How to Approach Mediation

You're going to hear plenty of advice from well-meaning people: how their divorce went, how their agreement turned out. The most useful thing you can do is go into mediation knowing you've chosen a more holistic, kinder path than the alternative. A mediator's role is to give you and your spouse the space to reach an agreement yourselves. Done well, that's a genuinely positive experience, quite different from litigation or a Beis Din setting, where a third party ultimately decides for you what makes sense for your children and your assets. In mediation, you're the one stating what you need and want, working it out with a neutral third party's help.

Mediation is an opportunity to get where you need to go without a fight, but that doesn't mean you'll get everything you asked for. There's always going to be back and forth, and some give and take. You won't get everything you want in mediation, but you wouldn't get everything you want in court or before a Beis Din either. Compromise is simply part of divorce.

Individuals navigating divorce will often compare the deal in front of them to the terms of a friend's divorce. Friends and family may also encourage the divorcing individual to pursue something similar to what they themselves received or have heard of. But there's no one-size-fits-all agreement in divorce. Every case and every situation is different. One spouse might take on more of the financial side while giving more flexibility on visitation; another couple might strike the opposite balance. What looks like a better deal from the outside often isn't comparable at all.

It's also worth keeping in mind that you rarely hear the full truth from a friend about their own agreement. People tend to describe their situation in the best possible light, leaving out what they gave up to get there. The better approach is complete honesty with your own mediator: bring up anything you've heard, including what a friend supposedly got, and let the mediator explain why that particular term does or doesn't make sense for your case.

Every agreement, whether reached in mediation or through a Beis Din, is really a global settlement, one that weighs many different factors together rather than any single term in isolation. Many different factors affect the child support payment, for example, including the parenting time schedule, the number of children, and the incomes of both parents. Pushing for a specific number because "so-and-so gets much more" doesn't take into account the entirety of the calculation. They may have more children, or an uneven parenting time split, or even be higher income than you are. That's why well-meaning advice from community members, or even from attorneys focused on one issue without seeing the full picture, can sometimes miss the mark. A global settlement means give and take across the whole agreement. Because every family and every couple is different, with so many individual nuances shaping what's fair, no other couple's outcome can reliably serve as a guide for your own case.

Approaching mediation with the right attitude also means recognizing that there are two perspectives in the room, yours and your spouse's. You don't have to agree with the other perspective, but acknowledging that it exists matters.

However difficult the past has been, it's important to focus on moving forward. Getting stuck relitigating old grievances makes it much harder to make real progress in mediation, or in life afterward.