Not all of Clive Tolley’s clients want a divorce. Some just want some space.
“I’ve had several clients that have got to a time in their life where they just wanted to have some independence and do some things they wanted to do and didn’t get a chance to do. They kind of still love the other person so they don’t get divorced,” he says.
They separate. They separate their assets. They go their separate ways. Some of them live just down the road from one another on the home quarter, the other on another quarter they bought maybe 40 years ago.
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“I’ve had a number of people say they simply are having trouble living together, there’s things they’ve wanted to do and they felt like the partner was holding them back a little bit.”
There are some farm wives, he says, who have spent their lives in the background, doing the cooking, raising the children, doing mostly domestic work and they want to assert themselves as individuals. They want to go out in the world.
These people, typically women, just want to take their share of the assets that they’ve built with their husbands and move out.
They’re not angry with their husbands. They don’t hate their spouses. They still respect and even love them. They just can’t live with them.
“Some of them can’t say it till they get me there as a neutral third party,” says Tolley. “They’ve been trying to talk to their husband but he’s not listening. When they have a neutral third party there, they have more courage to be open and honest about what they want.
“Sometimes the husbands know, but don’t want to acknowledge that all is not well. Sometimes they are shocked.”
