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The Time Has Come for Maintenance Guidelines
Those of us who are members of the “baby boom generation,” or the “children of the Sixties,” have witnessed half a century of evolution in the world of family law. When many of us entered high school, the only ground for divorce in New York state, for instance, was also a criminal act ' adultery. By the time we graduated college, our legislature had added abandonment, as well as cruel and inhuman treatment, as additional grounds to enable previously “trapped” spouses to escape bad marriages. Like Chicken Little of our childhoods, crying, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling,” critics of this sea change in our approach to divorce proclaimed the demise of marriage as an institution that was a foundation of our society.
Today, few would question the right of our citizens to terminate the “bonds of matrimony” (a phrase that itself alludes to indentured servitude). For some 40 years, doomsayers managed to prevent New York from joining the No Fault Divorce movement that had begun in California. The cataclysm that opponents predicted when Irretrievable Breakdown of the Marriage Relationship was added as a basis for divorce in 2010 has yet to be witnessed; no calamity has befallen the people of New York, just as none occurred back in 1966. The perplexing and frustrating complexities that pervaded fault-based divorce gave way to a result-oriented process that has muffled the accusations that often formed a roadblock to reasoned solutions of issues such as child custody, division of marital property, child support and spousal maintenance. While judges still are called upon to act as referees, they are no longer compelled to participate in the soap opera that grounds trials presented to them.
Like the issues of fault and no fault divorce, predictions of “doom and gloom” have followed each new development in the law, from equitable distribution of property and rehabilitative maintenance in the 1980s to child support guidelines in later years. Nevertheless, matrimonial law has changed for the better with each new development, providing relief time and again for stakeholders, particularly the poor and middle class, by affording them justice from a system in which many cannot reasonably afford legal counsel.
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