By James Simons-
The Supreme Court has rejected the case of a woman who wants to divorce he husband of 40 years.
Five justices upheld rulings by a family court and the court of appeal that Tini Owens must stay married to Hugh Owens.
Tini, who is in her late 60s, wants a divorce. She says her marriage to Hugh, who is in his 80s, is loveless and has broken down.
Tiny says the reason she wanted a divorce was because the man had behaved unreasonably . Her husband Hugh, denies the allegations against him and is refusing to agree to a divorce and denies her allegations about his behaviour.
He says that if their marriage has irretrievably broken down it is because she had an affair, or because she is “bored”. Judges heard that the couple married in 1978 and lived in Broadway, Worcestershire.
Tini petitioned for divorce in 2015 after moving out. After analysing the rival legal arguments, the Supreme Court ruled that arguments revolved around concepts of “unreasonable” behaviour and “fault”, at a hearing in London in May and delivered their ruling on Wednesday.
The judges also said there was a question for parliament in whether the law governing entitlement to divorce remained satisfactory. The slight contradiction is clear to see here that an unsatisfactory law should always be thrown out and changed. But judges were not saying the current state of the law is unsatisfactory.
Forty years of marriage is many decades for the law to just ignore. The law would also have been considering the potential cost in financial damages to the husband, if it were to grant the divorce.
Wilson noted that Tini would be able to divorce in 2020, when the couple will have been separated for five years.
The appeal court judges had ruled against Tini last year on the grounds that she had failed to legally establish that her marriage had broken down irretrievably.
One judge said she had reached her conclusion with “no enthusiasm whatsoever” but that it was for parliament to decide whether to introduce “no fault” divorce on demand.