Articles Posted in Marriage

Some creative Boca Raton residents are using social media pressure to get one woman’s husband to sign their divorce papers. A Jewish woman has found out the hard way that her husband is not willing to grant her a Jewish divorce. Although she has received a civil divorce, Jewish divorce laws require that the husband sign a Get, a Jewish divorce decree, which would allow his ex-wife to remarry.

Yomin Postelnik and Leah Postelnik went through a tumultuous divorce and Yomin refused to grant his wife a Get, even though a host of rabbinical courts handed down orders for him to sign the document. A rabbi in Boca Raton heard about the case and mounted a social media campaign against Yomin to pressure him into signing the document. He urged several in the South Florida Jewish community to blackball Yomin until he granted Leah the divorce.

The Postelnik’s are not the only Jewish couple going through a divorce and who have experienced social media pressure. Tara Epstein and Aharon Friedman had a similar experience to the Poselniks. Friedman refused to grant Epstien a religious divorce. The social media campaign against Friedman was so aggressive that some were even demanding that he be fired from his job with United States Representative Dave Champ, R-Mich.

Imagine you are offered a credit card with fantastic terms: zero percent interest for the first 12 months and no foreseeable strings attached. You need a line of credit, so you sign up and promptly fall behind on your payments. After the first year, you have a fair amount yet to be paid. The credit card company informs you that your first year interest rate is expiring; the new rate is 23%. That’s higher than a lot of other cards but, if you’re like many people, you simply stay with the card because getting a new one with a lower limit is just too much work. You’ve made the commitment; you’re stuck with it.

This is the analogy being drawn by experts studying what they refer to as the “sliding, not deciding” effect of relationship development. Many young couples are now moving in with each other to sort of “test the waters” before marriage. Many of them find out, however, that their cohabitation becomes something very difficult to get out of — more difficult than they realized — and marriage just sort of happens based on their mutual desire to keep things the way they are. Instead of actually committing to the marriage, these couples simply slide right into it.

Unfortunately, many of these couples do not communicate their full intent prior to cohabitating. As we’ve blogged about in the past, lack of communication is never a good thing. While dating, these couples spend more and more time with each other until they simply get married. What might’ve been a relationship that would’ve otherwise lasted only a few months turns into marriage simply because both parties are too invested in their living situation to try anything else.

Since I just wrote about the top ten most expensive celebrity divorces, I figured why not go ahead and write about the shortest celebrity marriages. This topic may not have that much to do with my job as a Fleming Island Family Law Attorney, but it is interesting nonetheless. See the list as follows:

Actress Drew Barrymore married comedian Tom Green on July 4, 2001. Less than six months (166 days) later, Green filed for divorce.

“One Tree Hill” actors Chad Michael Murray and Sophia Bush were married on April 16, 2005 and separated five months later, merely 163 days after they said their vows.