MISMATCH.COM: ONLINE DISPUTE RESOLUTION AND DIVORCE

If love is a battlefield, divorce is a couple’s own private World War III. It is a crusade against a person you once loved to the point that you bound yourself “til death do us part.” It is a tug-ofwar with one’s most basic instincts; a time when the emotional brain dominates, no matter how rational the rest of the brain would like to behave. Any lawsuit is emotionally straining; but a divorce—a lawsuit against someone you thought you were going to spend the rest of your life with and whom you may have children with—is worse. In fact, the Social Readjustment Scale places divorce and marital separation at second and third place in terms of major life stressors, following the death of a spouse. “Divorce is a lawsuit. One of you must sue the other in order to dissolve the marriage. In doing so, you automatically become adversaries. The law says so.” Everyone has seen or read the sensationalized movies and headlines—the Kramer v. Kramer-style child custody hearings; the New York Post headlines identifying Tiger Wood’s fourteenth mistress; the prenuptial agreement leaving the wife of twenty years in the dust as her ex-husband marries his girlfriend twenty years his junior. Of course, not all divorces are