No-fault divorce simply means that either party can sue for a divorce, and they don’t need to prove wrongdoing in order to be granted a divorce from their spouse. Prior to no-fault divorce laws, married people typically had to prove that the other person was responsible for the breakdown of the marriage, which made divorces more lengthy and painful than they are today.
Traditional grounds for fault in a divorce case included cruelty, adultery, desertion, imprisonment, and physical inability to engage in sex (provided that inability was not disclosed prior to marriage). Proving adultery and cruelty could be especially difficult, and forced many couples to stay together when only one of the parties didn’t want a divorce.
The need to blame one party or the other for dissolution of a marriage also led many couples to bend the rules of testimony in order to obtain a divorce. Unhappy couples would often stage an incident of adultery to establish grounds for divorce, and parties routinely lied under oath in order to obtain divorces. Out of fear that strict, fault-based divorce laws were making perjury widespread and rampant, California was the first state to adopt a no-fault divorce law in 1969.
With the introduction of no-fault divorce laws, which are now applicable in all 50 states with slight variations among them, either party to the marriage can initiate divorce proceedings without blaming the other party for violating the marriage contract. Instead of meeting legal criteria for the dissolution of marriage, a petitioner can now sue for divorce without blaming the other person for wrongdoing or having to prove that the failure of the marriage was the other person’s fault. It has greatly simplified divorce proceedings, and in many cases, reduced the cost of filing for divorce.
In most states, you can get a no-fault divorce by simply claiming irreconcilable differences. This is also known as incompatibility or irremediable breakdown of the marriage. There are no evidentiary hearings with a no-fault divorce, and divorce lawyers spend considerably less time preparing each case. The preparation time is usually spent in determining how the married couple’s property is to be divided, who will get custody of the children or how custody will be shared, and other particulars of the settlement.
Some states have mandatory separation periods for no-fault divorces, which tend to encourage couples to work out their difference whenever possible. The waiting periods can be frustrating, though, which leads many people to choose a fault divorce instead, where grounds can be easily proved.
The no-fault divorce tends to mean, especially in community property states, that the bad actions of one of the parties does not affect the equal distribution of property. Other issues of fault may be taken into consideration when determining child support or alimony.