Divorce on Demand? In U.K., It’s Not Quite That Simple

LONDON — It seems simple enough: If you want a divorce, you can get a divorce, right?

In Britain, it turns out, the answer is “not necessarily.”

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled — grudgingly, even apologetically, but unanimously — that Tini Owens, who has been trying for years to get a divorce, must remain in her unhappy marriage to Hugh Owens, who opposes the divorce.

Tini Owens’ predicament is not permanent. The law says that if a couple have lived apart for five years, one spouse can get a divorce even if the other objects. Owens will reach the five-year mark in 2020.

A 1973 law allows divorce on the grounds of adultery, abandonment or “that the respondent has behaved in such a way that the petitioner cannot reasonably be expected to live with the respondent.”

The case is an extreme rarity, the ruling states, because the court “has never had occasion to consider” what the threshold is for “reasonably” expecting someone to remain married.

Of the 114,000 divorce cases filed in England and Wales in 2016, more than 99 percent were uncontested, the court wrote in its ruling. And of those that were initially contested, only a small fraction — 17 cases in all — went all the way to a final family court hearing.

So there may be few cases to follow the precedent of Owens v. Owens, but it does show how much has changed since 1973. As the court noted, what is reasonable in a marriage might be viewed quite differently now than it was 45 years ago.

Multiple courts have heard the case along the way, and even as they ruled against Tini Owens, they appealed to Britain’s elected leaders to modernize the divorce law.

“Parliament may wish to consider whether to replace a law which denies to Mrs. Owens any present entitlement to a divorce,” Justice Nicholas A. Wilson wrote for the Supreme Court.

Tini Owens, 68, and Hugh Owens, 80, married in 1978 and raised two children in Gloucestershire, in western England. According to Tini Owens, her husband was verbally abusive, so she moved out of their manor house in 2015, and into a property next door.

But it usually makes little or no difference how the word “reasonably” is defined. If one spouse claims to be unable to live with the other, British courts are inclined to take the petitioner’s word for it, especially if the divorce is uncontested.

And, the Supreme Court said in the Owens case, the legal system encourages people filing for divorce to play down the misbehavior of their spouses, to keep things amicable as they negotiate terms.

Lower courts found that Tini Owens had failed to present enough evidence that she could not “reasonably be expected to live with” her husband. The Supreme Court majority said it had no basis to overturn that conclusion.

Justice Brenda M. Hale, the president of the court, wrote in a separate opinion that the trial judge had misconstrued the law, but she agreed to dismiss the case.