Divorce Lawyer Says She Got 14 New Clients The Day After The Election — 'A Phenomenal Week Would Be 5'
Politics have increasingly become a wedge in marriages. But last week may just have been a tipping point.
Elnur | Canva Pro Studies have shown that political disagreements have been a steadily increasing reason for people, especially women, to file for divorce.
However, while political divides and polarization are certainly nothing new, there are indications that the 2024 election just might have been a tipping point where relationships are concerned.
A divorce lawyer said she gained 14 new clients after Election Day, more than three times the normal number.
Political disagreements have been tearing families apart for a decade now, but 2024 seems to be on a whole new level because the contrasts between the sides of the political aisle and their respective candidates this year could not possibly have been more stark — far more so than they ever have been.
Women's issues, in particular, have, of course, been at the center of this contrast, and it seems to have become a last straw for many. A divorce lawyer known as @ParkerLawyer on X said her case count surged after Election Day.
Of course, it's possible that this surge is being driven by men, but it's extremely unlikely. Women initiate divorces as much as 70% of the time, according to some estimates. And given the contours of the election, it's not at all surprising that a surge like this would occur.
The lawyer said that five new clients would be 'phenomenal' in a normal week. Others in the field noticed similar surges, too.
"I had 14 potential new clients schedule consultations for divorce over the past three days," the lawyer wrote on the Saturday after the election. "For context, a phenomenal week would be scheduling at least 5."
Putting this even more into stark relief is the fact that "November is the slowest month of the year for new divorce cases" in a normal year.
There's no way to prove that the election is responsible, of course, but … well, can you come up with another explanation?
She was far from alone in this assessment, either.
Another woman who runs social media pages for law firms said she saw a staggering ten-fold spike in search activity starting the morning of November 6, the day after the election results.
Social media is also full of men saying they've been served divorce papers by their wives in the days since the election.
It's not just women who are talking about a surge of divorces post-election. Men online are reporting that they're experiencing it as well, like a viral Reddit post in which a man said just 48 hours after Election Night, his wife served him with divorce papers.
"I didn't even know it was possible to be served divorce papers this quickly," the man wrote in his since-deleted post. "I'm shocked I married someone willing to throw away our entire life over politics," he went on to say.
Nobody knows this relationship but the people in it, of course, but it's likely his wife does not feel that her husband's vote is just "politics." For one, the misogynist rhetoric that has been unleashed by people who voted like him since election night is frankly astonishing — with "your body, my choice" becoming a repetitive chant among men who voted for the president-elect. That's ghastly enough.
But polling has also shown that most Republican voters in this election, the vast majority of whom were men, were largely misinformed on many issues as well as the Republican policy proposals put forth to solve them.
Democratic voters, on the other hand, were the opposite, and 58% of women voted for Kamala Harris.
This suggests, of course, that women are very much in the know about the ways the incoming administration is likely to impact their lives, including not just the policies they have already been promised but ones with the potential to be added to the list of legislative priorities too — namely eliminating no-fault divorce, which has been a fixation among many state-level Republican politicians, religious conservatives, "men's rights activists" and others for years now.
This would mean women would only be able to divorce their husbands if they can prove some kind of wrongdoing — a thing that is impossible to do in all but the most extreme cases.
As another woman on X put it, when it comes to divorce, women "better do it now if [they] want to do it," and it seems many of them have reached that same conclusion.
Elections have consequences, as the saying goes. Sorry, gents.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.