Breakout rooms for breakups
Divorce is still divorce, but doing it on Zoom might be less painful,
When it comes to living life on Zoom, nothing seems off limits these days. Even divorce.
In January, a screenshot of Mary-Kate Olsen and her now ex-husband, Olivier Sarkozy — taken from their divorce over Zoom – was shared online and went viral.
Justin Harris, 35, who had been married for just over five and a half years before he separated from his husband, spent 10 hours on a Zoom call for his virtual divorce mediation midDecember.
He said a few close friends that knew of his situation sent him memes of Olsen’s divorce, as a tongue-in-cheek way to cheer him up.
Receiving them, he felt encouraged that it has opened up a discussion about what has been going on behind closed doors for those going through divorce during a pandemic.
Though Harris was hesitant about officially ending his marriage in such an unprecedented way, he understood that having to adapt to a new way of life with Zoom was only a small hurdle of the experience of divorce. “I didn’t think it was ideal initially, but after going through it I was kind of relieved because I didn’t have to see my ex that much at all,” Harris said.
He prepped for the day just like he would for any other Zoom meeting.
He sat in front of his computer screen at his home in Toronto, with a clean, somewhat curated background. There wasn’t the added stress of having to commute, deal with parking, forgetting documents at home or rushing.
When attendees were allowed into the Zoom, he briefly saw his ex on the screen before the mediator put them in separate rooms (called “breakout rooms,”) with each of their legal teams. The mediator would go back and forth between the two rooms, to determine what was fair and divide assets.
Harris was surprised at how analytical it was, as a result of it taking place online, and there was a lot of waiting around. “Sometimes you’re just sitting there making small talk with your lawyer because they’re the only ones on the screen,” Harris said.
They engaged in to-be-expected pandemic-type topics like whether they’ve made banana bread or sourdough, and whether they’ve hopped on the Peloton bandwagon. Other times they sat in silence.
When he got hungry, he went to his kitchen and reheated leftover shrimp linguini from the night before and poured himself a healthy glass of wine. Despite being at the home he once shared with his ex, he felt doing their mediation over Zoom and without seeing each other on screen during it allowed him to be less emotional.
“When you’re around people they give off this energy and aura,” Harris said. “This was all electronic so it made it feel it was more of a business transaction, which I guess it kind of is. It’s a transaction that certifies that there’s a termination of an agreement and that agreement just happens to be a marriage,” Harris said.
The downside? He says that contradictorily, not being in the same room with his ex means they could almost be more heartless and ruthless when negotiating various agreements, though he believes it was a fair process.
“The legal profession has definitely embraced technology more so now than ever before,” said Toronto divorce lawyer Nandishi Bekah. She says the pandemic has shifted the legal landscape significantly and that legal professionals and their clients are having to adjust, adapt and exercise patience.
But not all technology is created equal and Bekah isn’t a stranger to the technology issues that can arise over Zoom. She recently attended her first Zoom divorce and a judge asked everyone to mute their microphones until it was their turn to speak, to prevent people from talking over one another and to minimize sounds and interruptions. Her client was unaware that his mute wasn’t on and started swearing once his exwife began to speak. Bekah said it’s harder to control situations over Zoom when you’re not with your client in person.
That said, there are many pros to having a divorce online. “It allows for more convenient, faster, efficient and cost-effective methods of dealing with legal matters that were never previously available to the public,” Bekah said. Now that technology is being integrated into the day-to-day procedure of the law, she says it’s going to be extremely difficult and “highly impractical” to go back to the days of filing endless paperwork and appearing in person. “This pandemic has forced us to re-evaluate the efficiency of our system and make necessary changes to surmount the obvious obstacles brought about by COVID-19,” Bekah said.
For Harris and his partner, the mediator very clearly outlined their next steps, and helped them come up with a new agreement with terms and stipulations. They officially applied for a divorce certificate with the courts, also done online.
“I had this view of what love is and what marriage is and when you see the dissolution of it, you realize looking back it’s just the same as when you got the paperwork to file for your marriage,” Harris said. “It’s the same signing that acknowledges that you’re no longer in this relationship. It’s kind of cyclical.”
After their divorce came to an end, the final thing they had to do was put their home on the market, their last tie together as a couple. It sold within one week, on what would have been their seventh wedding anniversary. “Hashtag seven year itch,” Harris said.