UK court refuses to let wife divorce husband, tells her unhappiness is to be expected in marriage

Why get married in the first place? It’s much cheaper to be miserable on your own.

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Why on earth would anyone want to remain married to someone who doesn’t want to be married to you?
That makes no sense to me.

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Or start steadily increasing the level of salt in her cooking, until psycho-hubby can’t taste anything else, and soon enough dies of a heart attack/stroke.

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Abusive bullshit, missy pants.

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Power tripping? And what @Blaze_Curry said.

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Right, sorry, I forget about the control aspect, I was just thinking of the “relationship” - this is obviously not that…

Amazing.
Poor woman.

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Ownership?

That’s kind of what marriage until very recently, was all about…

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People with respect - for self, partner, and society - need to formalize their own contracts (if they need one), rather than trusting The State or anyone else to define their partnership and/or families. If you aren’t marrying them, then they get no say. Trying to decree for others what a family must be is classic weasely authoritarian antediluvianism.

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The evidence is subtle but i think you may be right.

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No, they can separate, just not dissolve the legal contract of marriage until they’ve been separated for five years, unless one party can be found to be legally at fault. That’s the immediate issue - the wife’s case wasn’t robust enough to prove that the relationship’s breakdown was the husband’s fault.

The requirements of the law may be absurd (**** it: they are), but it doesn’t look as if the judges were incorrect in applying it to the evidence presented.

All that said, my sympathies entirely lie with the wife, and i’d love to think this case will bring about some change.

ETA: “they can separate” sounds far more heartless than I intended - I don’t underestimate the challenge of a 66-year-old starting a new life after 39 years of marriage. Good luck to her.

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The description reminds me of my parents’ marriage. That ended in a violent act. And then a settlement. It later transpired that my parents had never been married, as my dad’s first wife was Catholic and never agreed to a divorce.

Ah, what a mess.

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Not Britain- just England and Wales. Scotland has very different laws.

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I hope that poor woman has the means to have already moved out. I also hope she finds some nice fellow to conduct a very public affair with – if she can get media coverage on that, maybe her arsehole control-freak husband will finally get the message (though if he didn’t mind further embarrassment he’d claim she was at fault – a judge like these might buy it).

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Because one spouse is an abusive asshole, who doesn’t see anything wrong with the abuse. It’s what his family did for generations!
In the US, all you have to do to not allow your wife to divorce you is change attorneys 1 week before the hearing. Doing this, and anonymously calling the wife’s attoney & telling her to drop the case “before something bad happens”, can delay divorce proceedings for almost 2 years.

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Sadly, every humorous thought I had upon reading the headline was already used in the summary. Leave something for the rest of us to quip about!

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The situation that makes less sense is two people who both hate their spouse staying married when there’s nothing keeping them from splitting up. I’ve seen elderly couples like this spitting venom at one another in public, knowing they’ve been at it for decades and that they’ll stay together until one of them dies.

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That, dear sir, made my day. Thank you.

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Yeah, if I were a judge I would accept the fact that your spouse was making you go to court to fight for a divorce as evidence of abuse and grant the divorce. The reason we have no-fault divorce in Canada is because it allows people to escape abusers without proving abuse. Requiring proof of fault is absurd, and monstrous, and it enables abuse.

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“Happiness is a new idea in Europe.” Louis Antoine de Saint-Just. Why do you think the brit hated french revolution so much ?

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PBS’ Masterpiece Mystery needs something to fuel its momentum.

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