When I got divorced, I would have happily paid a huge one-time settlement payment to my wife to avoid going through the whole process. I had a lot of high value assets from before, that did not appreciate much during our marriage. (In Canada, you only have to pay 50% of the increase in asset value from wedding day to separation day). I intimated this to my wife. She took that as a sign of weakness and dragged me through the courts (with encouragement from some social workers). At the end of the legal process she ended up getting a paltry sum (as compared to my initial offer). Also since our marriage lasted very small period of time, her alimony came out to be zero. My initial offer was 5x the amount she got in end. But I had to pay the lawyers a lot. I would have rather given that money to her. Also, by the time the whole process ended, my assets had significantly grown in value, so I had to liquidate a smaller amount to pay her share.