In debt do you part

They met in the '80s at a record shop in Ottawa. At the time she was really into everything French. The language. The wines. And the men. He was French. A decade later they were married, avec deux enfants. Then came the drawn-out, slow-motion fizzle. It came down to this: He was neat and repressed. She wasn't. "The cracks first started to appear after our second child," says Miriam*. Between parenting and their jobs - he worked full-time in communications, she picked up editing and writing gigs part-time - they weren't spending much time together. And when they did, they discovered that the differences their love once allowed them to ignore now caused fights.

By the time both kids were in school, Miriam and her husband were close only in the spatial sense. They lived in the same house. But emotionally they were like Moncton and Mumbai: worlds apart. She wanted to split up, even though she felt intimidated at the thought of taking on financial independence. And then there was the cost of a divorce.

Ending a marriage can be even more expensive than the wedding. The cost of splitting one household into two, with double the insurance and utilities bills and everything else, is fearsome enough. But even before you get to that, there's the cost of the divorce. Hiring a top-notch family lawyer to argue your side can cost upwards of $500 an hour, although many lawyers charge only half that. Still, the overloaded court system digests those billable hours like they're Flintstones vitamins.

Plenty of people feel like they're too broke to end their marriages, says Michael G. Cochrane, a Toronto divorce lawyer and the author of Surviving Your Divorce: A Guide to Canadian Family Law, recently released in its fourth edition. In fact, he says, most marriages experience a lag between the end of the relationship and the decision to actually separate. And one of the biggest reasons for that lag is financial. "The couple will know they're done," says Cochrane. "But no one else does."

According to Cochrane, contested divorces are becoming increasingly expensive, the unintentional result of a round of family law reform that swept Canada in the mid-'80s, which put the emphasis in a separation agreement on a couple's financial worth, spawning a still-developing industry of expensive consultants, such as forensic accountants and real-estate appraisers. Once lawyers get involved, Cochrane says, you can expect to pay $10,000 just to get a contested divorce into its beginning stages; it's not unheard of for long, drawn-out, complicated splits to skyrocket to $250,000. "With a moderate amount of conflict," Cochrane says, "most people will spend at least $15,000 to $20,000 per person to divorce."

Hence, the marriage trap. Once they've fallen out of love, married couples endure various messed-up living arrangements to avoid actual separation. Some live essentially parallel lives. Often, they'll split up parenting duties, parcelling out kids' music recitals or hockey games to avoid interacting. To maintain the facade of a happy family, they'll continue to sleep in the same bed, or wait until the kids have gone to sleep before one parent creeps downstairs to a mattress in the basement. Other spouses will move to a guest room.

Miriam came up with a different arrangement. Rather than separate outright, she and her husband attempted a less-costly alternative they hoped would be better for the kids: They rented an apartment near their house, and the two parents bounced between beds while the children stayed home in their own rooms. "That was my wacky idea," says Miriam. "And it failed. It meant I still had his presence all around me. It was a year that I didn't get on with my life. By the end of it, we still had our joint bank account."