Madonna and Guy Ritchie, part 1

I have noticed in my reading and research that Madonna’s divorce from Guy Ritchie presents an amazingly compact nugget of family law information. Their situation presents an example from which to answer questions about divorce, if we assume the hypothetical that the divorce was here in Oregon. I hope you can see the same wealth of knowledge that this news story presents to me. I have used celebrity cases such as Alec Baldwin and Britney Spears to educate TV audiences about how “regular” divorces can parallel the issues that famous people also experience.

Madonna and Guy Ritchie have been married for 7 ½ years. In Oregon, does it matter how long you’ve been married in terms of figuring out what happens with your divorce? Yes, it matters to a degree. Usually, regardless of how long your marriage is, you keep half of what you both accumulated during the marriage. The length of the marriage affects the things you brought into the marriage. In Oregon, a short-term marriage is one less than five years. In a short-term marriage, you generally take half of the accumulation during the marriage and all of whatever you personally came in with. In a long-term marriage of more than nine years, you generally take an equal share of whatever you currently have, regardless of whatever you came in with. A mid-term marriage is between five and nine years, as Madonna and Guy have, and a mid-term marriage can be characterized either as short-term or long-term depending on the circumstances.