A woman who wants to divorce her husband of 40 years because she says their marriage is unhappy has lost her case in the supreme court.
Five justices upheld rulings by a family court and the court of appeal that Tini Owens must stay married to Hugh Owens.
Tini, who is in her late 60s, wants a divorce. She says her marriage to Hugh, who is in his 80s, is loveless and has broken down.
She says he has behaved unreasonably and that she should be allowed to end her marriage. Hugh, however, refuses to agree to a divorce and denies her allegations about his behaviour. He says that if their marriage has irretrievably broken down it is because she had an affair, or because she is “bored”.
so i know that tumblr is super focused on the usa and women’s rights over there, but this is really fucking important case in uk law
unlike the us, the uk doesn’t have no fault divorce. you have to have been married for at least one year before filing for divorce, and then you have to pick one of five grounds under which divorce is permitted
- adultery – 14% of divorces, but only counts if you didn’t continue as a couple for six months afterwards, unless the affair is still ongoing or there’s more acts afterwards. fun fact, however – if you are in a civil partnership instead of a divorce, you can’t use this ground at all! really fucking shitty, am i right?
- desertion – if your spouse left you for more than 2 years in the last 2 and a half, then this ground is usable. only 1% of divorces are under this ground, however
- 2 years separation – 27% of divorces, as it requires mutual agreement between the couple
- 5 years separation – 13% of divorces, this is what the court has told ms owens she has to use, and she can only file under this ground in 2020. this is used in cases when your partner objects to the divorce, shittily enough
- unreasonable behaviour – 45% of divorces, and this is what ms owens used when she filed. to quote the government’s page on divorce, your spouse must have “behaved in such a way that you cannot reasonably be expected to live with them”, with examples of abuse, violence, and drugs/alcoholism
(note – scotland has slightly different divorce law, as it changes the 2 years separation to 1, and the 5 years separation to 2. no much better, but a little)
and long story short… three different courts (the family court, the appeals court, and now the supreme court) have all declared the examples ms owens used to be insufficient
now, the president of the supreme court, lady hale, said she found this “very troubling”, and another judge said he was very reluctant to give this judgement, and my thoughts on that are….. eh
unlike the usa, judicial activism is generally a no-no, and so both the appeals court and the supreme court have said parliament would need to amend the 1973 matrimonal causes act, which laid out the grounds for modern divorces
which really needs to happen as the last time divorce law was updated was in 2004, when the government mandated that if a transgender person was to legally transition, they needed to divorce their partner before they were allowed to. which is its’ own entire bullshit, tbh, and has been repeatedly brought up as an example of how shitty the uk is wrt transgender rights
so yeah…. i’m pretty sure a campaign is going to start because of this case and the supreme court’s ruling, and i’d really appreciate it if non-uk people would raise awareness of this gigantic goddamn issue in our country
I had no idea that Britain didn’t have no-fault divorce. Good for them! No-fault divorce is pure evil, completely indefensible by any moral standard.
The causes that Britain allows for seem quite reasonable. If nothing else, they’re a little too lenient.
what the fuck is wrong with you?
A marriage is where you stand up in front of your family, friends, and (often) God to promise that you’re going to stick with this person for the rest of your life. Where I come from, adults keep their fucking promises.
There are legitimate reasons for divorce. Some of them are given above. But no-fault divorce is defined as divorce for no reason. It’s divorce because you got tired of being married. It’s divorce because you apparently aren’t an adult and can’t keep your fucking promises.
Keep your fucking promises.
It is good to keep one’s promises. But there is nothing good about keeping a ‘promise’ that is hurting you or other people. And there are lots and lots and lots of ways that being married can hurt you or someone else.
i mean just for starters- people change all the time. Sure, you can make a promise to someone, and mean to keep it- but in two years, or five years, or ten, they might not be that person anymore. They – or you- might be someone completely different. And if your plans for your life have completely changed, being married to someone who wants the exact opposite can hurt you both.
What if you married someone who didn’t realise they were gay/trans/asexual until later in life, and thus is the ‘wrong’ orientation for you now? It’s nobody’s fault that they made a promise that they turned out not to be able to keep- these things happen- but if you’re that fundamentally incompatible, is it really fair to force you to stay married to someone who can’t love you the way you want to be loved? Of course not. You both deserve to find someone who can be in the kind of relationship you need. And … imagine having to be separated for 2-5 years before you can really look for that kind of relationship, because you’re still technically ‘married’. Imagine meeting someone who could be the love of your life and having to navigate that situation.
What if you married someone who does not, under any circumstances, want children, and you realise later in life that you desperately, ardently do? Sure, you didn’t weren’t planning on having kids when you got married at 23, but people change. And again, this is no one’s fault- things happen. But if you have to wait 2-5 years, and, say- you’re a cis woman who wants biokids? You might run out of time before then. Is it really fair to force you not to have kids- or to force your spouse to have them- because you made a promise years ago? OFC not.
No-fault divorce isn’t ‘just’ for people who don’t want to be married anymore. There are times, put simply, that getting married was a mistake, and at the time you got married you could not have known that. Making that big of a promise without all the facts is like signing a contract where the fine print is covered in white-out. It’s much, much better to (amicably!) admit that you made a mistake and be able to move on with your life than to have to live with that mistake for the rest of your goddamn life.
But more important than that- there are so damn many forms of abuse that don’t leave a mark and aren’t easy to prove to a fucking judge. If your spouse has emotionally abused you for decades, for example- especially if they’ve isolated you from your friends and family- you can’t prove that they hurt you. So the divorce becomes a great big game of he said/she said.
And abusers are often charismatic and superficially charming- able to convince other people that you’re an insane shrew/evil bastard and that there’s Nothing Wrong Here At All. Worse, abusers are often able to convince their victims that no one will believe them. Sometimes, they’re even right.
Imagine for a second that your abusive partner is a cop and his buddies are all cops. Imagine trying to go through a court of law with the entire edifice of local law enforcement stacked against you, because they just know you as their buddy’s “crazy bitch” of a spouse. How easy do you think it’d be to prove that your spouse is behaving “unreasonably”?
And if you can’t prove it? If you’re going through hell before the divorce, and you can’t make the divorce happen? Imagine how hellish things will be afterwards, when your abuser decides to ‘punish’ you for making them look bad.
No-fault divorce mitigates all this crap, because you don’t have to ‘prove’ that you’re being abused. You can say ‘I don’t want to be married anymore’ and not be married anymore, without having to relive trauma in front of a judge or convince them that you’re not nuts when your abuser has spent years convincing you that you are. Sure, your ex might wind up taking everything you got because they’re a slimy charming abuser- but you’ll be out of there.
Listen. I’m sorry for cussing you out. But the situations above? All but one weren’t hypotheticals. These are things that have happened to my family members and loved ones. I have seen people I care about deal with abusive partners and how they’ve had to get a divorce just to get the fuck out of there. And I was raised Mormon. Mormons don’t get divorced. If you’re Mormon, and you get divorced, it’s a stain on your character. Even if you get married again, you might be a pariah for years.
So these aren’t cases of ‘they just didn’t want to be married anymore’. These were matters of life and death. And divorce- specifically no-fault divorce, where they didn’t have to prove anything except that they didn’t want to be married to that ass anymore- saved their fucking lives.
You are… extremely lucky and naiive if you believe no-fault divorce is evil. I hope you never are in a position to need it.
Not having legal access to no-fault divorce is the reason why couples who *agreed* the marriage wasn’t working used to have to stage adultery so they could justify asking a court for a divorce. Like, the husband would have to hire a sex worker, let the wife and her lawyer know what hotel room they’d be in and when, and leave the door unlocked so they could burst in and “catch him in the act.”
Unhappy marriage not grounds for divorce, supreme court rules
Mooncustafer 