Divorce Lawyers Share the Most Ridiculous Divorces They've Witnessed

Couples who recite traditional marriage vows promise to love, honor, and cherish each other in good times and bad, whether richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do they part. But nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, so clearly not everybody is weathering every storm that comes their way.

Of course, there are situations where no one should stay in their marriage, and plenty of couples give it their all before throwing in the towel. A lot can go down between man and wife, and nobody sees the crazy side of marriage more clearly than a divorce lawyer. Here are some of the most outrageous reasons behind divorce petitions, according to a recent Ask Reddit thread.

Imagine being married to someone who kept the toilet paper under lock and key. User Julietcaravello1 says her client was the outrageous one, which has to suck, no matter what you're billing. "He had OCD, which manifested primarily financially," she says, and this made him very controlling of the family with his penny-pinching ways. In addition to prohibiting dining out and trips to the movies, he forced the family to submit to home haircuts (by him). But the worst part pertained to... toilet paper.

"Weirdest of all: he kept one toilet paper roll on him at all times and you had to get one square from him before you could go to the bathroom," Juliet says. "He never gave more than one square." In addition to the TP tyranny causing potty-training problems, the final straw came when he cut bangs for his wife without her permission. 

Custody agreements can often drag on long after divorce has finalized. SkipFirstofHisName, who works as a staff attorney for a judge, says the most outrageous hearing he witnessed involved a mother who was seeking sole custody because her ex was spending all his money on psychics and was delinquent on support. During cross, he revealed that "he had spent over $5,000 on 'readings' and other services." But the psychic also apparently gave him reason not to pay support.

He testified that "the psychic could 'read' that his children were provided for without his money." Plus, his psychic also advised him that he would eventually "seek great riches" in Mexico with his children in tow, so they'd eventually be rich, too. However, the judge read that as him essentially saying, "my psychic told me to kidnap my kids."  I wonder if his psychic warned him at all that this wouldn't go over well in court?

A user who worked in a law office says the owner of the practice used to share a story that I really, really hope was a tall tale, because it's honestly horrifying.

OK, look, I'm going to keep the working on this one as delicate as possible, but the man in this case sued his wife for divorce because she wouldn't allow him to "use a loaded gun as a... 'marital aid,'" IRtheLaw19 says euphemistically. 

Based on the emphasis there, this means that, at one point, the wife allowed this very unsafe gun play in the bedroom, though she later became understandably uncomfortable with this kink and would only allow it if the gun was empty. The husband apparently deemed this reasonable grounds for divorce. 

I really hope he's still single, because YIKES.

Though not a divorce lawyer, brevity_is_hard was a criminal defense attorney whose "heavily pregnant" client was jailed after attacking her husband with an iron. "Said client was now sitting in a police cell, sobbing and insisting that her husband deserved it and she wanted a divorce." While I can think of few justifiable reasons for hitting somebody with an iron, they do exist, but this client's reason for attacking her spouse didn't quite pass muster.

"I asked what he had supposedly done, assuming he'd cheated or something similar," says brevity. Even though infidelity wouldn't be a good reason to hit someone with a heavy and possibly burning hot device, that wasn't it, either. "Turns out she'd checked his phone and found a single [adult website] in his browsing history." 

And it wasn't even a recent hit — he had visited it two years prior. Honestly, I'm most amazed by the fact this man never cleared his browser history once in those two years.

User schmerpmerp recalled a divorce decree they drafted for a couple who "hated each other more than any two people I'd ever met," and that's pretty clear based on the contents of the decree. Apparently, "her prized possession was a room or two full of scrapbooking materials," while his was, "a yard full of junk cars that he never worked on." So you'd think each spouse would want their so-called prized possessions. Nope. 

Though they argued over every little thing — even a toilet brush— they did agree on one thing. Basically, as much as they prized those items, it was even more important to them to have the satisfaction of  depriving each other of their favorite thing. So she wanted his cars, ostensibly so he couldn't have them, while he wanted her scrapbooking supplies for presumably similar reasons. After the divorce was finalized, he hauled her scrapbooking stuff to the dump and she had a reclamation shop haul his junkers away. 

In another thread, a divorce lawyer shared that his client owed a bookie $70K. While gambling addiction has no doubt led to the dissolution of many marriages, the case here isn't quite what one would expect. This wasn't a wife leaving her gambling addict spouse over the mountain of debt he'd created. 

In this case, the gambler was filing because he wanted to use his half of the proceeds from the sale of their house to pay off his debts (and probably rack up more). Honestly, he probably did her a favor.

In case you don't remember your high school English class, Jane Eyre's boss, Mr. Rochester, has a secret wife in the attic who is "crazy." While cpearc00's client didn't put his wife in an attic, he did put her in an institution "based on a misdiagnosis, the medication of which caused the wife to be unable to care for herself." 

His client began dating someone else and possibly developed a substance abuse problem. Meanwhile, his spouse got off her medication and made a full recovery. Once she saw what became of her husband, she understandably didn't want to be married to him any longer.