Divorcing couples differ on future of houses
Decision to keep or sell it emotionally, financially fraught
As soon as she knew her husband wasn’t coming back, Terri Martin logged on to 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 Martin, 37, a knitwear designer in Cincinnati.
With her husband,
Tim Larson, 37, out of the picture, 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,” Martin said Feb. 1, hours after filing for a dissolution of marriage.
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 marriage was dissolved recently.
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 on to 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.
“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 on to the house, that usually means ponying up a significant amount of cash to buy the 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% in 2022 — of married couples own a house, according to the National Center for Family & Marriage Research, which found that just shy of 1 million people got divorced in 2022. 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.”
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.
By the time her marriage was over, Sara Touijer, an interior designer, wanted nothing to do with the house she and her husband had shared for nine years. She had decorated every corner of the five-bedroom residence in Rye, New
York, 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 Touijer, 47, who now lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Harrison, New York. “I’ve completely let go of things.”
The divorce was finalized in July 2023, and the house is in contract for sale, expected to close in June.
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.
Wyatt’s grandfather, who owned a toy manufacturing company, bought the 18th-century farmhouse on 300 acres in Bedminster, New Jersey, in the early 1940s, moved there from Montclair with his family and eventually sold all but 30 acres. Five decades later, Wyatt and her husband were living in Manhattan with their young daughter when they bought the estate from Wyatt’s family for $850,000. They moved to the country to raise their daughter.
By 2020, Wyatt’s husband wanted a divorce and suggested selling the estate to dissolve the marital assets. But Wyatt, who 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?” Wyatt, 69, a writer, said.
The property, in fact, was appraised at around $2.25 million for a tract that includes 10 outbuildings, nearly all of it on preserved farmland. She 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.
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. (Wyatt’s ex-husband declined to comment.)
It wasn’t until about a year after her divorce that 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.’ ”