… and can be a rather stressful experience. The emotional side of things can easily impede your judgement when dealing with your legal duties and responsibilities of marriage.

Marriage is a legally binding contract and one of its conditions is that once a couple are married, their assets and liabilities are considered to be owned by you both together. While you are together, you may choose to keep finances separate but if you divorce, the assets will be considered jointly and the starting point in division of the assets, whether owned jointly or in your individual names, is 50/50.

Where you can divorce will depend on a number of factors but often where you are married is not relevant. Provided you or your partner are habitually resident or domiciled in the UK, you can commence divorce proceedings here.

It is largely irrelevant who divorces who. Unless there are severe issues of conduct, it is unlikely that it makes any difference on issues such as children and finances.

The ground you need to prove for divorce is that your marriage has broken down irretrievably and the factors to rely upon in proving this are are one of the following factors:

• Unreasonable behaviour
• Adultery
• Two years’ separation with consent
• Five years’ separation without consent
• Desertation

In each case, the divorce process is virtually identical, and will take the same length of time. Currently, this is between four and six months from start to finish – there is no quick option.