Readers outside the US may not have heard of Siggy Flicker. I had not, but it emerges that she is a matchmaker from New York and a self-proclaimed “love & life expert”. She makes regular TV appearances as both a guest and presenter.
She is also a divorcée. And if you make your living as a relationship expert, analysing other people’s dating foibles and failures, then I suppose you have to be just as open about your own experiences, and sure enough Siggy proclaims on the website of TV channel VH1 that she left her marriage, to “the perfect man”, because “their relationship lacked real chemistry”.
Six years on from the split, she remarried and it was this second marriage which earned Siggy a mention on the Huffington Post divorce blog this week. It turns that Siggy invited her ex-husband Mark to be best man at the ceremony!
She explained this unusual move:
“Everyone was like, ‘I don’t really really understand.’ I said, ‘You don’t have to understand it, we do. When I looked up at Mark when he was saying his best man speech, I thought to myself, wow, I did this divorce right.”
On her own site, the matchmaker praises her first and second husbands for their “class and dignity” and says she is “so very proud” of the way she and Mark handled the divorce.
“My children Sophie and Joshua have been saved from the brutal battles of DIVORCE.”
Of course, we cannot know exactly what went on behind the scenes but I find this a rather inspiring story. When we deal with divorce, our job here at Stowe Family Law is so often to help our clients navigate their way through the stormy waters of separation. We chase recalcitrant spouses through the courts, track down hidden assets, mediate agreements between reluctant partners, and do our very best to guide the courts towards fair settlements.
But of course not every marriage ends in bitterness and resentment! Some couples make their own financial and childcare arrangements and really do manage to stay friends, and not just for the sake of the children! Remember that old Beatles song We Can Work It Out? Well, lots of former couples do just that.
If every divorce was as amicable as Siggy and Mark’s seems to have been, the world would be a much happier place and we divorce lawyers would have far less work to do. But we’d still advise people to make those voluntary arrangements legally binding!
