A Couple Who Wanted Clarity From the Start, And Chose a Fixed Fee Package

The thing nobody tells you about deciding to separate is how much of it happens in supermarkets. Not the big conversations, those came later, but the small admissions. Standing in front of the pasta aisle, both holding the same brand of penne, and realising we hadn't actually spoken to each other since the school run on Monday morning. Two days. In a marriage of fourteen years. I think we both knew, long before either of us said it out loud.

What surprised me wasn't the decision. It was how calm we were when we finally sat down at the kitchen table and used the word. Separation. Mark made tea, which was very Mark, and we talked for about three hours. The kids were at his mum's. We talked about the house, the holidays, his pension, my freelance work, which schools the children would stay at, and somewhere around the second pot of tea I started crying, but not from sadness exactly. More from relief that we were finally being honest with each other.

By the end of that night we'd agreed on something I think saved us. We agreed we'd do this properly. No solicitors firing letters at each other. No arguments through the children. No drip-drip of legal bills that neither of us could see the end of. We wanted to know what this was going to cost us, in money and in time, before we'd even started.

That was the part Mark kept saying. "I just want to know the number."

He's an engineer. He likes plans. He likes whiteboards, and Gantt charts, and knowing what something costs before he agrees to it. I used to tease him about it. The night we got engaged he'd researched honeymoon flights before he'd bought the ring. But sitting at that kitchen table, I was so grateful for it. Because left to me, I'd have drifted into something open-ended and terrifying, and I'd have ended up bitter about every invoice.

So we started looking. Mark made a spreadsheet, naturally. We called three high street solicitors and asked them for an estimate. The first one quoted a retainer and an hourly rate and then said "but of course it depends on how it goes." The second said something similar. The third actually laughed when Mark asked for a total figure. Not unkindly. Just like the question itself was naive.

I remember Mark putting the phone down after that third call and saying, very quietly, "I'm not paying someone two hundred and fifty pounds an hour to read my emails."

We almost gave up. There's a particular kind of tiredness that comes from being treated like a problem to be billed rather than a couple trying to do the right thing, and we both felt it.

Then a friend of mine, who'd been through her own separation two years before, mentioned mediation. She'd done the whole thing through one of the fixed fee packages you can get now. She knew at the start what it would cost. She said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world, and I felt slightly stupid for not having known.

I rang Mark from the car park outside Sainsbury's. He'd left work early. We agreed on the phone, in less than five minutes, that this was the route we wanted. We'd do mediation, we'd add on fixed fee legal services for the bits we needed advice on, and we'd know the whole cost before we signed anything.

The first session was harder than I'd expected. Not because the mediator wasn't lovely, she was, but because the way it works is you go in on your own first, just you and her in a quiet room, talking through what's brought you here and whether mediation is the right fit. I'd assumed Mark and I would be sitting opposite each other from day one, and I felt oddly nervous walking in without him, like I'd forgotten my notes for an exam. But actually it gave me space to say things out loud that I hadn't quite said even to myself. She asked me about the children first. Our daughter was nine then. Our son had just turned six. And somewhere in answering that question I started to understand what we were really doing this for.

We had four sessions in total over about ten weeks. In between we did the finance forms, which were dull and fiddly and occasionally awful, but at least we both knew exactly what was coming. Pensions. Equity in the house. My freelance income, which had been deliberately kept low for years so I could be there at school pick-up. The maintenance figure for the children. Mark's car, which we both pretended was worth less than it was, and then laughed about. There were tears in one of the sessions, mostly mine, when we got to the part about Christmases.

But it never spiralled. That was the thing. Because we knew what the package included, and we knew there wasn't a meter running, neither of us felt the panic of "how much is this going to be by the end." We could take a breath. We could say "I need to think about this for a week." We could disagree without it costing us another four hundred pounds.

There was a brief wobble around the children's arrangements. Mark's solicitor friend mentioned that if we couldn't agree, the next step would have been court paperwork, a court form completion service for the C100, and probably a CAFCASS prep meeting before any hearing. Mark looked at me across the kitchen table when he was telling me, and we both just shook our heads. Not for us. Not if we could help it. We went back to the mediator the following week and worked it through ourselves.

When the agreement was finalised, and then turned into a proper consent order through the fixed fee legal add-on, Mark printed it out and put it in a folder. He showed me, slightly embarrassed, the little spreadsheet he'd kept all the way through. Every payment, every date, every milestone. The total at the bottom was almost exactly what we'd been quoted at the start. He'd been checking it the whole way through. Of course he had.

The children are eleven and eight now. They have two homes, and two of most things, and they tell us off when we don't communicate properly about football kits or homework diaries. We are not friends, Mark and I, but we are something. Something workable. Something kind.

A few months ago I bumped into him in a supermarket. Different one, different town. He was holding a packet of penne. We laughed for far too long about it in the middle of the aisle.

This story is based on real mediation experiences, with details changed to protect confidentiality.