I Want The House Not My Spouse

I Want the House, Not My Spouse Dividing the marital home in divorce can be a financially and emotionally fraught experience. Share full article 355 Video CreditCredit...Mariaelena Caputi Ronda Kaysen By Ronda Kaysen Ronda Kaysen corresponded with 88 people about how they divided the marital home in a divorce. Published March 8, 2024 Updated April 4, 2024 As soon as she knew her husband wasn’t coming back, Terri Martin logged onto Facebook Marketplace and bought a 1949 General Electric refrigerator for $5. Her marriage might be over, she thought, but her relationship with her home certainly wasn’t. “I started to realize that even without him, I still loved the house,” said Ms. Martin, 37, a knitwear designer in Cincinnati. With her husband, Tim Larson, 37, out of the picture, Ms. Martin would no longer have to sell him on her vision of a retro kitchen that would embrace the historic character of the 1916 American Foursquare, a house the couple bought in 2021 for $180,000. She was now free to rip out the generic yellow oak cabinets and install open shelving, replace the vinyl floors with linoleum, and swap the run-of-the-mill stainless steel refrigerator for the vintage Facebook find. “It is exciting to think about doing the entire kitchen now and not having to compromise,” Ms. Martin said on Feb. 1, hours after filing for a dissolution of marriage. Image A woman standing in a kitchen looking out a window. Ms. Martin decided she wanted to keep her house in Cincinnati and make it her own after her marriage ended.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times Image A man in a cream colored sweater standing outside. Mr. Larson sees the house as a “moot point” now that his marriage to Ms. Martin has ended.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times Mr. Larson, a prosthetic limb designer who has been rotating through Airbnbs since he moved out last spring, said he found renovating the fixer upper more of a chore than a joy. With the marriage over, he sees no reason to keep the house. “The house is just kind of a moot point to me,” he said. “She can have it.” ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The marriage was dissolved on March 6. ImageA yellow brick house with a porch. Ms. Martin and Mr. Larson bought the American Foursquare in 2021 with plans to renovate it.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times Image A living room with a green sofa, pink chair and white coffee table. The living room of the house Ms. Martin and Mr. Larson bought had charming details like original molding.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times Image A kitchen with cabinets, a counter, a sink and a stovetop. Ms. Martin plans to replace the cheap oak cabinets with open shelves and restore the historic character of the space.Credit...Madeleine Hordinski for The New York Times Few objects signify a marriage quite like the home a couple shares. It’s the place where life unfolds in scenes writ large and small, from lazy Sundays curled up on the sofa to formal Thanksgiving gatherings with extended family. It’s usually a couple’s most valuable asset, so dividing it can be financially and emotionally fraught — even if you don’t end up like Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, battling to the death in “The War of the Roses.” In interviews and correspondence with 88 people who said they’d been through a divorce, the home was often described as another character in the relationship, taking on a life of its own as a marriage disintegrated. For some, holding onto the property became a point of pride — proof that they could make it on their own. For others, shedding the space where a life fell apart felt like a metamorphosis. Sometimes, the house became the center of a protracted dispute, a cudgel to exact revenge. Some blamed the house itself — maybe one that was too expensive or needed too much work — for the collapse of a fragile union. Editors’ Picks Do You Know How Flavor Works? Women Who Made Art in Japanese Internment Camps Are Getting Their Due The Buzz on Boat Shoes SKIP ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “It’s either a womb or a tomb,” said Katherine Woodward Thomas, a marriage and family therapist who coined the term “conscious uncoupling,” and later wrote a book about how to do it. It’s also not cheap. If one person wants to hold onto the house, that usually means ponying up a significant amount of cash to buy their former partner out. Moving at a time when rents, interest rates and home prices are sky high is not an easy proposition, either, adding more tension to an already difficult situation. An overwhelming majority — 82 percent in 2022 — of married couples own a home, according to the National Center for Family & Marriage Research, which found that in 2022 there were just shy of one million divorces. The center also found that, in 2020, the median length of first marriages that end in divorce was 13 years. Increasingly, children are staying in the house while their estranged parents cycle in and out, an arrangement called nesting that can create its own complicated feelings about what a house means and who it’s for. However you slice it, the house is not an easy possession to parse. “The thing that you lose most in a divorce is your sense of home,” said Lori Gottlieb, a psychotherapist and the author of the book, “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.” ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT While clinging to the house can be a way to lessen the blow, many experts urge their clients to consider packing up and moving on. “There is something about the freshness of hanging pictures on the wall, getting new sheets, for God’s sake, getting rid of the marital bed,” said Jessica Ashley, a divorce coach in Chicago. When her own marriage ended, Ms. Ashley took her then 3-year-old son through every room of their old home and wrote thank you notes in chalk on the walls for all that it had given them. Then they walked into their new apartment and thanked it for what was to come. “We had that ritual together and it prepared us for the next space,” she said. Image A woman in jeans and a beige sweater sitting on a sofa looking at a small white dog on the floor. Sara Touijer, 47, in her two-bedroom apartment in Harrison, N.Y. Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times By the time her marriage was over, Sara Touijer, an interior designer, wanted nothing to do with the home she and her husband shared for nine years. She had decorated every corner of the five-bedroom house in Rye, N.Y., selecting the fabrics, art and furnishings to give the space a contemporary, Moroccan vibe. But the place where she’d poured her creative energy and raised her two children had become “so toxic,” she said, that by the time she left for good in December 2022, she had divorced herself from even the concept of a house as a home. “A home is not a physical structure for me,” said Ms. Touijer, 47, who now lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Harrison, N.Y. “I’ve completely let go of things.” ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Image A two-story red brick apartment building with white banisters. The apartment complex where Ms. Touijer now lives. Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times The divorce was finalized in July 2023 and the house is in contract for sale, expected to close in June. Ms. Touijer still designs interiors for her clients, often helping married couples create their dream homes. Her advice is more nuanced than it once was. “I have this clarity and consciousness of being in the moment,” she said. “I lead with my heart now, and I didn’t before.” She urges her clients to select items and styles they love, regardless of current trends or potential resale value. “I tell them, ‘don’t get tied to something,’” she said. “Know that life is always changing. Nothing is permanent.” Ms. Touijer’s ex-husband declined to comment. Image A woman sitting on a sofa with a dog in a living room with a colorful painting behind her. Ryder Sollmann Wyatt, 69, at her home in Bedminster, N.J.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But when Ryder Sollmann Wyatt’s 30-year marriage collapsed, she knew one thing for certain: she wanted to keep the home that had been in her family for generations. Ms. Wyatt’s grandfather, who owned a toy manufacturing company, bought the 18th-century farmhouse on 300 acres in Bedminster, N.J., in the early 1940s, moved there from Montclair with his family, and eventually sold off all but 30 acres. Five decades later, Ms. Wyatt and her husband were living in Manhattan with their young daughter when they bought the estate from Ms. Wyatt’s family for $850,000. They moved to the country to raise their daughter. Image A white house with black shutters and pillars with a green lawn in front of it. Ms. Wyatt’s grandfather bought the 18th-century house on 300 acres about 80 years ago.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Image A dining room with a wooden table and chairs and a blue and white rug. Ms. Wyatt could not imagine selling the estate that had been in her family for generations and was full of family heirlooms.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times By 2020, Ms. Wyatt’s husband wanted a divorce and suggested selling the estate to dissolve the marital assets. But Ms. Wyatt, who, as a child, had lived in a cottage on the property with her parents until she was 12, could not imagine a world without the family farm. “How do you put a price on that?” said Ms. Wyatt, 69, a writer. The price, in fact, was appraised at around $2.25 million for a tract that includes 10 outbuildings, nearly all of it on preserved farmland. The house was filled with generations of family furniture and the grounds were full of flowers, shrubs, trees and vegetation Ms. Wyatt had spent years nurturing. “My plants are like my children,” she said. ADVERTISEMENT SKIP ADVERTISEMENT But Ms. Wyatt knew that her share of the couple’s divided assets would not provide her with enough cash to buy her husband out and properly maintain the estate. “A house, to me, is a living breathing thing and you have take care of it. You have to keep it going,” she said. “It’s like a person.” Ms. Wyatt said her husband eventually conceded and let her keep the house and half of the remaining marital assets, keeping the dispute out of court. The divorce was finalized in 2021. Ms. Wyatt’s ex-husband declined to comment. It wasn’t until about a year after her divorce that Ms. Wyatt realized that for the first time in her life the family homestead was hers, an heirloom she could one day pass on to her daughter, who is grown. “I was walking back from the pool one day, and I stood back and thought, ‘Oh my God, this is mine,’” she said. For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Related Articles I Love You, but I Don’t Want to Sleep With You Feb. 10, 2023 Separated but Under the Same Roof April 1, 2022 Deciding Who Gets to Live in the Family Home During a Divorce Aug. 29, 2020 A correction was made on March 14, 2024: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described 2022 divorce data. There were nearly one million divorces in 2022, not nearly one million people that were divorced. When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more Ronda Kaysen is a real estate reporter for The Times, covering the housing market and home design trends. More about Ronda Kaysen A version of this article appears in print on March 10, 2024, Section RE, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: I Want The House, Not My Spouse. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe