Some of the trickiest cases Bethesda divorce lawyer Deborah Luxenberg has handled come with a twist: The couples in question never married.
They’ve paid the rent together, flossed their teeth side by side and shopped for the perfect couch. Maybe even had a kid. But they chose not to tie the knot. And when they decide they want to untangle their lives and get their fair share of combined assets, they come to divorce lawyers such as Luxenberg for help.
“But there isn’t any law around this,” she says. Often, Luxenberg has to tell them something no lawyer likes to tell a client: There’s not much she can do.
They need to work it out between themselves.
A study by the Pew Research Center found that 39 percent of Americans think marriage is becoming obsolete. But it still takes a marriage (or some other legally binding agreement) to get a divorce. And as the number of couples choosing to live together rather than marry has increased drastically, so have the spats over their splits. The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers found that almost half of its 1,600 members are seeing an increase in court battles between cohabiting couples. Nearly 40 percent of those lawyers said they’ve seen an increase in demand for cohabitation agreements — the equivalent of a prenup, sans wedding ring.
“It’s pretty heartbreaking,” Luxenberg says. “People don’t have rights unless they have the title — their name is on a piece of property or a bank account or something like that.”
Luxenberg recalls one client who lived with her partner for 20 years. They’d had a child and built a home together. The woman’s income was about $50,000, Luxenberg says, and her boyfriend’s was “six or seven times that.” When the couple split, the woman hired Luxenberg to see what recourse she had. The answer: not much.
There would be child support, “but she didn’t get any of his pension benefits or any of his profit sharing. And she wasn’t going to get alimony,” Luxenberg says. “I don’t think people think about those kinds of issues.”
Planning ahead
Amber Settle eventually did. When she and Andre Berthiaume, professors at DePaul University in Chicago, moved in together in 1997, they were young and in love and not at all worried about whether their relationship would end.
The two decided that marriage was not for them — “As an institution, it’s just not something that I feel like fits me,” explains Settle, now 43 — but they bought a house and other property together.
When the couple had a daughter, Erin, in 2004, it spurred them to reconsider their relationship — and what would happen if it dissolved.
“We started to realize that it’s great that we were getting along now,” she says, but “that it would be really good if we could have a discussion about what it is that we would want to do [in the event of a breakup], especially when it comes to our daughter.”
Settle and Berthiaume visited a lawyer specializing in gay and lesbian couples, the groups that first popularized cohabitation agreements. The pair drafted an agreement spelling out how custody of their daughter would be shared if they broke up and how major assets would be divided.
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