Our economy and society are still not really set up to deal with divorce, and probably can never be, even though the culture encourages it. Yes, but you're dividing a shrinking pie , plus the people have new expenses from new relationships and children. Everyone gets poorer , and the judge is going to make everyone share the sacrifice, whether they're the one who wanted the divorce or not. 3-It's true that the law lets the judge make one party pay the other's fees, or divide the property differently to punish someone who does something really awful or wastes or steals a lot of money. But it costs thousands to prove anything like that, so it only works if you're dealing with really big money.
Justice is expensive .
Also, in practice, the guilty try to use all of these remedies against the innocent, and defending against them sucks up all the lawyer's time and the client's money. But you really can't predict that . In fact, it is considered unethical for a divorce lawyer to even give a client an estimate, because it's so out of control. Either side can pull all kinds of stuff in court that just makes both the lawyers waste time until one client runs out of money. And the thing with custody cases is that no matter how reasonable one side is, how much you give up in order to stay out of court, the other side can always demand more until you have to choose between fighting and never seeing your kids.