How to tell good divorce advice from bad

Divorce may be the worst-served topic on the internet, and not because the people writing about it are careless. It is structural. Divorce is governed by state law, so most questions have fifty different correct answers. It arrives when people are frightened and searching at two in the morning. And it attracts advertising money, because a divorcing person is a valuable reader.

Those three things together produce an enormous amount of content that is confident, readable, and wrong for you specifically.

Here is how to sort it, using checks you can apply in about ten seconds each.

Does it say what varies by state?

This is the single most useful test, and most content fails it.

If a page answers a question about property, support, timelines, or custody without saying anywhere that the rule differs by state, one of two things is true. Either it is about something genuinely federal, like the tax treatment of your filing status or the rules governing workplace retirement plans, or it is giving you one state's answer as though it were the country's.

Content that names the limits of its own answer is showing you it knows where the edges are. Content that never does has either not thought about it or is hoping you will not notice.

Does it give a number where the law gives a range?

"You have thirty days to respond." "You get half." "It takes six months."

Every one of those is true somewhere and wrong in most places. Response deadlines, waiting periods, and division rules are set by each state, and the specific number is exactly what varies. A page that hands you a figure with no qualification is the most quietly dangerous kind, because a number feels like an answer and people act on it.

Is the framework invented?

The three C's of divorce. The seven-seven-seven rule. The 20/20 rule. The four behaviors that cause ninety percent of all divorces. The five stages of divorce grief.

Some of these are loose adaptations of real research. Most originated on a blog and spread because they are easy to write about and easy to click. They are presented in the same tone as established law, and they are not the same thing.

A quick test: search the framework's name and look at what the sources are. If every result is another content site describing it, and none is a court, a statute, or a study, you are reading folklore with numbers in it.

Where did the statistic come from, and when?

"Half of marriages end in divorce" has been repeated for decades, is disputed, and depends heavily on how you count. Divorce rates by profession usually trace back to a single analysis passed hand to hand ever since.

Ask two questions of any figure: who produced it, and in what year. If a page cannot tell you, the number is decoration.

Recency matters for law too. The tax treatment of support payments changed for agreements after a certain date. Rules move, and content rarely gets updated when they do.

Who benefits from you believing this?

Not a disqualifier, just context worth holding.

Law firm blogs are often genuinely good, written by people who do this daily, and they end by suggesting you call. That is fair, and it also shapes which questions get answered well. Notice that content about doing something yourself, or about whether you need a lawyer at all, tends to be thinner and more discouraging everywhere it appears.

Content farms optimize for clicks rather than outcomes, which is why they favor lists and rules that sound like insider knowledge.

Does it assume a situation that is not yours?

Advice written for a high-conflict divorce is wrong for an amicable one, and the reverse. Guidance that assumes you have assets to fight over does not fit someone deciding whether they can afford to file at all. Content aimed at people with children does not transfer.

Most bad advice is not false. It is true for somebody else.

The best source is free and almost nobody uses it

Your court's self-help center, if your court has one. They are not universal and coverage outside cities can be thin. Where they exist they are free and not means-tested, they serve people without a lawyer in that court's own cases, and they are the authoritative source for the thing the internet is worst at: the actual rule where you actually live. They cannot give legal advice, and they can tell you which form, which deadline, and how it works in that courthouse. One thing to know before you go: they are neutral by design, there is no attorney-client relationship, what you tell them is not confidential, and the same center will help your spouse with the same case. Use them for procedure and forms, not for strategy you would not want repeated.

After that: your state bar's public information, the statute itself, which is more readable than people expect, and one hour with a licensed family-law attorney before you agree to anything.

Apply all of this to us

A page like this is worthless if it exempts itself, so hold this site to the same checks.

We say when something varies by state, because on this subject that is usually the honest answer. We do not publish a statistic we cannot source, which is why you will find very few numbers here. We are not a law firm and we are not your lawyer, which is on every page of this site. And where a question has a genuinely national answer, we say so plainly rather than hedging for the sake of appearing careful.

If you find something here that fails one of these tests, we would genuinely rather hear about it than not.