Latest Judgement

1. Over the years I have come to think that a marriage ends twice. It ends once in the heart, quietly, on some ordinary evening no one marks on a calendar, and it ends a second time in law, on a date a court records with more precision than the occasion deserves. Between these two endings lies everything that determines what a person’s life looks like afterward — and I have watched enough of both kinds of endings, the long and the quick, to say with some confidence that the gap between them matters more than either party ever expects it to.
2. Take first the couple who fight to the end. I have had clients who began their case young, with small children and full heads of hair, and reached the final decree in middle age, greyer, thinner in the wallet, and strangers to people they once knew intimately. What strikes me, watching them afterward, is not that they are unhappy — grief of that kind usually settles, given years — but that they carry the litigation with them long after the file is closed. They have learned, over a decade of hearings, to read every gesture of the other side as a manoeuvre, and this habit does not switch off simply because the marriage has. I have seen such men and women unable to negotiate even a birthday visit for their child without summoning the old vocabulary of pleadings and prejudice, as though every ordinary conversation must now be conducted through counsel because that is the only way they have practised speaking to each other in ten years. The case is over. The reflexes it built are not.
3. I think often of a particular pattern I have seen repeat itself with variations across dozens of long-fought cases: the parties stop being able to remember, by the end, whether the fight is still about the original grievance or has simply become a fight about the fight. A dispute that began over a specific wrong — a broken promise, a betrayal, a sum of money withheld — slowly loses its original shape and is replaced by something closer to habit. Each hearing produces a fresh grievance of its own, born of the last hearing, so that the case grows a second layer of conflict sitting directly on top of the first, and it is often this second layer, rather than the original marriage, that the parties are truly still fighting about by the time judgment finally comes.
4. There is also, unmistakably, a financial afterlife to the long fight. I rarely see a client who fought for a decade end up richer for having done so, even when the final order is generous on paper. The money that should have gone toward rebuilding a life — a home, a child’s education, a business restarted — has already been spent on the fighting itself, and what remains is often a right on paper that takes further years, and further fees, to actually collect. More than one client has told me, years after the decree, that they no longer quite remember what they were fighting for, only that stopping had, at some point, come to feel like losing.
5. Now take the couple who part quickly — by mutual consent, with terms settled in months rather than years. Their ending looks, from the outside, unremarkable: a short hearing, a modest order, a case that never makes it into anyone’s memory as a battle. But I have followed enough of these couples afterward to notice something the long fighters rarely manage. They tend, within a surprisingly short time, to become almost ordinary to one another again — not friends, necessarily, but civil enough to sit at the same table for a child’s school event, to adjust a visitation schedule over a phone call instead of a motion, to remarry, where they choose to, without the shadow of an old case still open somewhere in a court’s cause list. Their children, in my observation, seem to carry less of the marriage’s failure into their own adult lives, perhaps because they were not asked, even indirectly, to be witnesses to it for years on end.
6. I do not say this to suggest that every quick settlement is wise, or that every long fight is foolish. I have seen quick settlements signed in haste that a party spent the next decade regretting, and I have seen long fights that were entirely justified — where a real wrong needed a court’s full attention, and no earlier settlement would have been honest to what had actually happened. The length of a case is not, by itself, a measure of its rightness. But I have noticed, again and again, that the two kinds of endings produce two different kinds of people on the other side of them. The long fighters, even when they win, often carry the courtroom home with them, unable fully to leave it behind. The quick partners, even when they concede more than they might have won at trial, seem more able to close the door and begin again.
7. What I tell young clients now, when they first sit across from me convinced that a long fight is the only form justice can take, is that the court will eventually give them an order, but it cannot give them back the years spent obtaining it, nor restore the ease with which they once spoke to a person they are still, in practical terms, going to have to speak to for the rest of their lives, on account of the children they share. That is not an argument for surrender. It is only an invitation to ask, honestly and early, what kind of ending they actually want to be living inside ten years from now — because by the time the last order is passed, that question will already have answered itself, whether or not anyone thought to ask it in time.

This article has been researched and written by Advocate Aarun Chanda, who practices divorce law in Mumbai and Pune. It is intended solely for academic purposes and should not be construed as legal advice. Readers are encouraged to consult a qualified lawyer or advocate specializing in divorce cases for professional legal guidance.

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