You know about your driving record. You hear way too much about your credit report. Have you ever thought about your marriage record? How clean is that?
For most younger people, a divorce free marriage record is assumed. For older daters, many people expect to hear about your divorce. They may even go looking for you online to find out exactly what kind of record you’ve got, just to verify the stories you have told them about yourself.
You may not have been aware of it, but a divorce judgment, just like the original marriage license, is considered to be a part of the public record. The data is out there for anyone to find who knows how to look. If you have a divorce free marriage record, then you have nothing to worry about, and if you had simple divorce, you may also not care who is looking at that information.
However, if there were some detailed judgments, or if there are just things you don’t want others to know, what can you do? Unfortunately, marriage isn’t like a traffic ticket. When you cross the line, there isn’t a class to take away your points and return you to a divorce free marriage record. You have to accept that it is there.
You don’t have to leave all the papers public, however. Divorce records can be sealed so that enquiring minds with too much time on their hands don’t have anything to feed into the gossip mills. You can shield your children from the details, or just keep potential new mates from knowing exactly how things were divided in the divorce.
If you’ve never thought of looking into it, you might. Think of it as another record to check on to make sure it looks exactly the way you want it to for the world.
