.

You may have opted for marriage boot camp, completed a couples retreat, or practiced people who pray together stay together. Maybe you went the nontraditional route and consulted the Ouija board or a spellcaster. That's none of my business. Surely there must be some magic elixir that explains why some people make it and some don't? Trying to figure that out is as productive as analyzing a slot machine.

In reality, some things in life feel purely random. You can train hard, play by the rules and still lose. As a lover of tangled tangents, reading about games and the power of numbers made me think of the huge expectations we often assign to little phrases or words with eight tiny, unsuspecting letters -- I love you. But what happens when you spin and end up with the unlucky 13 puzzle to solve? I want a divorce.

Congrats, you're the next contestant on How about a round of emotional scrabble? That war of words is as much fun as a root canal.

One person goes vertical, the other horizontal; someone throws in a diagonal trying to build off what you said previously; zero points and no one wins. If your main issue as a couple is communication, you may also play a few rounds of marital charades.

I ended up acting like a mentally unstable mime as I struggled for months trying to explain how I was feeling. When people play mind games, the winner is the person that returns to the adult ego-state first.