Filing the paperwork for her divorce was more complicated for Nuala Bishari than planning her 2019 wedding at San Francisco City Hall.

I was standing in my kitchen frying an egg when I got the call. My divorce, a clerk from San Francisco’s Unified Family Court told me, was final. In fact, I’d been divorced for two months.

I had no idea. I’d pestered the court, leaving multiple voicemails inquiring about the status of my case, but the last thing I expected to hear was that a judge had dissolved my marriage eight weeks earlier.

The call ended, and I stood, shocked, with the phone in my hand. As it sank in, I was hit with a huge wave of relief — not that my marriage was over (we’d been separated for two years) but that I was finally done wading through the complicated piles of paperwork that had bogged down the past year of my life.

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I was not the first of my friends to get married, but in 2022, I was the first to file for divorce. It was a lonely journey, in more ways than one. There was no pool of experience to draw from, no one to tell me how to start such an opaque process or even how long it would take.

I decided I needed a lawyer, but quickly realized hiring one was far beyond what I could afford. One told me divorces at her firm started at $10,000. The average cost of getting a divorce in California if you don’t have children, I learned, is $17,500, and if you have kids, it jumps to $26,000.

Was it possible that even with no kids, no shared property, an amicable separation and nothing being contested, I couldn’t afford to get divorced?

In desperation one afternoon, I Googled, “How to get divorced San Francisco” and landed on a step-by-step guide on the California Courts website, which made the whole thing sound easy.

“You can get a divorce........

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