(FORTUNE Magazine) – THE UNITED STATES is the world's divorce mill, and in this decade, sadly, a lot of us are going to be headed for Splitsville. During the 1990s the Bureau of the Census reckons that somewhere between four and five out of every ten marriages will break up, a slight decline from the five out of every ten that prevailed through most of the 1980s. That drop has less to do with morals than with aging. In peristalsing through the demographic python, baby-boomers have left their 20s and early 30s, the time of life at which most divorces occur. But so prevalent is the phenomenon still that at Sloan's supermarkets in Manhattan, the back of the grocery receipt is imprinted with a $25-off coupon for the Divorce Center, which specializes in low-cost -- $150 plus court fees -- uncontested partings. With more than 54 offices in New York and New Jersey, owner Rick Kramer announces proudly: ''Our aim is to be the H&R Block of divorces.'' Divorce has become a high-level negotiation -- for couples at any income level. In two-income marriages, it means suddenly and consciously dividing assets accumulated and commingled over years. In marriages where one partner is the primary breadwinner, one of you is putting a value on a lifetime's work and investment before hiving off part of it for good. The other is bidding to secure an economic stake in something that represents years of hard work and may be all the nest egg you will ever have. But neither of you usually comes to the bargaining table playing from strength. Says Raoul Lionel Felder, a New York City matrimonial lawyer: ''If I told business executives that before they make a deal they should prepare themselves by losing sleep for a week, becoming highly emotional, and drinking too much, they'd say I was crazy. But that is how they make what can be the biggest and most difficult decision of their lives.'' What can you do to get the best deal in your divorce? The only sure-fire gambit: Marry rich. Guinness Book of Records, 1992 edition, reports that the largest settlement ever was won in 1982 by Soraya Khashoggi, wife of the Saudi Arabian arms dealer. The amount: (pounds)500 million, or roughly $950 million in real money. There aren't many Khashoggis on the marriage market, but on a less grandiose scale, a Wall-Streeter wed an heiress, then promptly quit his job to become a teacher and live off her trust fund. When they divorced several years later, she absorbed all the costs of child support and settled $1.65 million on him, ostensibly so he could afford a suitable home when their kids came for overnights. Says her lawyer, shaking her head: ''She overpaid on that deal. He could have rented a place.'' For most of us, however, divorce will be an economic bummer, even in cases where incomes and assets are way above average. Assume that both spouses work full time and have amassed property worth $500,000 to $1 million, usually consisting of a house and retirement savings. He earns at least $150,000, and she, having taken a couple of years off to be home with two babies, makes $50,000 to $100,000. They live on an income of $200,000 or more, but when the - twain finally part, each has half the assets the couple had before, a diminished income stream, and a lower standard of living. For the average household the situation is grimmer. According to the Bureau of the Census, when parents split up, income for the spouse with custody of the children -- usually Mom -- drops 37% within four months of the separation and tends to stay down unless she remarries or reconciles with Dad. As one recently burned investment banker snarled, ''The whole process of divorce stinks! No matter who you are!'' Still, there are ways to make this wrenching process less painful and to avoid expensive mistakes. Rule No. 1 (and the hardest to follow): Compartmentalize feelings of anger and guilt and keep them out of negotiations. Says New York City attorney Helene Brezinsky: ''A good deal has a lot to do with being reasonable about your expectations. Revenge is not a reasonable expectation.'' Many lawyers recommend that clients see a therapist while negotiating their split in order to have someplace to vent accumulated hostility before it robs them of all judgment. ''I don't have any more phone books in my office,'' says Marlin S. Potash, a psychologist who practices in Manhattan. ''My men clients kept tearing them up.'' Rule No. 2: Hire a good lawyer, one who understands Rule No. 1 (see box). Breaking up isn't hard to do anymore. Gone are the film noir private detectives lurking in seedy hotels to catch an errant husband with his ''niece'' or a wife in the bronzed arms of her tennis instructor. At least a quarter of the 50 states have pure no-fault statutes, which allow either spouse to file for divorce regardless of the other's wishes -- California led the way, natch, in 1970. But any state will now put an end to a union provided the spouses meet its residency requirements and both agree that they have lived apart for some time or cannot resolve their differences. The battleground has shifted to dividing the loot. Today marriage is considered an economic partnership to which both spouses contribute equally. What's fair, given the nature and duration of the partnership, is what guides judges in the disposition of assets. This concept, known as equitable distribution, is now the law in 40 states plus the District of Columbia. Nine others are community-property states, in which marital property belongs equally to both spouses, and one, Mississippi, remains a title state, which means that the spouse who has title to the property owns it. Under equitable < distribution, a wife in a marriage of 20 years or more will likely receive 50% of the assets; in shorter unions of say ten to 12 years, she might receive 30%. Equitable distribution is a vast improvement over the old days when a husband owned everything that was in his name -- and most of the property was -- and paid his ex-wife alimony until she died or remarried. Both halves of the couple were held hostage to this arrangement: Given the superior longevity rates of women, the husband was likely to bear the alimony burden until he died, and the wife was prevented from having any kind of social life with another man lest she lose her support. WHAT'S STILL UNFAIR about equitable distribution, at least as many judges interpret it, is the common assumption that a woman who stayed home to raise children can easily go out and get a good job. In a 1992 study, economists Joyce Jacobsen of Rhodes College in Memphis and Laurence Levin of California's Santa Clara University compared the earnings of women who returned to the work force after a gap of at least six months in employment, with those who never left it. ''The wages of women who have taken a leave from the labor market never catch up to the wages of women who never left it,'' they concluded. They figured that a seven-year gap in a woman's work experience ''costs ten years of earnings.'' How much worse for the woman who has never held a job. Sally Kleberg, a member of a wealthy family, was married in 1965, right before she graduated from the University of Texas with her bachelor's degree. When she divorced in 1991, she was paying her husband alimony and had assumed his debts from limited partnerships that had gone south. She was also saddled with $250,000 in legal fees. ''I had to go to work,'' she says. ''A 48-year-old woman with no MBA -- there was nothing for me out there -- nothing! The best I could do was a trust administrator in a bank for $25,000.'' Last fall she landed a job in the private banking division of Bankers Trust that paid her $75,000 a year and where she advises owners of family businesses about estate and retirement planning issues. ''I had lived all my life with a family business,'' she says. ''That's what gave me credibility at Bankers Trust.'' Alimony is still considered unmasculine, and judges are inclined to believe there is a name for a man who lives off the earnings of a woman. Women think so too. Queasiness about alimony, however, has not affected Ivan Boesky, the disgraced arbitrager who is seeking $1 million a year in alimony from his ex- wife, Seema. ''Why is he doing this?'' Barbara Walters asked Mrs. Boesky last spring on ABC's 20/20 program. Replied Seema, who has since been put under a gag order: ''He claims he has no money.'' Meanwhile, Vanity Fair magazine reports she is paying him $180,000 a year in temporary support. Under equitable-distribution laws, most states divide only assets acquired during marriage. Usually separate property, defined as what you bring with you into marriage or receive during it in the form of gifts or inheritance, is not part of any settlement. Needless to say, most of the wrangling is over what constitutes marital property and how those assets should be valued. Julia Perles, a Manhattan lawyer who chaired the committee that helped draft New York State's equitable-distribution law, believes that one of the biggest mistakes spouses make is mixing separate property so that it becomes indistinguishable from marital property. Adds Jack Zuckerman, who specializes in valuing assets as a forensic accountant in Sherman Oaks, California: ''You must keep track of your separate property. Sometimes if a piece of real estate is sold during the marriage and the money is reinvested in another asset, it is hard to prove that it is separate property without proper records.'' THE ONE WHO HAS the best records wins the war. Says Martha Clark Briley, an executive at a financial services company who is now in the midst of a divorce: ''I keep meticulous records, and I've had to produce everything: a note to substantiate a loan from my father, the record of my interest payments, what I pay babysitters for my two children, what their clothes cost me, school tuitions, what I spent on vacations, mortgage payments. Fortunately I have a computer program where I can keep track of my expenses.'' So hang on to those mutual fund statements, income tax returns, canceled checks, credit card receipts, and pension fund accounting statements. (Yes, your pension fund is a marital asset, and depending on the length of the union, your spouse may be entitled to as much as half its future value.) Your business is also a marital asset, at least the part of it that appreciated during the time you were wed. Under equitable distribution, your spouse is likely to be entitled to a share of the business, but unless you want a dissident shareholder on your board, you will have to buy him or her out. Warns Manhattan attorney Peter E. Bronstein: ''Your divorce can encumber the business with debt, just as an LBO does, to pay out a settlement. It is our job as lawyers to see that businesses are not destroyed.'' To avoid this fate, most payouts are structured over a period of years, almost like annuities. One of Bronstein's clients, the founder of a $100-million-a-year business, was even able to persuade her husband to accept alimony generous enough to allow him to live in luxury, in return for not pressing his claims to her business under equitable distribution and forcing her to sell or mortgage it to pay him off. But valuing a business for the payout is more an art than a science, as the case of Henry Kravis's divorce illustrates. Sarah Bartlett's book, The Money Machine, says that when he signed a separation agreement ending his first marriage, to Hedi Kravis, in 1983, Henry agreed to give her 30% of his stake -- valued the year before at $7.2 million -- in companies that his firm, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, owned. She would receive a minimum of $3 million and a maximum of $4 million under this agreement. The ink was barely dry on the settlement when KKR started doing mega-LBOs and Kravis's fortune skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions. Off to court Hedi went, charging that Henry had defrauded her. According to the 1989 decision handed down by Acting State Supreme Court Justice Walter Schackman, Henry's former partner Jerome Kohlberg ''supposedly'' told her that her ex-husband had understated the true value his holdings in 1982 by about $10 million. But her case was dismissed, with Judge Schackman observing that her separation document had been drafted over a three-year period by lawyers of her own choosing. She ''had the means and opportunity to investigate the true nature of ((the)) defendant's assets, either personally or through her representatives.'' The divorces that you hear about tend to be those that go to court -- and any lawyer worth his huge fee will tell you that's not where you want yours to wind up. Assuming that the two of you can lay your animosities aside long enough to come to an accord, you will usually get a better deal with a separation agreement than you will in a trial. The separation agreement is specifically tailored to your situation and can, for example, contain a cost-of-living adjustment, stipulations for educating the children through college or graduate school, or a buyout agreement for a business. The courts, on the other hand, frequently tally up assets, order them sold, and divide the proceeds along equitable lines, regardless of tax or any other devastating consequences. Says Bethesda, Maryland, attorney Beverly Anne Groner: ''Some judges think there is a cleansing effect in having a courtroom in which couples can tell their stories. If so, it's very expensive therapy.'' ALSO KEEP IN MIND that when you go to trial, though affidavits and court testimony are almost always sealed, the judge's decision is usually a matter of public record. That means friends and neighbors can nip down to the courthouse and see what you got or gave up. Decisions may often include such entertaining tidbits as the following from Gordon v. Gordon: ''Another witness . . . testified that at a bar mitzvah in 1984, Mrs. Gordon, who was sitting next to him, put her hand on his thigh and said that it would be nice to have a young man for a change.'' Had you the wit to think of it -- or the nerve to propose it -- you could have greased your negotiations with a prenuptial agreement specifying what each partner is to receive in the event of a divorce. That's what Donald Trump did when he married Ivana. In fact, he asked her to sign four of them, one before the marriage and three after. As notorious as that breakup was, it was mercifully over in a year and Ivana strode into the sunset in March 1991 with the same $10 million in cash, $4 million housing allowance, child support, and 45-room estate in Connecticut that she was entitled to under the terms of her final concordat with The Donald, signed in 1988. Prenups, as Ivana discovered, stand up in court provided neither side was under duress to sign, both were represented by lawyers, and all spousal assets were disclosed. Most lawyers recommend them for couples who are marrying a second time and have children of first marriages to protect, or for spouses with a tremendous disparity of assets. But couples in first marriages ought to consider them as well if either spouse plans to give up a career and stay home to care for children. Along with equitable distribution, child custody arrangements represent the biggest change in the divorce laws. Though there is still a feeling among judges that children should be with their mothers, more fathers are gaining custody. Richard Templeton, president of America's Society for Separated and Divorced Men, estimates that ''25 years ago about 1% of men got custody of their children. Encouraged by their lawyers, they accepted liberal visitation rights instead. Now 20% to 25% of men who want custody are getting it.'' Unfortunately, they frequently have to go to trial first. ''What is done to children is horrendous,'' says attorney Julia Perles. ''People put up fights for custody often to gain financial leverage with the other spouse.'' Judith Wallerstein, co-author of Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce, believes that ''10% to 12% of divorcing families engage in bitter and protracted litigation over children.'' If parents can be at least civil to each other, joint custody arrangements seem to work best. ''Joint'' means pretty much anything you want, from a situation where the kids live primarily with one parent but both share in the decision-making about schools, camps, and other major expenses, to a scheme wherein the child shuttles back and forth between parental homes, sometimes as often as every other day. Kids hate this version -- and why not? As Manhattan psychologist Magda Denes puts it: ''Adults do not choose to sashay by calendar between addresses. Why then would anyone claim this to be the preferred arrangement for minors?'' Both lawyers and psychologists advise that children have a primary residence with one parent. Even when that's not Dad, it's important to keep him involved with the kids if you expect help with child support. The record of men here is simply disgraceful. The Census Bureau finds that only 44% of children in divorced homes receive any money from their fathers. That goes for affluent men as well. In 1975, when Betty Noyce divorced her husband, Robert, founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and later of Intel, she received $20 million, out of which she was to pay the expenses of the couple's four children -- ''which I could well afford,'' she says. But as he could well afford it too, why didn't they split child support? ''Men resent the fact that in a divorce the wife 'got' something from them,'' she says. ''And now they have to pay for the kids too?'' THIS ATTITUDE is all too prevalent. The legal requirements for child support usually end when the kid reaches 18, just as he or she is about to encounter the major expense of college costs. Sociologist Judith Wallerstein discovered in her ten-year study of the effects of divorce on 60 California families that even fathers who paid support regularly when the child was young drew the line at college. She describes this attitude as: ''I paid my child support through the years. I've given my wife thousands of dollars; now it's up to her.''

The result, she notes grimly, is that when she interviewed children who were over 18 ten years after the divorce, 60% were not getting the educations their fathers had received and 45% were not as well schooled as were their mothers. Needless to say, the kids were resentful. One young man spoke of how his father prorated his support check to end on the tenth of the month the boy turned 18. Does anyone get the best deal in divorce? Not really. Society still tends to underemphasize a woman's role as an earner and define her primarily as a wife and mother. So when she divorces, not only has she failed at what society considers her most important job, but she also is often unable to make up for her economic loss in the workplace. By contrast, society overvalues a man's earning power and underrates the value of his marriage. In theory, divorce goes through him like a dose of castor oil because he remains pretty much intact economically. But he pays a high emotional price in the likelihood that he will be cut off from his children. When both men and women lose in divorce, wouldn't it be better if they both tried harder to stay married?