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Divorce lawyer knows a thing or two
about marriage
By Stephanie Dunlap
Randal Bloch is a quick blast of brisk wind blowing close to the ground,
in spite of her entreaties to a photographer to make her tall, thin
and blonde.
“Coffeeteawaterjuice?” she offers before leading visitors
back to her bright office. It’s punctuated by clumps of stuffed
bears, a few unwieldy plants and a mantle overgrown with pictures
of her family — husband, two kids and an exchange student from
Slovenia.
Like Bloch, her plants don’t seem to act like proper plants
should, growing unwieldy but brightly alive in the sunlight that drifts
through a tall window.
“I’m not real normal,” Bloch says.
She says it’s because she still believes in having fun. Maybe
that’s how she’s kept her humor honed over three decades
of guiding clients through the dissolutions of their marriages. A
twist of impish humor dilutes the blunt, matter-of-fact approach,
like sincerity dilutes Bloch’s quick-witted smooth-talking.
But no healing thyself for this physician: She’s been married
three years longer than she’s practiced law, which is now 32
years. Nor is she a child of divorce. Maybe following her father,
Harold Wagner, into law and then joining his practice had something
to do with that.
“Nobody can afford to divorce a divorce lawyer,” she says.
“My husband couldn’t afford to divorce me. He wouldn’t
like that outcome. I keep telling him that.”
She first got into the domestic relations field to be an advocate
for women. Thirty years ago, that mostly meant litigating forgery
charges.
“I learned a lot about forgery and lettering because that’s
what women did,” she says.
She also worked in women’s civil rights employment litigation,
but back then most women didn’t have the business interests
they have today.
“Times have changed,” she says, noting a reporter’s
typing skills.
Bloch refused to learn to type. If she typed well, someone would have
expected her to do it. She didn’t even get a computer until
this past August.
Even so, as a young graduate of Brooklyn Law School in the 1970s she
caught the way men subtly tried to demean the female law students.
Women noticed how many professors directed their most offensive questions
— about rape, for instance — to the female students. When
Bloch walked into a prosecutor’s office, he put his feet up
on the desk.
Cincinnati, of course, wasn’t any better than New York.
“When I came out here it was, ‘Honey, cutie, sweetie,’ ”
she says. “Some attorney threw a book at me in the middle of
court, I think to see if I’d flinch, and the judge wouldn’t
do anything.”
Though she tries to keep things light, sometimes the detail work of
dissolving happily ever after gets to Bloch.
“At some point everybody in the field sits back and contemplates
the number of divorces that are happening,” she says. “We’ve
gotten calls in the last week from the children of our clients we’ve
seen get divorces. To start seeing the next generation is really disconcerting.”
Bloch always asks her clients if their marriages can be saved before
anyone signs dotted lines, something she says any good domestic relations
attorney will do.
The worst is watching parents play kids off each other. She sees that
daily.
“The best (divorces) to work through are the ones where the
parties will work together to come to a good result for both of them
and their children,” she says.
That’s what excites her about a new approach called collaborative
law. Both parties and their lawyers commit to reaching consensus outside
the courtroom. If one party decides to go to court after all, both
must find new attorneys, which she says is “a real disincentive.”
Life generally goes better when parties come to their own agreement,
and children’s lives are much, much better when their parents
find a way to agree, she says.
“Any time children are involved and they’re interviewed
by the court, those are very difficult days,” Bloch says.
Money troubles and substance abuse are the two most common reasons
for the 50-some divorces Bloch brokers every year.
As a coroner must have some skewed insight into life, a divorce lawyer
must know some secrets about marriage, right? Bloch doesn’t
miss a beat.
“Communication, communication and — shall we say it a
third time? — communication.”
Here’s an idea, she says: How about instead of deciding what
dishes to put on the registry, couples decide how they’re going
to run their money, how they’re going to make decisions and
what to do when they can’t agree.
“The more people talk before marriage, at least you’ve
got a shot going in to the marriage that you’ve gone through
some of the discussion items,” she says. “Because marriage
is stressful. You have to work at friendships, you have to work at
relationships. It’s a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job, probably
the hardest institution, the hardest job in the world.” ©
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