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We live so much of our love lives online: meet our match, announce our relationship status, evite friends to showers and weddings, get gifted with online registers, and plan honeymoons through brand-name travel sites.

What about legally ending a marriage online? It sounds very appealing and blessedly impersonal. Everyone dreads the messiness of he said/she said, the costs of legal fees, and the elongated pain and drama depicted in the epic movie “The War of the Roses.”

The fundamental problem with online divorces is that marriage is a legal relationship that carries legal rights and duties with it. Undoing that legal relationship is complex. You do not want to wake up years later to find that the IRS or some other creditor has not been successfully dealt with by your divorce agreement and that the liability is still knocking at your door. Worse yet, you do not want to find that car or boat that you agreed to give up was involved in a major crash with your ex at the wheel and your name still on the title.

You may think lawyers are biased against online divorces because they are taking business away, but that is not true. The fact is that many of the online attempts to divorce create complicated clean-up work for lawyers. Divorce procedures themselves differ from state to state and sometimes county to county, so the one size fits all model can frustrate and even sabotage your attempts to be civil and efficient.

Somewhere between too much war and too risky a peace, there are good divorce solutions. Choose your attorney carefully and work with them proactively to have the best outcome for you and your children. Be assured that the largest percentage of cases do settle. “The War of the Roses” was just a movie. Most couples will never experience that kind of drama.