It has long been known that January is the month that most people divorce. With that in mind, lawyers in London actually picked a specific date for D-Day — as in, divorce day: The first Monday after children return to school. In England, that will be January 12th.

In the U.S., according to some experts, divorce filings will see a dramatic spike this week — the first full week of January.

Why wait until January vs earlier?

Logic is that no one wants to ruin a child's Christmas and if you divorce over the holidays, the holidays will then be always associated with a traumatic event.

Although some in the U.S. believe that the crumbling economy and falling housing prices will delay divorces, a lawyer in England thinks otherwise.

"Many are concerned that divorcing when house prices are plummeting means they’ll lose a great deal of money from what they view as an inevitable sale, says Shelley Hesford, a solicitor in Cheshire who spoke with the London Telegraph. So instead of waiting for prices to rise, which could take years, some couples will opt to cut their losses sooner vs. later. The estimate is that every 10 percent drop in housing prices leads to a 4 percent rise in divorce.

Tight money over the holidays may reinforce that thinking.

In addition to sticking it out over the holidays for the sake of the children, there are other factors contributing to early January being D-Day time:

This is not gossip but truth: Kelly Rutherford, who plays scheming Lily van Der Woodsen on the oh-so-hip Gossip Girl, has filed for divorce from her husband of two years, Daniel Giersch.

Okay, you have to wonder what is really going on here. What provokes someone to get a divorce when you are three months pregnant? His baby is growing inside you for the next six months — clearly limiting your dating options — and you also have Hermes, your two-year-old son who carries the same man’s genes. Was it that he wiggled into someone else’s jeans and was unfaithful? It has to be pretty bad for Rutherford to want out at this moment of time. She certainly could have waited until she delivers her baby six months from now.

When she filed for divorce, Rutherford cited “irreconcilable differences,” according to TMZ. Some have wondered about the timing of this announcement. After all, her character on the hit series is a serial divorcess.

Will Rutherford now have the same complicated personal life as Charlie Sheen and Denise Richards?

It is so sad when children are involved in divorce — especially at such a young age.

Rutherford, who is 40, can also look on the bright side: at least she will have a sibling for her son Hermes. After a certain age, it is harder to get pregnant, and it’s not as though life partners are as plentiful as Prada sales at Saks. But obviously something has triggered her wanting a divorce from her German entrepreneur husband.

Rutherford is expected to be on the Gossip set in New York on Tuesday.

Some want you to believe that love is merely a science and there’s a formula to determine whether you will stay together or divorce. One of those places is The Journal of Family Psychology which released a study showing that those in relationships where the guy is better looking than the girl are more doomed to divorce.

"The relative attractiveness in a couple matters more than the absolute attractiveness of each partner," according to one researcher in the study, UCLA's Benjamin Karney, PhD.

Ah, so that is why Jennifer Aniston got dumped by Brad Pitt, the logic goes. She’s not as good looking as Pitt, but Angelina Jolie is more beautiful than he is, so voila — that explains the chemistry.

The only problem with this analysis is that it reduces attraction to looks and not a more enduring connection — based on loyalty, intelligence, common interests. If people believe this study, they will have yet another reason to worry about fidelity.

Even our article on “How to Catch a Cheating Husband,” didn’t suggest you should worry if he’s better looking than you.

The sages have long said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Years ago, I compiled pictures of long-term couples and discovered that they often had the same face shapes and, more often than not, looked as if they belonged to the same family.

What I gleaned from that unscientific study is that love can be triggered by familiarity. If the husband in the Karney study was more attractive than the wife, both of them were less satisfied with the marriage.

Satoshi Kanazawa, PhD, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics, offers his own explanation as to why the couple might be less happy — handsome men make bad husbands.

Bruce Jeffrey Pardo was a loner. A quiet man whose wife, Sylvia Pardo, asked for a divorce in March. They had met in 2004, and married in 2006. She brought three children into the relationship, two grown, from a previous marriage, as well as a 5-year-old daughter, who lived with them.

Together they had an Akita named Saki, which Pardo walked every day. They both worked, and in a short time had $88,000 in their savings account.

And then Sylvia Pardo found out that her quiet husband, a church usher who attended Mass every Sunday, had been listing a Matthew as a dependent on his income taxes, a son he had never told her about.

Moreover, Matthew was disabled because, when he was 13 months old, he fell into a swimming pool while Pardo, who was babysitting, watched TV. The baby was not discovered until his mother, Pardo’s girlfriend, returned from grocery shopping.

If Pardo felt guilty, and he must have, he nonetheless did not see his physically handicapped and brain-damaged son once he got out of the hospital, and he never supported him in any way. But he did list the 9 year old as a dependent on his taxes.

Was that enough to lead his wife to ask for a divorce? Probably not. She also told friends that he had drained their joint bank account down to $17,000. He liked his toys: a Hummer in the driveway, a little Miata.

Sylvia Pardo filed for divorce, saying the marriage was irretrievably broken.

According to the divorce papers, when she told her husband she wanted a divorce he said she would have to move out, because the house was in his name. In the court papers she said that while she was at a family birthday party, he moved all of her belongings, and her furniture, into the driveway.

Here is yet another reason to be grateful that you are a woman born in the U.S.A. and not in Saudi Arabia. A while back we reported on an 8-year-old Yemeni girl who wanted to leave the 30-year old man her father had forced her to marry. We also reported about a 10 year old Yemeni girl who went to a courthouse by herself to plead to be divorced from her much older husband, who beat her and raped her.

Those child brides were awarded their divorces, in one case with the repayment of a bride price.

But other children are not so lucky. Last week, a court in Saudi Arabia refused to annul the marriage of an 8 year old child and her 58-year-old husband. The girl’s father had married her off in August to pay off his debts. (He collected a dowry of $7,400.) The girl’s mother, who is divorced from the father, immediately started the annulment proceedings, and kept the girl living with her.

The judge, Sheikh Habib Abdallah al-Habib, dismissed the mother’s petition, CNN reported, because she "is not the legal guardian of the girl," the woman's lawyer, Abdullah al-Jutaili, said.

Wait. Let’s say that again. The mother – yes, the one that went through nine months of pregnancy so that her stomach stretched like a balloon and then had countless hours of labor to deliver the child and then took care of her since birth – that mother has no right to protect her child from a man 50 years her senior. O.K.

Fathers in Saudi Arabia have the sole right to make decisions, because men are the ones with all the power.

But maybe not for long. How fast can we say “Women of the world unite?”

The splits. The fits. The emotional pits. And all the couples who called it quits.

This past year had it all. Some stories touched us, others moved us, many angered us, and a few even tickled us.

After much culling and sifting, we narrowed it down to 20 of our top picks from 2008. We hope you enjoy this little look back as we prepare to move forward.

The Let’s-Just-Be-Friends Award
(Most Amicable Divorce)

Robin Williams and Marsha Garces Williams

Talk about civil unions. No sooner had the couple announced their split after 19 years of marriage than they signed an official agreement stating "we commit ourselves to the collaborative divorce process and agree to seek a positive way to resolve our differences justly and equitably” — all for the sake of their two children. For those of you playing along at home, this is the way to go.

Runner Up: Dixie Chick Emily Robison and singer Chris Robison. How do we know they were both “ready to make nice”? Their divorce took a mere six months, and the filing was a scant two and a half pages.

The ‘Til-Death-Do-Us-Part Award
(Most Devoted Husband)

Mohammed Bello Abubakar

When Nigerian cleric Abubakar, 84, was told he had to divorce all but four of his 86 wives, he refused – even though doing so might lead to the death penalty. He is currently behind bars, fighting for his love. And you thought “Titanic” was the greatest love story ever told.

The Golden Goose Award
(Biggest Settlement)

Madonna & Guy Ritchie

This time of year, it’s easy to think that even a bad marriage might be better than no marriage at all. When you are a couple, there is at least another body rattling around the house. If you’re divorced but have custody of the children, you’ve at least got little ones around the Christmas tree.

But if you have no children, or if your ex has the children for Christmas, it is hard to make merry. You can go home to your family, and accept more pairs of socks, blank diaries, and bars of soap. But eventually you have to go home, feeling even more alone.

Even being angry at your husband’s lack of sense in buying a gift (or effort) (or lack of buying a gift at all) can still seem better than being alone, perhaps looking at photos of Christmases past.

New Years Eve. Alone? Gack.

But a new study reported in Science Daily shows that pouring over old photo albums can be just the cure for depression at Christmas time. Two psychologists at the University of Southampton have found that nostalgia can generate self-esteem, create social connectedness, and alleviate a kind of existential dread.

In other words, the tendency as we grow older to muse about our childhoods, our high school sweethearts, our “good” years, can make us feel connected to other people, even if we are now alone.

Nostalgic “narratives,” looking at a photo, a video, or just remembering a good time, usually features you as the protagonist, and is almost always in a social context.

Nostalgia occurs in all cultures and among all age groups. Nostalgic thoughts usually concern someone we are close to, an important event, or somewhere important to us.

These studies show that nostalgia may promote psychological health, and increase overall positive feelings.

Ynetnews.com did not specify whether the man wore boxers or briefs — but it did indicate that said underwear is the lead evidence in a rabbinical court divorce case. Yep, underwear.

A suspicious Israeli wife snagged her husband’s underwear shortly after he disrobed and brought them to a forensics lab to be tested for a “third party’s” DNA. Turns out, she was right.

The woman also brought a saliva sample of her own and two of her husband’s cigarette butts. (Sidenote: Why do cigarettes seem to be at the center of multiple divorce cases?) Two samples were found: a man’s, which matched the DNA on the husband’s butts, and a female’s — which did not match the wife’s saliva sample.

DNA first surfaced in divorce court as evidence in a 2000 Florida case, when a West Palm Beach woman took the bed linens from her Vermont vacation home to a lab for testing.

The rabbinical court has taken the current evidence into review; apparently, there’s serious money at stake. Too bad all that cash comes down to Fruit of the Loom.

Here is a role a South Korean actress didn’t want to play. In a real-life drama, Ok So-ri was handed a suspended jail term for having an affair, which is against the law in South Korea. It was a high profile case that tested the decades-old law prohibiting extramarital affairs and naturally gave the tabloids a tantalizing tale to keep readers mesmerized for months.

A year ago, Ok acknowledged during a news conference that she had had an affair with an opera singer for a few months in 2006. She stressed the affair was a result of her loveless marriage to actor Park Chul, who was a friend of the singer.

Naturally, Ok was not okay with the country's law — nor were others. She fought back, maintaining that the law was unconstitutional and an invasion of privacy. However, the conservative country’s court upheld the ban, which is part of South Korea’s 55-year-old criminal code.

Technically, Ok could have faced a prison sentence of up to two years, but few do serve time. As the Seoul newspapers reported, supporters of the adultery ban say it promotes monogamy and keeps families intact. Opponents argue the law violates privacy.

Complaints have been filed with the Constitutional Court three times — in 1990, 1993 and 2001 — to abolish the law, but the court has upheld it every time. While women's rights group were the ban's biggest supporters in the past when the law was meant to keep philandering husbands in line, in recent years some husbands have begun pressing adultery charges on their unfaithful wives.

Feminism and economic independence means that women do not have to put up with bad behavior. However, better to get divorced than have an affair.

It's time to amend the list of basic needs. In addition to food and shelter, parents paying child support must now cover cell phones in Italy, reports timesoftheinternet.com.

The ruling comes after a father was ordered to fork over more than $13,000 in back payments for his son's necessary supplies-which includes the child's cell phone.

And going forward, divorcing couples are required to buy their children cell phones to use as a form of daily communication.

Not sure if this is a safety issue (a child living between multiple households can be accounted for more easily) or way to ensure kids have contact with both parents — and the freedom to do so where and when they feel most comfortable.

Either way, seems like a step in the right direction, considering that a new study reports that the law children would most like to create would be a ban on divorce — the first time it's ever been mentioned on the survey's list.