I had two clients in the last 2 months decide they wanted to reconcile with their spouse. This article will discuss how you go about dismissing or cancelling your California Divorce case.
The six month cooling off period in California is there for exactly this reason. Imagine if you could divorce in one day. How many people would have to get remarried. People do decide to try and make their marriage work after one of the parties have filed for divorce.
Before we talk about the exact way to file for a dismissal to cancel your case, you should consider this.
If you cancel your divorce case, and later decide it is not going to work out, you will have to re-file for divorce. This means paying the filing fee again and having to do all the paperwork again. Essentially, you will have to start over.
One thing you may want to consider is to just let the divorce case sit with the court while you attempt to work things out. If your spouse has been served already then it is unlikely that the courts will send you anything in the mail or request you to go to a hearing. However, if you have not had your spouse served, you can expect that they will set a hearing to follow up on how the process is going.
If after reading this you still want to file for a dismissal of your California divorce, here is what you do. You will need to file a form CIV-110 – Request For Dismissal. This is a generic form that is used for many types of cases, not just divorce cases. If you need to get a free copy of the form, simply search for “Fillable CIV-110” and you will be able to download a copy.
Here is a couple of rules to follow when filing a CIV-110 – Request For Dismissal of your family law case.
If you have filed and your spouse has not filed a response then only you (the Petitioner) need complete, sign and file the dismissal. If your spouse has filed a Response in the family law case, they too will have to sign the consent to dismiss the case.
The reason for this is because your spouse can decide they want to continue with the divorce, even if you want to reconcile your marriage. So you will have to get your spouses agreement to dismiss your divorce if there has been both a Petition and Response filed with the court.
