Laura Wasser

Conversations about money certainly are not sexy, but they should give each of you some clarity and enable you to enter into your marriage with a better understanding of each other and what is important. Work and home responsibilities, joint or separate accounts, budgets, etc. are all subjects which should be discussed.

In seeking a lawyer, you are looking for an advocate, an expert advisor on the law and on your rights and responsibilities, a strategist, a negotiator, and a litigator.

Especially where financial matters are concerned, when it comes to dissolving a marriage, any dissembling at all is strictly against the law - on penalty of perjury. You need to disclose fully and factually, which is precisely what the discovery process is all about.

Dissolution and custody matters are the great equalizers. Having done this for a while, you do realize that everybody has the same issues. It doesn't matter how much money you have or how much power you have, you are always afraid you're never going to see your child.

If one person is spending all of their income on clothes, travel, hobbies, and entertaining, and one person is saving it, that may not be quite fair if and when you guys split up, depending on what the law is and what you decided to do.

I don't try to be sexy, but I do want to look as good as I can.

I represent celebrities, but I am not a celebrity.

Couples counseling gets many couples back together. But not all, and not always. For your own sake and that of your children, however, I recommend it - I almost insist on it - as the first step for anyone unhappy in a relationship.

There is probably no such thing as a good divorce, but clinging to an old idea of how relationships are unraveled can make a bad thing even worse.

I think if you're going to be in a relationship with someone, you need to be able to share the responsibility, the knowledge, the worry. It's not like it was when our parents or their parents were having lives where the mom just baked bread, and the husband worried about it, and the wife didn't know there was any problem.

The rarity is the sudden epiphany or single turning point showing you with dramatic clarity that your marriage is over, although that does happen. Most relationships hover on a precipice for years before one party or the other finally decides it is time to jump, and coming to the decision isn't easy.

I'm not a divorce monger by any means, but if you're not happy in a relationship, and you've grown apart, it's not healthy for a couple to stay together. It's better for kids to see two happy parents than two miserable parents.