Here’s the scenario: your significant other wants to move. Maybe you have to move, maybe you don’t. If there is any sign of instability in your home, even if divorce or separation seems a long way off, before you up and move with your children, talk to an attorney. I’ll tell you why.
From a judge’s perspective, children are the anchor. Where they are determines most everything else if it comes time for you and your spouse to go your separate ways. That anchor, your children, will determine where decisions are made, what culture, what geography, what normative values determine your outcome. And it doesn’t matter where the new place is. If you don’t want Alabama norms deciding your life, don’t move to Alabama. If you don’t want Albanian norms deciding your life, don’t move to Albania. If you don’t want your children’s lives to be decided by a judge in Pittsburgh, don’t move to Pittsburgh. If you don’t want your children’s lives to be decided by a judge in Paris, don’t move to Paris. You get the picture.
If you decide to move the children, you need to do it with eyes wide open. Regardless of your significant other’s representation, assume that the move is forever (or at least until the children grow up and make their own decision). Your decision sentences them to a life wherever you have moved them.
If you want to move but understand or desire a different outcome than changing their permanent residency, you absolutely must talk to an attorney, a general family law attorney if you are moving within the United States and a genuine International Family Law Attorney if you are considering moving outside the United States. There is advice we will render; there are things we can do to help greatly increase the likelihood that what you expect, what you intend, what you desire is what will occur.
I get it. Moving to a new place can be exciting, filled with opportunities, filled with new beginnings. You don’t want to kill the momentum. You don’t want to say “no.” You don’t want to disappoint your significant other’s strong desire, particularly if it seems like that might call the question about your staying together much sooner than you want to. But for all the uncertainty and unhappiness that this question seems to hold, it will be worse if you are farther down that road facing that same question but the road now bears a foreign name.
Good fences builds good neighbors. Do yourself the good service of learning about fences that can be built. Let’s build that fence so that the likelihood of going from bad to worse is greatly reduced.
-Michael Manely