Forced togetherness. Few work escapes or vacations. School-age children running amok day and night.
It may be months, or even years, before researchers can gauge the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on Connecticut marriages.
Connecticut family law attorneys, meanwhile, say divorce inquiries are holding steady compared with 2019 after an initial dip, while child care, custody and alimony disputes — so-called “post-judgment” issues — are on the rise.
Living in close quarters over extended periods of time is likely to prompt unhappy couples to end a relationship. But in many cases, unwinding financial affairs and finding new residences simply isn’t possible during a pandemic.
Financial insecurity due to stock market declines and high unemployment, fear of relocating to new physical environments, and reluctance to make major life decisions are among the reasons couples may choose not to uncouple.
Many partners who believed they had enough assets to divide and maintain a standard of living are finding that’s no longer the case.
Even under normal circumstances, it’s economically difficult for many couples to divorce amicably, Robert Fried, a family law attorney in Hartford, said, especially when one partner is a homemaker. Now, it’s nearly impossible.
“People are losing their jobs and don’t know what their economic future is going to be,” Fried said.
Another factor keeping unhappy couples together is the shutdown of divorce courts, which now hold one-hour video hearings. (Marriages can typically be dissolved without such hearings, but only if both parties agree to the terms in advance.)
Except for cases involving domestic violence — at the start of the pandemic, domestic abuse calls to police increased slightly across Connecticut — judges are restricting hearings to legal arguments and testimony from each party, though longer arguments and multiple exhibits may be permitted soon.
“There has to be a way to present exhibits,” Fried said. “How do you subpoena witnesses? Right now, our courts are not open for that purpose.”
Lawyers in Michigan, California and New York have reported rising numbers of divorce-related calls during the pandemic, while traffic to online divorce sites have reportedly gone up by hundreds of thousands of visits.
Meghan Freed, managing co-partner of Freed Marcroft, a family law firm in Hartford, said the number of divorce calls and new clients between May 1 and July 15 was roughly the same as in 2019.
Still, Freed said her new pandemic-era clients tend to want to end things quickly.
“When they call, they’re more ready,” Freed said. “Because it’s such a big decision, couples often take months, even years, to initiate a divorce, and we might get involved to sort of help them figure it out. Now, people are further along in their thinking.”
Finding a way to communicate privately with divorce lawyers is a unique challenge for unhappy COVID couples; instead of picking up the phone, Freed said more people reach out through email, Facebook and Instagram messaging and her firm’s website chat function.
“Usually people call divorce lawyers from work or on commutes,” Freed said, “and when you don’t have those things, how do you have a private phone conversation?”
Karen Gersten, of Gersten & Gersten, Attorneys at Law in West Hartford, said couples are hesitant to launch into a full-scale divorce during the pandemic because they don’t want to deal with finding new places to live.
“They don’t want to think about relocating,” Gersten said. “People are concerned about jobs. People are concerned about cost. There’s not a lot of people who want to make big life decisions right now.”
The court shutdown, meanwhile, is forcing couples to work through longstanding issues, which often leads to reconciliation, or at least a truce.
“I say to some clients, ‘Listen, you’re not getting in the courts for six months, so you might as well try to work this out,'” Gersten said. “Some of them have worked through their issues and have managed to come up with their own solutions, because they know there’s no court available.”
Douglas NeJaime, Anne Urowsky Professor of Law at Yale University, said divorce filings misrepresent the total number of failing marriages during the pandemic.
“Given the strain that COVID has put on the courts, I don’t think we have good data at this point,” NeJaime said. “Many people might be actually thinking to dissolve their relationship without being able to or having easy access to the actual legal process of divorce.”
Data on divorces, domestic violence and child abuse during the pandemic will ultimately be helpful to researchers, NaJaime said, especially because people aren’t interacting with mandatory reporters of child abuse — including teachers — the way they normally would.
“There might be things happening at households that we just don’t really know about,” NeJaime said. “Divorce is a species of conflict that might arise when people are forced to be living and working together and have very little escapism, either as a physical matter or social matter.”
In Connecticut, and across the United States, online searches for “divorce” hit a yearly low in mid-March but have since risen steadily, according to Google Trends.
Paul McConnell, a mediator and family law attorney at McConnell Family Law Group, said his firm received virtually zero divorce-related calls during the first six weeks of the pandemic.
Between March and May 2020, overall calls were down about 50 percent from the same period in 2019, but the numbers have since ticked back up.
“I would say we’re busier than we were pre-COVID, and slightly busier than we were a year ago,” McConnell said.
Over the last few weeks, as Gov. Ned Lamont has increasingly lifted restrictions on shopping, dining, gathering sizes and travel within the state, divorce-related traffic may be picking up, but it’s too soon to know for sure.
“All of a sudden, I’ve started getting many more calls, and in fact, a number of more engagements for divorce,” Robert Fried said. “Whether that’s because people are seeing a light at the end of the tunnel here in Connecticut or not, I don’t know.”
Michael Hamad can be reached at mhamad@courant.com.
