Divorce law in Florida has its early origins in English common law. Simply put, common law is a body of law which, as opposed to statutory law, is not found in the laws passed by the legislative branch of government, but in the decisions of courts, which we now know as the judicial branch of government.

Before the 19th century, the English system of jurisprudence was split, in the sense that there were two separate court systems which had jurisdiction over different areas of the law:

- courts of chancery (or courts of equity) dealt primarily with land, trusts and family issues, and the parties sought relief directly from the King, who was supposed to rule based on what war fair or equitable on a case-by-case basis based on the King's conscience;

- courts of law (or courts of common law) dealt with all other areas of the law.

There is a historical distinction between Divorce and Dissolution of Marriage. Divorce was a concept that was connected to the notion of the sanctity of the marriage. In the past, once a man and a woman were bound by matrimonial vows, they could not end their marriage unilaterally or even by the consent of both parties. A party seeking divorce had to have actionable reasons for divorce, the most common of which were abandonment (where one spouse would walk out on the family and would stop providing them with support), infidelity (where one spouse would engage in sexual relations outside the marriage), and cruelty. Absent the existence of such factors, divorce was impossible. That is why old movies of the noir genre often involve private detectives snooping on spouses suspected of infidelity or, even more interesting, when both spouses wanted a divorce, they would stage an extramarital affair which a private investigator would then "document" and present to the Court as evidence for the spouse's infidelity, therefore making the divorce legally possible. As a result of this need to prove the "fault" of the other spouse in order to get a divorce, the term "divorce" acquired the negative connotation that something bad (such as abandonment, infidelity or cruelty) must have happened during the marriage since one of the spouses (usually the wife) was able to get a divorce.
With the changes in American society in the 1960s, the view of marriage as a special type of contract started to gain traction. In contract law, one of the parties may breach the contract or the parties may come together and modify or even terminate the contract by consent. That is not to say that there are no legal consequences to one or both of the parties "dissolving" a contract, but it affords them a greater liberty of action according to their best interests. As a consequence, in 1969 California was the first state to adopt a no-fault divorce statute, allowing a souse to seek a divorce without having to prove any "fault" by the other spouse. To reflect the fact that getting a divorce did not anymore necessarily mean that one of the spouses did something bad, state legislatures started using the term "dissolution of marriage" instead of "divorce" in their state laws.