By Neta, founder of SortMyDivorce · Updated
Most of these are not sinister. They are ordinary negotiation moves that work particularly well against someone who is exhausted, under-informed and emotionally invested — which describes almost everyone going through a divorce.
| What most tactics exploit | Time pressure, incomplete information, and emotional fatigue. |
|---|---|
| The universal counter | Slow down, write it down, and check it against the record. |
| Anchoring | An extreme opening designed to reset your sense of the range. |
| The exploding offer | A short deadline designed to prevent you taking advice. |
| Attrition | Reopening, delaying and generating correspondence until you concede to make it stop. |
| Salami slicing | Small concessions extracted one at a time, none worth fighting alone. |
| What makes you vulnerable | Not knowing what has already been agreed and what has moved. |
| What is not a tactic | Genuine disagreement. Not every unfavourable position is manipulation. |
Keeping track of dates like these across a stack of letters is exactly what SortMyDivorce does — start a free trial, no card needed.
It is worth saying plainly: not everything that goes against you is a tactic. People in divorces are prone to reading every letter as strategy, and that reading is exhausting and sometimes wrong. Your spouse may simply disagree with you. Their lawyer may simply be doing their job.
The value in recognising tactics is not so that you can be angry more accurately. It is so that you can respond to the mechanism rather than the provocation — which is cheaper, calmer and more effective.
What it looks like: an opening position so far from anything reasonable that it seems almost designed to insult.
What it is doing: resetting your sense of where the midpoint lies. If the opening is extreme, anything closer to the middle feels like a concession, even when it is still well outside the range you would have expected before the letter arrived.
Counter: do not treat their opening as the reference point. Establish your own view of the realistic range, from your lawyer, before responding. Then counter against that, not against them. And do not respond by anchoring extremely yourself unless advised to — matching an extreme with an extreme adds rounds and costs.
What it looks like: a proposal with a short deadline. Respond by Friday. Open for seven days.
What it is doing: preventing you from taking proper advice, comparing it against previous rounds, or thinking. Urgency degrades decisions, which is the point.
Counter: ask your lawyer whether the deadline is real. Most unilateral deadlines carry no force. Ask for more time — refusal to allow a few days for legal advice is itself informative about the offer. And notice that a genuinely good offer rarely needs a fuse.
What it looks like: nothing ever closes. Issues reopen. Deadlines slip. Correspondence multiplies. Every step takes three letters.
What it is doing: exhausting you and draining your legal budget until conceding feels cheaper than continuing.
Counter: this one is only visible over time, so document it — dates, what was agreed, when it reopened, what was promised and missed. Then respond to the pattern rather than the instance. Raise it with your lawyer as a pattern with evidence, and ask what options exist for moving the matter forward rather than continuing to correspond.
What it looks like: a series of small requests, each individually not worth a fight. Move the handover by an hour. Take one more item from the house. Adjust one figure slightly.
What it is doing: accumulating. Ten concessions that each cost you little add up to a materially different position, and at no point was there an obvious moment to object.
Counter: keep a record of concessions. If you cannot see the cumulative picture you cannot judge any individual request. Once you can, the decision on each one is informed — and some are still worth conceding.
What it looks like: slow responses, missed deadlines, requests for extensions, disclosure produced in instalments.
What it is doing: sometimes just disorganisation. Sometimes deliberate — delay favours whoever benefits from the status quo. If they are living in the house, controlling the finances or seeing the children on the current arrangement, time is on their side.
Counter: ask who benefits from the delay. If it is them, that is your answer. Document every missed date on both sides, and discuss with your lawyer what mechanisms exist to impose a timetable.
What it looks like: a letter that raises six issues at once, most of them minor, one of them significant.
What it is doing: the significant point gets less scrutiny because you spent your energy on the ones that provoked you.
Counter: the extraction habit. Every letter, five headings: proposals, requests, deadlines, assertions of fact, everything else. Do it before forming a view. The important item is often not the one that made you angry.
What it looks like: parenting arrangements linked, explicitly or otherwise, to financial concessions. Schedules that change when negotiations stall.
What it is doing: applying the one form of pressure most parents cannot ignore.
Counter: raise it with your lawyer immediately and keep parenting and finances separate in your own correspondence, however the other side frames it. Document changes to arrangements factually and contemporaneously — dates, what was arranged, what happened. This is one where a dated log matters more than almost anywhere else.
What it looks like: a warm, conciliatory letter that, read carefully, offers less than the last one.
What it is doing: exploiting the fact that tone is processed faster than content. A friendly letter containing a worse offer reads better than a cold letter containing a better one.
Counter: compare the substance against the previous round, issue by issue, before reading for tone. Tone is a choice made by the writer and carries no value.
What it looks like: your spouse contacting you directly with proposals, particularly if they are unrepresented, or "just wanting to talk about it like adults".
What it is doing: removing the advice layer. Direct discussions produce concessions that would not survive contact with a lawyer, and they create ambiguity about what was agreed.
Counter: it is entirely reasonable to say "I'd rather deal with this through the lawyers." If direct contact is unavoidable — as it often is with children involved — keep it to logistics, put anything substantive in writing, and forward it to your lawyer.
Almost every counter above reduces to the same three habits.
Slow down. Nearly all of these tactics need you to respond quickly. Almost none of the deadlines are real. The single most effective response to nearly everything here is twenty-four hours.
Write it down. What was proposed, when, in what words, on which issue. A negotiation you can see is one you can assess; a negotiation you are remembering is one you are guessing at.
Check the record before you react. Is this actually new? Has this issue been agreed before? Has this position moved backwards? You cannot answer any of those from memory six months in.
The reason these habits work against so many different tactics is that most of them exploit the same underlying weakness: that the person on the other end does not have a clear, current, quotable picture of their own negotiation.
Usually you cannot tell from one letter, and it does not matter as much as it feels like it does — the response is broadly the same either way. Over time, patterns distinguish themselves: genuine disagreement tends to come with reasons that hold up; tactics tend to repeat.
Discuss strategy with your lawyer. Some of what is described here is ordinary negotiation and some of it is corrosive, and the line matters — particularly where children are involved, and particularly because conduct can be relevant to costs in some jurisdictions.
Sometimes. Sometimes it is house style, and sometimes it is what their client instructed. Advocates' letters routinely contain characterisations you will disagree with. Tone carries no legal weight — extract the content and leave the adjectives.
Ask your lawyer. Naming a tactic can occasionally be effective and can equally escalate things for no gain. What is always right is to document it, so that if it becomes a pattern you can raise the pattern rather than a feeling.
Yes, and it is worth saying that the exhaustion is not a sign you are handling it badly. Sustained adversarial negotiation is genuinely depleting, and several of the tactics above work specifically because of that. Support — practical and emotional — is not a luxury here; it is part of negotiating well.
Last reviewed August 2026. Researched and written by Neta, founder of SortMyDivorce. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice — laws, fees and forms change, so please confirm current details with your court’s official website or a local family lawyer.
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