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As lawyer with some twenty eight years of experience listening to the tales of woe that have driven men and women to the brink of divorce, one thing seems certain to me. There was usually plenty of warning before anyone said, "I do."

Except for issues relating to child custody and visitation, divorce, these days, is very much about the business of splitting up an economic partnership and less about pointing figures and assigning blame.

That is, perhaps, as it should be, since we don't want individual judges to have the power to deprive us of the fruits of our long years of labor just because we've behaved badly once or twice in the course of a long marriage, or because someone falsely but convincingly insists that we have. We also don't want to encourage long and bitter trials where our darkest secrets are exposed and, in the process, our last hope of preserving a civil relationship with a former husband or wife, for our own sake or for the sake of our loved ones.

Whether or not bad behavior should be the focus of divorce trials is beside the point, however. What we want for ourselves and for our children are marriages that last and that are happy and fulfilling.

Anyone who has ever been married, knows what a daunting goal it is to build such a marriage, even when both partners are reasonable, responsible, respectful, and sensitive people who are determined to compromise in order to make marriage work. The fact remains that we all have different needs and priorities, and conflicts are bound to arise.

Even though fault on the part of one or both parties is not the most important factor for courts to consider when deciding how to spread the wealthor the debtin the final analysis, it is one factor judges are allowed to consider even under most no-fault divorce statutes. Fault comes up all of the time in negotiations as well, so it is a subject that the divorce lawyer had best be well prepared to deal with.

In my own practice, I ask each of my clients to take a few weeks to ponder their marriages, jot down a few notes, and then to write me a two-part history of their marriage which I will use to prepare their case for negotiation, and, if all else fails, for trial.

Part one tells me the financial story so I'll know who contributed the most money and who built the most sweat equity or put in the most hours of unpaid labor at home. Part two tells me what went wrong. I ask my clients not for character profiles of their spouses, but for stories from their marriage. From

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