Live-In Divorce

They make small talk; they have bagels together on Saturday mornings; they share a car. While they are watching TV, one of them might say, "By the way, have you gotten a moment to look at the divorce papers?" They make jokes like "Don't break that dish—it's not yours, it's mine." Still, "It's a tiny house and it seems to get smaller every day," Fern says. She longs to get away from Rick—whose emotional dependence on her makes her feel guilty—and get on with her life.

This is the best of all possible live-in divorces. More typical is the mean version. But there is one practical solution: If living together becomes too uncomfortable, the partner staying behind can pay his mate to move out. Deborah Sterne* is doing that. A 42-year-old costume designer making $60,000 a year, she's spent eighteen months living with the man she's divorcing, 44-year-old Mark*, an actor.

He came up with the standard hassling techniques: bursting into her room constantly to dress and shower, pursuing her around the apartment, even shoving his way into her room against her attempts to shut the door. Sharing responsibility for their five-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter, they communicated mostly by notations in the Metropolitan Museum datebook by the kitchen telephone.

Their lawyers advised them to stay, but Deborah eventually caved in. She has agreed to borrow heavily to pay Mark his share of the equity in their $600,000 Village co-op. Will the high interest payments be worth it? She tosses her mane of ringlets and beams a meltdown smile: "Yeah!"

Hell Is the Other Person: "She has this hatred of me—my presence, the air I breathe," says one husband. His wife agrees: "I couldn't stand the sound of him brushing his teeth!"

Though staying together to force a more favorable division of assets or a better custody arrangement seems to make tactical sense, it actually slows down the settlement, says 37-year-old Maryanne O'Doherty*, who has now lived for almost two years with her estranged husband and two children in their $600,000 Riverdale house. Husband and wife become more polarized when they live together, she believes, and negotiations actually take longer. "The scab is constantly being ripped open," she asserts fiercely. "You're living together and hating each other, and you can't get any distance that might allow you to negotiate."

Hating each other and sleeping in the same bed is a perversion some people are driven to when they're going through a live-in divorce. In such a case, pure human cussedness takes the stay-in-the-same-house ploy to an outrageous extreme.

Roger Masters*, a 47-year-old management consultant who makes $150,000 a year, refused to leave his $1.5-million, four-bedroom Park Avenue co-op, or even his bed, despite the furious protests of his wife of fourteen years, Laurie*, who had asked for the divorce. For more than a month after hiring lawyers, Roger and Laurie shared their bed every night. They rarely talked and never touched. Roger made jokes, Laurie recalls bitterly, like "What's wrong with this picture?"

"I couldn't stand the sound of him brushing his teeth!" Laurie says agitatedly in a telephone interview. She is speaking from Chicago, where she recently fled with their three children. "It's an intrusion of your everything, physical and emotional! I'm lying in bed trying to sleep," she says, her voice breaking. "How much more vulnerable can you be?"

But why didn't she leave the house as soon as she'd filed for divorce? Laurie, a former dancer, says she had no independent income. She didn't leave the bed right away because, she says, "I believed in my heart of hearts that if I just went along"—her voice rises in disbelief, irony, and shame—"everything would go smoothly." She was afraid to provoke Roger, she says, afraid he'd put up obstacles to the divorce. She finally moved to a room down the hall.

"She had this hatred of me," explains Roger, a donnish-looking man sporting a bow tie. "My presence, my life, the air that I breathed." He rests one high-gloss shoe on the chair opposite the conference table in his expensively furnished midtown office. "What's going to bring this thing to a head?" he says, gesturing with open palms. "Discomfort."

As for his own discomfort in bed, Roger says it was worse before Laurie asked for the divorce, when there was no sex or affection in that bed and he was anxiously wondering why. "Listen," he says, shrugging, "I've slept with people I've hated before—in school, in the Army, in camp."

Roger shakes his head over the way Laurie would lift his "filthy, sweaty clothes out of the washing machine and toss them back into the hamper." When he began staying elsewhere almost every night, returning in the morning just in time to change his clothes and see the children, Laurie moved his things out of the master bedroom—dumped them in a pile, he says—and put a lock on the bedroom door: "an industrial-strength Segal lock," he says with amusement.

But she had no right to lock him out of any part of the house unless she was in danger—in which case she'd have grounds to force him out. A call from Roger's lawyer to Laurie's scared her into taking the lock off and moving back to the den. "I felt wonderful," Roger says. "I turned it into a defeat for her."

Walking the dog every morning, Roger lectured himself to stick to his strategy. Most important, he emphasizes, was his determination to keep his kids from feeling abandoned, the way the children of his previous marriage had felt. "I'd had that pain before," he says with narrowed eyes and set jaw.

After nine months, negotiations grew fevered: Roger claimed he couldn't afford their children's private-school tuition without taking out a loan on their apartment, and Laurie refused him permission to do so; she believed this was one more trick to force her to give him the settlement he wanted. One day, having borrowed money from friends, Laurie packed a duffel bag for each child, took the dog, and flew to Chicago, where she quickly found a new school, an apartment, and a job as an office manager. She has no money and no furniture, but, she says, "I have my life back."

Roger came home to an empty apartment and waited for their return . . . and waited. Now he is suing for divorce in New York to make sure the case isn't tried under the divorce laws of another state. And Laurie is taking him to court because she says he's not paying enough child support.

Whatever the legal or financial reasons that keep divorcing people in the same house, therapists and lawyers believe there is always an emotional subtext—a "power struggle," explains therapist Olga Silverstein, senior member of the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy, "which is acted out in the resolving of issues like 'Whose bed is this? Whose house? Whose kids?' "

Couples therapist Sonya Rhodes agrees. "Who's going to leave and who's going to stay takes on huge meaning in the aftermath of a failed relationship," she says. Every part of the divorce negotiation becomes "another example of how 'you don't want to accommodate.'

Psychotherapist Ellen Weber has seen many people use this staying-together as a time of transition, to avoid going "cold turkey." Whatever they may say, Rhodes agrees, these people prefer to "stay a married person in crisis rather than become a single person, alone."

Further complicating the emotional ground, observes divorce mediator and matrimonial lawyer Lenard Marlow, is that one partner has usually been emotionally girding himself to ask for the divorce, while the other, caught by surprise, is emotionally about eighteen months behind. The one playing catch-up tends to dig in and be unsusceptible to "reason."

But the children's situation is the real heartbreaker, says lawyer Betty Levinson, and she blames therapists as much as lawyers for this problem. "Therapists," she says, "should say to fathers, 'You are forcing your children to live in a war zone.' " Rhodes agrees that children find the tension and hostility between their parents devastating. "Even if there's not gunfire," she says, "there is some kind of guerrilla warfare," and at the least the children experience "the delayed and postponed reality that the marriage is over."

No matter what the experts believe, some couples say they are keeping themselves in limbo for the sake of their children.

That, at least, is the explanation Diane* and Kevin Lowe* give for the fact that they slept in the same bed for eighteen months after hiring lawyers. Or rather, it's the more palatable of the two reasons they give. "Leave my bed? Forget it!" Diane snaps, and Kevin confirms that he refused to move—even down the hall—without a signed agreement. They schooled themselves to sleep so that they never touched.

More important than defending turf, though, they say, was maintaining an appearance of normality for their ten- and seven-year-old sons, who, a therapist had advised, shouldn't be told about the divorce until shortly before Daddy's departure.

Trying to convey what it was like, Diane, a 40-year-old in a cashmere jacket, leans across her desk. She may be a brusque public-relations executive commanding a $75,000-a-year salary, but from time to time she crumples into quiet tears and dabs neatly behind her round tortoiseshell glasses with a tissue. Then, briskly, she continues.

She had no difficulty falling asleep, even with Kevin beside her, she says, because she used sleep as an escape. To cope at other times, she made believe that Kevin, 42, wasn't there, even when they sat opposite each other at their nightly dinner with the children, pretending that all was normal.

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