Marital assets must be shared. Any assets acquired before your marriage are yours to keep. To make equitable distributions to both sides, these assets then must be valued. If you and your spouse started a dot-com company or have a slew of stock options, these valuations can be challenging, to say the least. But this process is a necessity before any distributions can be made to each spouse.
Distributions can come in many forms, but alimony is the most common.
How you decide to handle distributions is dependent upon your situation. If you make substantially more money than your spouse and have the cash available, you may opt to pay your spouse's fair share in alimony. Then you won't have to worry about liquidating your assets and owing big taxes at the time of sale. Even better, you'll get a tax deduction for any alimony you pay. But if both spouses earn similar amounts, odds are good you may have to divide up the assets.