There are many ways couples can end up in court or in adversarial negotiations, but there are just as many ways to avoid ending up that way.  Sometimes the issues that cause people to go to court look large, like where the children will live or who will get the house, and sometimes they can look small but feel huge. What all family court cases have in common is intense emotion; emotion that is disguised as an argument about ‘facts’, because you can’t really have an argument about emotion in a court, can you?

Where couples are embroiled in the court system for...