Filing the paperwork for her divorce was more complicated for Nuala Bishari than planning her 2019 wedding at San Francisco City Hall.
I was standing in my kitchen frying an egg when I got the call. My divorce, a clerk from San Francisco’s Unified Family Court told me, was final. In fact, I’d been divorced for two months.
I had no idea. I’d pestered the court, leaving multiple voicemails inquiring about the status of my case, but the last thing I expected to hear was that a judge had dissolved my marriage eight weeks earlier.
The call ended, and I stood, shocked, with the phone in my hand. As it sank in, I was hit with a huge wave of relief — not that my marriage was over (we’d been separated for two years) but that I was finally done wading through the complicated piles of paperwork that had bogged down the past year of my life.
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I was not the first of my friends to get married, but in 2022, I was the first to file for divorce. It was a lonely journey, in more ways than one. There was no pool of experience to draw from, no one to tell me how to start such an opaque process or even how long it would take.
I decided I needed a lawyer, but quickly realized hiring one was far beyond what I could afford. One told me divorces at her firm started at $10,000. The average cost of getting a divorce in California if you don’t have children, I learned, is $17,500, and if you have kids, it jumps to $26,000.
Was it possible that even with no kids, no shared property, an amicable separation and nothing being contested, I couldn’t afford to get divorced?
In desperation one afternoon, I Googled, “How to get divorced San Francisco” and landed on a step-by-step guide on the California Courts website, which made the whole thing sound easy.
“You can get a divorce without a lawyer,” the website said at the bottom, in bold, next to an exclamation point graphic.
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Challenge accepted.
Forgoing a lawyer would bring my divorce costs down to just $435 for court filing fees. I printed out the FL-100 form that gets the process rolling with a giddy sense of optimism.
Little did I know it would take 13 months, six visits to the courthouse, multiple calls with the court’s self-help service, several episodes of crying in frustration and a dozen YouTube tutorials to finally get divorced.
Getting married is ridiculously easy. Undoing a marriage? It will take months, if not years.
I was blissfully unaware as I stood in my wedding gown at City Hall, filling out paperwork before my ceremony. There was no CliffsNotes primer on the government’s rules for marriages. I learned too late, for example, that to remove my spouse as a beneficiary of a personal financial account, I needed their permission — even though they didn’t have to grant it to be added. Divorce was the only way to skirt that.
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As the petitioner, or the one who filed for divorce, I processed the lion’s share of the paperwork. All forms — and there were many of them — had to be dropped off in person. But during the pandemic, the family court operated with limited hours and was open only from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
The forms were not as straightforward as they seemed. One mischecked box or missing signature would stall the entire process, and I was never notified about my mistakes. I’d wait weeks or months for the forms to be mailed back to me, which signified that they had been correctly received. Too often nothing arrived. It was only when I returned to the clerk’s office that I was informed I’d done something wrong. In these instances, there were no copies of the forms on hand, so I’d have to go home, print them out, fill them out again, return to the clerk’s office to drop them off, and the whole waiting process would start over.
“The reason why there are so many forms is because they want to lay out every single step as it proceeds through the system,” said Norah Alyami, founder of DIY Family Law, a Bay Area-based firm that offers by-the-hour consultations, educational videos and mediation. “The problem is the forms tend to contain legalese that self-represented litigants — usually people who have not been to law school — are not going to understand. It puts a lot of responsibility on individual litigants to figure out what a form is actually asking for.”
I experienced this as I struggled to figure out what the difference was between “community property” and “quasi-community property,” or what the phrase “good cause appearing” meant. A misinterpretation of one question could lead to months of delays.
Alyami offers legal services that I sorely wish I’d discovered when doing my own divorce. She doesn’t require expensive retainers to secure her services, and even provides document reviews to those doing their own divorce to ensure they filled out everything correctly.
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In cases where someone has started their own divorce and gotten stuck, she spends a lot of time untangling the mess.
“They may be all over the place in terms of which forms they filed, and they may not have happened in the right order,” she said.
I asked her if the process was intentionally difficult, perhaps to push people into hiring lawyers. She disagreed. Legislators and the Judicial Council have tried hard to streamline the process so people can do this on their own, she said.
After my experience, I can say it hasn’t been a particularly successful effort.
Nearly a year to the day after I filed for divorce, I dropped off a stack of forms to the clerk’s office for what I hoped was the last time.
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“I love getting these final packets!” a clerk said, beaming, before telling me that it would take a few weeks to be finalized because hundreds of divorce cases were queued ahead of mine.
For the first time in this entire process, I felt less alone.
The year I filed for divorce, six of my friends got married. I didn’t feel awkward about celebrating their love; I adore a wedding. But mired in the struggle to manage my divorce, I imparted unwelcome advice.
“You don’t have to sign paperwork,” I told them all.
They didn’t want to hear it. “Sure, right,” they’d respond, not making eye contact. No one wants to think about divorce before a wedding.
But in 2022, the year I filed for divorce in San Francisco, 1,736 couples in the city did the same.
A narrative persists that a commitment to someone must include formally registering the relationship with authorities. This trumps what I see as the most beautiful part of a wedding ceremony, where vows are read in front of loved ones and promises are made. Yet for nearly everyone I know, that’s not enough. There’s an outsized value placed on the government recognizing that you have chosen someone to be with, ostensibly, for the rest of your life.
Formalized marriage can help couples transcend some of the broken aspects of our society — such as gaining decent health insurance or having a say over the end-of-life care of a partner.
After getting a glimpse inside the bureaucracy of legal marriage, however, it’s unlikely I’ll do it again.
Reach Nuala Bishari: nuala.bishari@sfchronicle.com
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