People commonly treat their finances as a personal, private matter, and not something to be discussed with others. However, that changes once they enter a marriage. Couples join their lives together during a marriage, and that includes joining their finances. They have to share bank accounts, take on debt together, and make purchases for the marriage as a unit. Not every couple does so successfully though. Instead, some spouses end up being financially unfaithful.

A recent survey by the National Endowment for Financial Education discovered that one out of every three adults who have been in a relationship with combined finances admits to lying about money. Some people even lied about such basic topics as the amount of debt they owe or the amount of income they earn. Seventy-six percent of people who responded to the survey also said that when dishonesty about money occurred, it had an effect on the relationship. It even ended in divorce in 16 percent of cases.

Warning Signs 

The law often cannot keep up with rapid changes in modern technology. This can lead to legal gray areas and open questions in the law. One recent example of this involves advances in reproductive technology. These advances have made the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF) more common. This type of treatment involves extracting sperm and egg cells from the couple and creating embryos from them in a lab. Doctors then implant some of these embryos in the woman, and the rest are often frozen in case the couple chooses to use them at a later date. These frozen embryos can present challenging questions in the context of divorce, a topic that Illinois courts have only recently begun to address, starting with the case of Szafranski v. Dunston. This case is an example of a significant divorce issue, which arises when the wife would like to keep the embryos for future implantation, while the husband would prefer to have them destroyed.

How Courts Decide 

In order to decide the issue, courts will look to the forms that the spouses signed throughout the process. One of these forms is generally an agreement that the clinic will not release the eggs without the spouses’ consent. However, it is not clear that this would actually be a binding contract. Courts in many states refuse to enforce those contracts since they find them to be “against public policy.” This means that the court will not enforce the contract because it involves an area of life that courts do not want to regulate or that they think should be absent of private contracts. Other common examples of such unenforceable contracts include contracts between parents and children for love and affection or contracts to complete illegal acts.

Filing taxes can be a complicated endeavor at the best of times, and doing it during a divorce only serves to make it more difficult. This is because many parts of a person’s taxes depend on marital status and family relationships. Those sorts of relationships can affect things like tax brackets, deductions, and tax credits.

Two of the largest issues that a divorce presents in regards to taxes are marital status and dependent deductions. Marital status, which includes categories like single, married, or head of household, alters a person’s tax bracket and it can raise or lower their standard deduction. Dependents, which refers to people relying on the tax filer for care, allow the filer to claim them for the purposes of tax deductions.

How Divorce Affects Marital Status

A handful of states, including Illinois, still recognize a pair of torts that allow spouses to sue their unfaithful partner's lovers in certain circumstances. These torts, alienation of affection and criminal conversation, were recently the subject of a judicial opinion in North Carolina, where the trial court judge ruled that they were unconstitutional under the First Amendment's protection of freedom of expression. While such a ruling would have no actual legal effect in Illinois, courts do often look to other jurisdictions for persuasive legal reasoning, and the opinion provides a modern view on some very old laws that still affect people today

The Two Torts

Illinois still allows people to bring lawsuits for infidelity, but the circumstances need to be precise. The first cause of action that allows people to do this is a suit for alienation of affection. People would not bring this cause of action against their unfaithful spouse, but would instead sue the spouse's lover. In order to prevail, the spouse would need to show that the lover's actions were the sole cause of the divorce. It would not be enough that the unfaithful spouse's feelings slowly faded on their own. Instead, the lover must have “pirated” away the affection, a very high bar to meet.

Divorce can be a stressful process for everyone involved, including the children of the divorcing spouses. That may explain why a study, recently published in the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), discovered a correlation between childhood obesity and parental marital status.

The researchers studied over 3,100 third-graders and found that children whose parents were divorced were 54 percent more likely to be overweight. This means that parents going through a divorce may want to keep a special eye on their children’s weight, and ensure that they take steps to keep their children healthy.

What the Study Found