My latest reported decision, Olson v. Anderson, is now available online. You can read it here.

This case was a trial decision, the outcome of which was to preserve my client's support support entitlement. His ex-wife was seeking to have his spousal support terminated (or reduced, then terminated soon after).

My client, in his late-50's at the time of trial, had not been able to find significant work since he and his common-law wife separated six years ago. They signed a Separation Agreement in 2009 that required him to make reasonable efforts to find work. Five years later, he was still unemployed, and his ex-wife brought a motion to terminate spousal support on the basis that his efforts to find work were insufficient. Her counsel argued that my client was satisfied to live off her indefinitely, and would never make a reasonable effort to find a job.

In the end, the court ordered that support would continue without a reduction. The reasons are too complicated to explain here (but you can read the Judgment at the link above). Nonetheless, there are a number of lessons we can take away from this case, and I am sharing a few of them below.

1) Gender Doesn't Matter

At least two judges who helped shepherd this case to its conclusion acknowledged that a wife paying spousal support to a husband was not the norm. But those judges also said that it would make no difference to the outcome. That played out at trial as well. The law applying to a "traditional marriage" is applied just the same when the genders are reversed.

2) Marriage vs. Common-Law Doesn't Matter

Unlike the law of property division, there is no difference between how the law of spousal support applies to common-law spouses vs. married spouses.

3) Use the Guidelines

The court in this case found that the husband had not made reasonable efforts to find work. This allowed the court to vary the separation agreement, and even impute income to the Husband. So why didn't the court reduce his support? In my view, it was largely because under the Guidelines, he would have been entitled to even more support than he was getting.

The Spousal Support Advisory Guidelines (SSAG's) were first published in July 2008 after a long development and consultation process. They are at once an academic treatise on the law of spousal support in Canada, and a tool to help lawyers and judges bring certainty to what had been up to that point an often arbitrary process of determining spousal support amounts.

Parliament never enacted the SSAG's as law, and that may be why they are such a nuanced, useful tool for family lawyers and judges. They were largely embraced by Canadian family lawyers right out of the gate, and the courts have been directed to consider them by the Ontario Court of Appeal both on initial applications and variations.

The SSAG's provide formulas for most support scenarios, and easily apply to a marriage like this one . And no matter how the calculations were run, the husband in this case was entitled to more spousal support than he was receiving. A reduction, in this case, was completely out of line with the Guidelines amounts.

Even more importantly, asking for a reduction or termination of the husband's support fundamentally misunderstood one of the core reasons we have spousal support in Canada. This leads to my fourth take-away...

4) Merger Over Time

One theory of why we have spousal support in Canada, especially in longer marriages, is the theory of "financial merger over time." This theory recognizes that the longer two people are together, the more merged their financial lives become. The husband was entitled, if not to an equal standard of living, then at least to receive an amount of spousal support that recognizes the merger that occurred over the previous 25 years, and the expectations that arise from sharing your life with someone for such a long period of time. Olson v. Anderson not only relies on the principle of merger over time, but by quoting extensively from the spousal support advisory guidelines' chapter on that topic, helps elevate the theory from principle to precedent.

Staying in a 25-year marriage, whether common-law or not, is a choice that has serious financial consequences. Anyone separating after a long-term marriage should remember that for better or worse, even long after you are physically separated, you may be financially linked to your former spouse for many more years to come.

In the early days of my career, I thought of divorce as traumatic. 

At the time, I worked at a law firm that specialized in high-conflict parenting cases. In my first year of family law, I was exposed to families torn apart by domestic violence, mental illness, parents estranged from their children, kidnapping, child abuse (including sexual abuse), false allegations of child abuse (including sexual abuse), and the fallout of an attempted murder. I was convinced: nearly all of the separated and separating people I met were wounded by their separation, if not outright traumatized by it. And so were their children.

I also wasn't shy about sharing my view that divorce is traumatizing. In that first year, I ran into an old friend at our mutual friend's wedding.

I'm a divorce lawyer, now.
Oh! My parents are divorced!
I'm sorry to hear that.
Don't be! If they weren't divorced, I wouldn't have been born.

My friend's parents were both divorced, but never from each other. In fact, they were still happily married to each other, but they were very unhappily married before they met. They each suffered in their dismal marriages, and not only did those relationships hurt them, but it also hurt their families. One of those marriages led to a total estrangement from one side of the family.

Neither of my friend's parents had children from their first marriages, and so after a few miserable years, they got divorces. Before long, they met, fell in love, and married each other. By starting a new relationship and bringing children into their family, they were not only able to heal themselves, but also their relationships with the entire extended family. Divorce, my friend explained, saved her family.

Over the years, I have helped some clients who were traumatized by their separations, and some clients who were appreciative of them. I have seen many people, armed with better self-awareness and communication skills, find new, healthier love after leaving their first marriage. Divorce, like marriage, is not a one-size-fits-all life event.

These days, when someone tells me they are separated or divorced, optimism comes up naturally, even if I usually save it until after my reasonably cautious intro. "That can be hard," I say, "but it's often for the best. Let me tell you a story..."

Maureen Halushak, A contributor to Flare magazine, interviewed me for an article in their April 13, 2013 issue. Her article explores whether sharing housework unequally (particularly in her own home) might lead to the breakdown of a (her) marriage. I was quoted in the article for my view that fights over household chores aren't likely to break up a marriage. I do think, though, that those types of fights, if they get bad enough, may indicate serious communication problems, which can be deadly to relationships.

None of the divorced and divorcing women and men who I've met in my practice have told me their relationship ended over an imbalance in housework. The division of housework comes up from time to time, but often in passing, and only as an example - a symptom - of larger problems. In my experience, most men and women at the end of relationships acknowledge that they shared chores fairly, or at least they shared them in a way that was acceptable until the relationship was beyond repair.

My "gut check" confirmed the anecdotes I was hearing: the "vacuuming gap" doesn't break up marriages.

Jennifer Senior might disagree with me. In her book, All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, Senior argues that the difference in how men and women spend their working hours - especially in the home - can lead to significant stress in a relationship. According to Senior's research, although mothers and fathers report that they work the same number of hours in a day, mothers spend more time doing household work than fathers. More importantly, mothers tend to do the type of household work that is more demanding, child care in particular (e.g. waking up in the middle of the night, managing children's schedules, waking children up and putting children to bed). This type of work, which can interrupt sleep, require more multi-tasking, and include time-sensitive, stress-inducing "pressure-points," can lead to increased stress for mothers. That's bad for families, and bad for relationships.

Senior also notes that mothers may be more stressed at home than fathers not just because they are doing the more stressful work, but also because they see themselves doing the more stressful work, compared to their partners. When both parents are at home, they inevitably observe what the other is doing. Senior writes:

"It's hard to overstate how stressful these perceived imbalances can be. At one point, the UCLA researchers took saliva samples from most of the subjects of their study to measure levels of cortisol, the stress hormone. They found that while leisure time went a long way toward relaxing fathers, it did far less to subdue anxiety in mothers. So what, you may ask, did calm the mothers?

Simple: Seeing their husbands make a bigger effort to reduce the pandemonium in the house."

I think that Senior's interpretation of that study is an oversimplification, but it makes a crucial point: it isn't enough to be fair; we also have to appear to be fair. It can be easy to underestimate, if not forget entirely, how important it is to show the person you're in a relationship with how hard you're working. This is especially true in long-term relationships with settled roles. But if the conflict in your relationship is a major source of stress, whether during a relationship or after separation, you may want to consider whether the real problem is more about perception - a failure to demonstrate (or sometimes, just a failure to explain) what you are going through - than actual unfairness.