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Mygripe John Frost and his wife had been unhappily married for much of their 25 years together when his company moved him from Virginia to Knoxville, Tenn., in 2000. So he left his wife behind. At first, it wasn’t clear what would happen next. Would she follow him? Or would they end up divorced?
The answer: neither. “After a few months,” Frost says, “we both realized we liked it this way.”
Technically, the two are married. They file joint tax returns; she’s covered by his insurance. But they see each other only several times a year. “Since separating we get along better than we ever have,” he says. “It’s kind of nice.”
And at 58, he sees no reason to divorce. Their children have grown and left home. He asked himself: Why bring in a bunch of lawyers? Why create rancor when there’s nowhere to go but down? “To tie a bow around it would only make it uglier,” Frost says. “When people ask about my relationship status, I usually just say: ‘It’s complicated. I like my wife; I just can’t live with her.’ “
As a culture, we understand the expeditious voyage from separation to divorce, the desire for a clear-cut ending that makes way for a clear-cut beginning. But couples who remain separated, sometimes for years, may leave us dumbfounded.
“I see it all the time,” says Lynne Gold-Bikin, a divorce lawyer in Norristown, Pa., who is the chairman of the family law department at the law firm of Weber Gallagher. She can cite a docket of cases of endless separation.
One well-known figure who was separated for decades without divorcing is Warren Buffett, the wealthy chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. He separated from his wife, Susan, in 1977 but remained married to her until her death in 2004. All the while, he lived with Astrid Menks; they married in 2006. The threesome remained close, even sending out holiday cards signed, “Warren, Susan and Astrid.”
Also in the ranks of the un-divorced: The artist Willem de Kooning had been separated from his wife for 34 years when she died in 1989. Jann and Jane Wenner separated in 1995 after 28 years but are still married, despite Wenner’s romantic relationship with a man.
Separations are usually de facto, rarely pounded out in a contract, and family law is different from state to state. But even long-estranged couples are irrefutably bound by contractual links on issues like taxes, pensions, Social Security and health care.
Divorce lawyers and marriage therapists say that, for most separated couples, the motivation to remain married is financial. According to federal law, an ex qualifies for a share of a spouse’s Social Security payment if the marriage lasts a decade. In the case of more amicable divorces, financial advisers and lawyers may urge a couple who have been married eight years to wait until the dependent spouse qualifies.
For others, a separation agreement may be negotiated so that a spouse keeps the other’s insurance until he or she is old enough for Medicare. If one person has an existing condition, obtaining affordable health care coverage is often difficulty or impossible. The recession, with its real estate lows and health-care-expense highs, adds incentives to separate indefinitely.
Four years ago, Peggy Sanchez, 50, a Midwest resident, parted amicably from her husband, who has fibromyalgia.
“He would not get medical treatment if he weren’t on my insurance,” she says, and giving him that is less expensive than paying alimony. “Besides, I care about him and want to make sure he gets the medical help he needs,” she says.
There are still sticky issues: Sanchez’s boyfriend is unaware that she’s still married. Her daughter from a previous marriage views her husband as a father figure. And he got custody of the family dog. But Sanchez plans to stay separated.
“I don’t have much desire to remarry, so there’s no benefit to me from divorce,” she says. “I guess that sounds pretty jaded, but it’s just not as important as it used to be.”
Sharon O’Neill, a marriage therapist in Mount Kisco, N.Y., has seen four cases in the last two years in which couples separated but stayed in the same home. In a depressed market, couples may not want to sell a house they purchased at the market’s height, or one party can’t maintain the mortgage or the other can’t afford a new home.
“The financial collapse has made people say, ‘Let’s not rush into a divorce; let’s see if we can make something else work,’ ” O’Neill says. The added value of marriage is also hard to kick.
“Many people I’ve worked with over time enjoy the benefits of being married: the financial perks, the tax breaks, the health care coverage,” says Toni Coleman, a couples therapist in McLean, Va. “They maintain a friendship; they co-parent their kids; they may do things socially together. “… But they just feel they can’t live together.”
Still, long-term separation can create big problems. If a couple isn’t divorced, their lives are still legally and financially intertwined. If your estranged husband goes on a spending spree, you’re responsible for the ensuing credit card debt. If you win the lottery, that’s community property.
Last year, a 67-year-old professor in New York, who asks that her name not be used, filed for divorce from the man she married in 1969 and separated from in 1988 after she had an affair with a woman. “My husband had been more attached to me than I thought,” she says. “I think I liked that we were still married in some way. But last year I met someone who minds that I’m still married to someone else.”
And so for her, it was time to divorce. Call it an old-fashioned romance. Mygripe
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