Unfortunately, you need not select merely for folk who won’t be “a bitch”, but either for folk who won’t divorce at all, won’t benefit much from a divorce, or who won’t respond to fairly significant incentives. The difference between even moderate legal tactics and weak ones can easily make the difference of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year—and if you ask family lawyers, you’ll quickly find that “amicable divorces” are for most practical definitions a contradiction in terms.
Someone being “a bitch” can be much, much worse, certainly. ((And the monetary issues are only one out of many problems, if either party goes for the dirty tricks playbook.)) But neither party needs to be evil for it to be a major concern.
either for folk who won’t divorce at all, won’t benefit much from a divorce, or who won’t respond to fairly significant incentives.
You’re missing a large and important subset: people with value systems in which moderately large amounts of money are not as important as a variety of inner emotional states.
To give an example from a different sphere, let’s assume that there is a riskless way to cheat on your taxes. There are people who will do it and people who won’t. It is not particularly useful to describe the latter as not responding “to fairly significant incentives”.
True, though I’d somewhat wrapped them more under “won’t benefit”, since the economic benefits would be outweighed by the emotional costs. At the same time and to state the obvious, people are aware of and overestimate the chances of future emotional states being positive.
And, obviously, neither partner need be or become “bitch” for a relationship to result in an overall positive experience, or less-positive-than-readily-possible experience, and humans do not seem to have good established tools for estimating future emotional states on this long of a timeframe.
Unfortunately, you need not select merely for folk who won’t be “a bitch”, but either for folk who won’t divorce at all, won’t benefit much from a divorce, or who won’t respond to fairly significant incentives. The difference between even moderate legal tactics and weak ones can easily make the difference of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per year—and if you ask family lawyers, you’ll quickly find that “amicable divorces” are for most practical definitions a contradiction in terms.
Someone being “a bitch” can be much, much worse, certainly. ((And the monetary issues are only one out of many problems, if either party goes for the dirty tricks playbook.)) But neither party needs to be evil for it to be a major concern.
You’re missing a large and important subset: people with value systems in which moderately large amounts of money are not as important as a variety of inner emotional states.
To give an example from a different sphere, let’s assume that there is a riskless way to cheat on your taxes. There are people who will do it and people who won’t. It is not particularly useful to describe the latter as not responding “to fairly significant incentives”.
True, though I’d somewhat wrapped them more under “won’t benefit”, since the economic benefits would be outweighed by the emotional costs. At the same time and to state the obvious, people are aware of and overestimate the chances of future emotional states being positive.
And, obviously, neither partner need be or become “bitch” for a relationship to result in an overall positive experience, or less-positive-than-readily-possible experience, and humans do not seem to have good established tools for estimating future emotional states on this long of a timeframe.