While multiple factors play a role in falling divorce rates, the costs of separation make going it alone a daunting prospect for many Canadians.
“Why do people stay in abusive marriages?”
Cost is likely 90% of the reason. Make divorce free with nobody having to give up anything they own, and without any other support payment, and I guarantee the rates would skyrocket to at least 75% of all married couples. LOL
Yup. I have it relatively easy. Our relationship is cordial on the surface. We have a house in Toronto that will be paid off this year. We’re financially doing well. And we have a wonderful boy we’re raising together.
I’m miserable though. She has a short temper. Our interactions are filled with micro aggressions. We haven’t so much as kissed in years. I would love nothing more than to leave and just live in peace for a while.
I can’t. Homes go for over 2 mil in my neighborhood, rents are about 4k for a 2 bedroom. Unless I want to abandon my son and move far away. I simply cannot afford to live where we live right now.
Instead I’m in therapy trying to develop strategies to cope.
Before anybody chimes in: I do all of the house work, groceries, cooking, cleaning and laundry. The only thing I don’t do is fold her laundry as she doesn’t like the way I do it, which she complains to me about. I also pay the majority of the bills and child care and then again, I get flak for not saving enough money compared to her.
Why did you dive in so deep with this person?
I got divorced in the 2010s and it kicked me out of the housing market. I’d be five years from paying off my home now, but had to sell it as part of the separation. We bought it for $210K in 2009, sold for $225k in 2011. It flipped during the pandemic for $900k, as an “investment opportunity for GTA-area landlords looking for rental income”
That’s hard to watch, not just the money, but also seeing the trees I planted with my then-young kids cut down because the landlord needed another parking spot.
Since then, I’ve watched house prices accelerate away from me, so much so that I decided to just give up and bank everything into education savings for my kids in hopes that I’ll have a couch to sleep on in my old age. Even now that’s looking unlikely.
My now-spouse had it worse: when she divorced, she got to keep half of her then-husband’s previously-secret and significant debts, which more than wiped out any equity she had, putting her tens of thousands of dollars into the red. He, of course, got his debt halved.
I don’t doubt for a second the stats that tout rising domestic abuse rates since people become house-locked. I got divorced when rent was at least reasonable where I live. Now? Now the choice is between “a miserable, if not right dangerous, marriage” and “sleeping in a tent in a public park”.
Since the 60s I have been proclaiming that it should be very difficult to get married and very simple to get divorced. I will die on this hill.
Will you die on it divorced and poor or married, unhappy and slightly less poor?
The problem is now that you risk living in a tent in a park, or in your 50s with roommates in a sketchy rooming house. It’s not just “poor” anymore, it’s that divorce can mean homelessness.
I don’t think people realize how badly out of control the housing market is. In much of the country, it’s not a matter of not being able to buy a home, it’s not even being able to rent one.
In the area where I live I can count four or five young couples and/or single parents who are raising kids in rooming houses. Other than one spectacular instance of substance abuse, they’re not “bad people”, and ten years ago they’d at least have been able to rent a space of their own to raise their kids, while thirty years ago they’d have been able to buy a starter home. Now? Now they’re raising children in rooming houses.
That’s not a good thing, but hey, at least landlords are doing well and Galen Weston’s making more money this year than last.
Too many people have no concept of how great the change is. We got married in the late 1970s. My wife’s high school education and receptionist job was enough to get us into a decent 2-bedroom apartment, buy her a brand new motorcycle, and pay for my schooling in a trade. My trade was enough to upgrade our apartment, pay for my hotrodding hobby, let her quit to stay home with our son, buy a camper for weekend trips around the province and vacation trips around Canada and USA, all while saving enough for a down payment on a house with double-digit mortgage rates.
A few financial setbacks (extended layoffs mostly) meant starting almost from scratch (we kept our home but lost all savings and investments) in the early 90s and completely from scratch (lost our home, too) in the early 2000s. It took both of us to barely afford the same apartment of our youth. We finally gave up in 2011, changed careers and moved into a 1968 mobile home on a leased lot in the middle of nowhere. We’re back to being able to afford leisure, although on a much, much smaller scale than in our youth.
We’re still in that 1968 mobile home on a leased lot. It has apparently quadrupled in value since 2011, so if we were forced to start over again, it would be out of reach. We’d be homeless.
Divorce? Fortunately, that has never been on the table, but it’s been at least 2 decades since we’d have been able to contemplate single life from a financial perspective.
