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

“I’ve been trying to sell this house for two years,” Chris Wealty said. He dropped the price from $850,000 to $599,000; still no interest. The house sits empty, once home to a married couple. They are trying to divorce, but settling the financial terms depends on selling this house in College Park, a neighborhood north of Orlando, Florida.

So he decided to advertise. On a large (and not very attractive) sign in the front yard, he wrote “3,400 sqft Lake View House: $599,000. Helping me get divorced: $ priceless $. 407 592 4964 (Husband)”

As he told the Orlando television station WESH, he and his wife had been married for 17 years, and had been in negotiations for several years over a divorce settlement. The house is in one of the nicer areas, former orange groves surrounded by lakes near the well-known Winter Park. It is not far from the modest bungalow where Jack Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums, a home that is now a writer’s colony.

But a nice four-bedroom, three bath house, a pretty view, a good neighborhood have not been enough. Housing prices in Orlando, which went up 34 percent from 2004 to 2005, have now dropped by 20 percent. One leading real estate expert, Robert Schiller, says Orlando prices will drop another 30 percent this year.

Thus Wealty’s desperation. If he doesn’t sell the house soon, he said, he faces foreclosure. One of his neighbors opined that putting up a sign airing dirty laundry was kind of “white trashy,” so the experiment hasn’t endeared him to the community. But his life, and his wife’s life, have moved on.

When asked what his soon-to-be-ex wife thought of the sign, Wealthy answered: “Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not real sure. We don't talk much these days except through lawyers.”

No kidding.

Here's what happens when a divisive couple deals with a housing slump. A Cambodian couple resorted to a drastic solution to combat the country's notoriously corrupt and expensive court system by literally — and we mean literally — cutting their house in half.

According to the Khmer-language "Koh Santepheap" newspaper, Meuon Rima sought a divorce from his wife, Nhang, both 40, because she refused to nurse him during a recent illness. They decided to split their house, which was built on stilts, rather than deal with what they considered a diseased court system.

Rima sawed the house down the middle with "surgical precision," the newspaper reported. He was last seen driving away from the village in southeastern Prey Veng province hauling half of the home with him.

It was not known where he had gone with his very detached piece of marital assets, it said. And apparently Rima had not felt the same need to divvy up the couple's two teenage children, both of whom were left with Nhang.

One would argue that the heart of the home is the family, so in that sense he left the home mostly intact. 

FWW has reported on many solutions to deal with divorce and housing, including how to divide the family home and if you should keep the house, but we don’t recommend actually splitting the house. Granted that just last year a man in Germany, facing divorce, chain-sawed a house he shared with his wife in two, and then hauled “his half” away to his brother’s property on a forklift truck.

Usually when couples resort to what is called “The War of the Roses” solution, referring to the 1989 movie about a fractious divorce, they simply keep living there, each taking separate quarters and turning the kitchen into a demilitarized zone.

Hulk Hogan's wrestling days may be behind him, but as E! News so aptly stated, he can still avoid being pinned.

Judge George W. Greer of Florida released the pro wrestler from a commitment to purchase a $4.2 million Las Vegas condo, a property he agreed to buy with estranged wife Linda Bollea back in 2005.

The commitment on the condo, in a sinking Las Vegas real estate market, has been a sticking point in their ongoing legal dealings, with Bollea just last month seeking to get her ex held in contempt of court and jailed for failing to pony up his share of the condo’s purchase price.

Her Miami lawyer, A.J. Barranco, Jr., said that the condo would be a good investment, even if other condo values have gone down, because Linda Bollea believes that their properties sell at a premium.

And if they walk away from the condo, they stand to lose much of their $840,000 down payment.

For Bollea and Hogan, divorce has become a spectator sport, and an example of what not to do. Some observers believe that it will be more than a year before the divorce is final. The divorce was started in 2007.

“We are thrilled that the judge did not require us to continue to engage in the folly of purchasing a $4.2 million condo at a time when we should be considering other matters,” Hogan's attorney, David Houston, told E! News.

Houston added that, in addition to his client getting off the real estate hook, a stipulation outside of court allowed Hogan the right to reside in a beach house that had previously been awarded solely to Linda.

Perhaps this was the judge's way of penalizing Linda Bollea for wasting the court's time. But she also gained some traction too.

The Australian posted a recent article on the impact of divorce on the environment. The claim? That the results of divorce — multiple homes, cars, energy use — is eating way at the earth's resources. One can't argue with that, especially as a new report by the Australia's Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts released the following numbers:

"A four-person family that breaks up will generate around 43 percent more garbage than they did when they were together. They will use up to 34 percent more water and up to 70 percent more energy, depending on the type of new dwellings being occupied."

But what we can argue with is the alternative: Stay in a broken relationship? And keep the kids there, too, just to cut down on the garbage and utilities? Please. A rise in energy consumption seems far less detrimental than forcing kids to stay in a glued-together, patched-up broken home. With the electricity they save now, they'll be running up their therapist's bill with all the hours they'll spend sitting on the couch in 10 years.

And let's remember, with second marriages come a union of two houses to one. Live Science reports that the environmental footprint of U.S. households who had "weathered divorce and remarriage shrank back to that of married households."

If researchers are looking to pin the environmental crisis on something, divorce is really the least of our worries.

The house on one side is up for sale, and has been for a long time. On the other side, the house has already been foreclosed. Now, statistics in Australia say, if you are facing divorce, chances are your house is going to be up for sale too, within the next two years.

A study by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute looked at home ownership among couples who stayed together and couples who broke up.

Not surprisingly, home ownership fell from 69 percent to less than 50 percent in the two years following a couple splitting up. What was surprising was that home-ownership rose to 90 percent in couples who stayed together.

Professor Gavin Wood, from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, told “The Sydney Morning Herald” that, within one year of separation, people spending more than a third of their income on mortgage payments rose from 3 percent to 34 percent.

“So,” he said, “within a year of breaking up, you have a third of these people in mortgage stress.” That is often the wife, who usually is the one to keep the family home.

Some 20 percent of divorced women sell their house to pay for retirement, the study found, twice the number of men who does the same thing.

Men, the study found, are more able to make adjustments in housing costs, even if he “falls out of home ownership.”

Another study by the same institute, in 2004, showed that divorced and separated people had a lower probability of attaining home ownership, compared to those who remained married. But those who divorce and remarry were found to have the same chance of home ownership as those who remained continuously married.

Is it possible that times are so bad, and divorce is so expensive, couples are staying together? It seems that divorces have moved into the luxury category, along with gas-guzzling cars, soy lattes at Starbucks, and big homes. Fine for those who can afford it.

That's what an article in the Newark Star-Ledger says, with statistics to prove it.

The number of couples signing on with mediators has fallen 21 percent in one year, according to Keila M. Gilbert, president of the Alpha Resource Center, a nonprofit divorce mediation network based in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Part of the reason, she thinks, is housing prices. If the home is a couple's only real asset, and it can't be sold, or it would be sold at a loss, that makes it very difficult to resolve a divorce.

Moreover, with some husbands and wives losing their jobs, or not being able to find work at their previous level, it becomes clear that it's a bad time to split up: all expenses will be higher for two separate households, starting with health insurance and ending with cable TV.

For couples who are barely making it now, divorce becomes a near impossibility.

A divorce mediator in Metuchin, New Jersey, Michael Grodjeski, said: "They end up getting stuck living together. It's not easy, but don't forget, couples who come to mediation tend to be more amicable about their divorce. They can continue to live together, not happily maybe, but they are trying to make the best of things."

Of course, for some women, divorce isn't a luxury, it's a necessity. It may mean renting their home out and keeping it in both names until the market improves, or it may mean biting the bullet and making a break. Even reduced circumstances are better than living in an unhappy home.

Meet Louise Rush and Alan Bamberger, of San Francisco. They were divorced six years ago, but they still live in the same 2,700-square-foot Victorian house. She takes a downstairs bedroom, he takes an upstairs one, where he is close to their two sons. Lisa Belkin wrote an 8,000 word article “When Mom and Dad Share It All” in The New York Times Sunday magazine on June 14. But she didn’t have room for the Bambergers or another divorced couple that has split responsibilities amicably, even after divorce. You can read about them here on her blog about equally shared divorce.

The trophy wives are on their way out in London. Thousands of jobs have been lost in the city's financial districts and rumors are flying that dozens more are on the way. The result? A trophy wife exodus.

Sandra Davis of Mishcon de Reya — the law firm formerly known as "Heather Mills' lawyers" — says that since the layoffs have started the number of inquiries about divorce and division of assets has tripled. "When money looks like [it's] flying out the window, love walks out of the door."

Paula Hall from Relate, a relationship counseling service, has a slightly less cynical view. "More financial stress will tend to show the cracks in marriage contracts which were either overtly or covertly financial in the first place."

Another Mishcon de Reya divorce attorney Miles Geffin thinks that the increase isn't just as simple as the trophy wives marching out the door while there are still assets to divide. He thinks that the working partner — in this case, the man — has just as much motivation to divorce under these circumstances as the woman.

"Businessmen who lose their job often see it as an opportunity to head straight off to the divorce court before they find a new job — so alimony payments will be based on their unemployed status."

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Nowadays, some men are looking at divorce as something that they can win, similar to the lotto. At least that's the message being given by Australian men's mag Zoo Weekly. Its readers are invited to write in and explain why they deserve to "win" a divorce.

The competition will allow one lucky, disgruntled husband to "unleash themselves back to bachelorhood" without having to spend a cent on the inconvenience of lawyers.

Zoo Weekly claims its $10,000 divorce package is an Australian first and has everything a marriage escapee needs to embrace the life of a bachelor, including a divorce party complete with pin-up girls.

The other prizes include a three-tiered divorce cake, a home cleaner, a plasma television, PlayStation 3, and a year's subscription to Zoo to help ease transition from the marital home.

Zoo Weekly has previously been host to another tasteless contest in which readers were encouraged to enter to win free breast enhancement for their girlfriend. Surprised? Not so much.

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