When you or your partner don’t want the relationship to be over, how do you both cope?
As I always tell my clients, the relationship is over when your partner says it is and there is nothing you can do about it unless your partner is willing to join you in a concerted effort to restore it or find out what is going wrong. I find myself saying this to my clients far more than I am comfortable with, but it’s so true. If your partner is not a willing participant in reconciliation then you have to back off and accept it. No matter your age or the length of your relationship it’s very hard. The breakdown of a relationship is one of the most traumatic events you can go through.
What is very hard to understand is the increase in the breakdown of relationships in elderly people. As a family law practitioner I find myself overcome sometimes at the emotion of it all. My heart of course goes out to all of my clients who are taken by surprise when a relationship breakdown happens to them but I find myself wondering how a couple in their 70s or even 80s reached this point and I have acted for quite a few and no, it’s not at all easy. It may come as a surprise but relationship breakdowns are rarely a spur of the moment event. Quite often the collapse of a relationship has already been bubbling along but we simply overlooked the signs.
As an early riser, I have often pondered the question in the wee hours over a cup of coffee….what are those signs and what brings a long term marriage or relationship between two elderly people to the point of separation. The answer I think is that no two relationship breakdowns are ever the same and there are different signs evident in different relationships but from my experience in legal practice, they reach this point the same way as for any other couple. A broken heart is no discerner of age. Of course, your lawyer is not a counsellor but that does not mean they do not feel your pain. I have noticed, however, that the affects on the elderly can be very different than in younger couples. The abject sadness in the elderly client who feels they are being left behind and discarded seems more profound and perhaps that is because the fabric of their togetherness has been woven together over a longer period of time. It is very hard to cheer an elderly client in this predicament and convince them that life will get great again, when they feel their life is all but done. We know life can get great again and every person experiencing the breakdown of a relationship, no matter their age, is entitled to feel that way; but trawling through a property settlement in those circumstances is the pits quite frankly. It is not easy for any of our clients; however, to look into the eyes of an elderly client who views their life as lived out is very hard as a family law practitioner and I confess they present as some of the most difficult of cases.
As two legal practitioners, Don Gayler and I started the Fraser Coast Family Law Centre together as one voice in collaborative practice in family law because we both hold a belief in the same philosophy of harmonious family law practice carried out with dignity and respect towards one another. It is this jointly held philosophy measured with dignity and respect that we strive to extend to each of our clients and their partners throughout the collaborative process no matter their age or circumstances. If your lawyers have that type of strength in their collegiate relationship, it can only mean positive things for you and your partner.
