Lucy Stewart-Gould, a partner in our Divorce and Family department, recently spoke with Fedora Abu, author of the lifestyle blog ‘Late Filing’, about financial independence, why pre-nups aren’t just for the mega-rich and the things she’s learnt from her 15 years working in family law. Lucy was part of the legal team that acted in Standish v Standish in the Supreme Court earlier this year.

Fedora introduces the interview by saying:

“Nowadays as a 30-year-old, I’m surrounded by lots of people who are embarking on marriage (the engagement announcements and wedding invites have never come thicker and faster), and that’s partly what made me so keen to interview a divorce lawyer. I’m aware that sounds horribly cold and pessimistic but I feel it to be the opposite: in my mind, there is no one better placed to impart some wise words on marriage – and even dating – than someone who sees where it so often goes wrong. And so, I reached out to Lucy Stewart-Gould, who is a partner at one of London’s top family law firms. Lucy also met her husband in her mid-thirties (very chic) and was very generous in talking about how and why she made the choice to get married. I really enjoyed our conversation, which reaffirmed some of my core beliefs (especially around financial independence) but also made me look at other aspects of marriage and relationships with a fresh perspective.”

The full interview can be read on the Late Filing Substack. Excerpts from the article setting out some of Lucy’s advice for couples are set out below:

What should couples discuss about money before getting married?

“You have a lot of financial protection once you’re married but what I see causing problems for people is different expectations. It’s not so much about what you decide to do as about being on the same page. It’s important to have that discussion beforehand. What is our expectation around this? Because where you see problems arising quite quickly is where people have wildly different expectations of how this is going to work. Now, increasingly, people will have lived together before they get married, so they’ve probably had those conversations to some degree when they’re setting up a home together, but even still, they could have been quite cursory.

“I’m a proponent of keeping your financial independence. I have seen too many women end up with not only the emotional complication of divorce – Do I want to walk away from this marriage? It’s not serving me anymore. Emotionally, it’s not the right thing for my kids. What’s my life going to look like? – but then have to overlay that with a period of real financial insecurity and stress. I don’t know how I’ll look after myself. I don’t know how I’ll pay lawyers’ fees. I don’t just have my get-out-of-here fund or the confidence to know that I can look after myself financially and that if he behaves terribly, I can still figure it out.

“Everybody is different and what they want from life is different, but when I see people with very young families giving up lucrative careers altogether, I worry that it is short-termist. It is incredibly stressful at that point where you have a young family and you’re trying to do a job and you want to be a certain type of mum and all the rest of it. But actually, that period in the whole of your life is relatively short and they probably don’t need you in the same way once they’re in secondary school. I see a lot of people lose their identity and their financial independence and control.

“[Financial independence] is the difference between having a female client who can come to me and take advice for a reasonable period of time without her husband being aware she’s taking that advice and being able to pay from their own bank account without anyone being able to see it, and then a client whose husband has full visibility because all she has is a credit card and a joint bank account. She’s like, ‘I don’t feel I can even ask for advice because he’ll see that I’ve paid a lawyer, even if I’m just coming because we’ve been through a rough patch and I want to know what my rights are’.”

Other than money, what should couples discuss before tying the knot?

“If you are marrying someone who isn’t from the same place as you, you don’t want to discover after the marriage that actually it’s really important to them that they live near their mum and dad on the other side of the world eventually. You need to have those conversations: Do we want to be a bit nomadic? Are we going to spend time between the two places? Where do we want any children we have to be educated?

“Any couple with two different nationalities needs to have had conversations about long-term where they see themselves living, how they’re going to deal with making sure any children they have experience both cultures, what language is going to be spoken at home. People can have wildly different expectations about that. I also think expectations around careers are really important because you may find that someone who’s been brought up by parents with a very traditional setup expects that to happen at some point, and if that’s not what you want to do that needs to be flushed out.”

Pre-nups: should every couple have one, even if they don’t have millions of pounds?

“I don’t think big inheritances or millions of pounds are a necessity to have a prenup. What you’re essentially doing is contracting out your statutory legal rights, and there are real advantages to that in terms of certainty. It also forces you to have some of the conversations that we’ve talked about. How many children do we think we’re going to have? How are we going to live? Am I going to keep working? And so for that reason, it’s really positive for everybody.

“Whether you in fact have one or just have those conversations is sort of a personal choice where there isn’t loads of wealth. But increasingly people are thinking, we’re going to be a dual-career household and we’re not going to have traditional roles, and I want to put some parameters around what we expect, so that there isn’t any uncertainty at the end of the marriage. They’re not contractually binding at the moment – that’s another area of necessary law reform – but they are the best you can get here. You’re going to have to tell a court why you shouldn’t be held to it.”

Are the biggest disputes over money and kids?

“Yes, it’s money, kids – and those are the things that often lead to resentment. So either resentment around ‘I’m working so hard, and you don’t appreciate what I’m doing for the family in terms of how stressful my job is’ or resentment in terms of ‘You don’t appreciate what it takes to get these three children out of the door every morning and keep the show on the road’. Or where you’ve got a couple where both of them are working and there are children and one person feels like they’re carrying more of the burden at home. Those things are obvious trigger points where you can get imbalance and resentment. I think also it’s challenging now where increasingly you might have a couple where the woman earns more than the man, and there’s this ingrained social stuff about that. Some men do find that difficult.”

How do you prevent a divorce from becoming toxic?

“Firstly, find yourself a good therapist if you don’t already have one. Have a repository for all the emotions that are coming up with the process so that when you’re actually having to make what are serious financial decisions at the most disappointing moment of your life, you are able, as much as it is possible as a human being, to separate them from how you’re feeling.

“The second is to be respectful. Before I was married, people would say, ‘You’re in your mid-thirties, you’re not married – is it because your job has put you off marriage?’ It’s a variation on that usual question that professional unmarried women in their mid-thirties are asked. But I’d say, No, I want to marry someone I would be willing to divorce. By which I meant someone that you’ve seen how they treat their colleagues, their business partners, their competitors – because they will treat you like that if it breaks down. So, try to be respectful. You don’t have to like them. You don’t have to agree on the facts in order to make an agreement and move on with your lives. You don’t have to agree about why you’re there. That doesn’t matter.

“A divorce should be a forward-looking process. It’s like, We are where we are. How do we separate and move forward? That’s actually a really hopeful thing as well in a way. I suppose the other thing is: how are you in five years’ time or 10 years’ time going to feel about how you conducted yourself in this moment? If you have children, what do you want to show them about how to deal with a difficult thing? And I often say to clients with children that they need to try and get in the headspace of ‘We’re not breaking up the family – what we’re doing is reorganising it and it’s going to look different’.”

As a divorce lawyer, what would be your main piece of advice to a single woman who’s hoping to get married one day?

“Pick carefully and don’t settle. Because actually the grass isn’t greener – it’s just different. And really be honest with yourself about why you want to be married. Marriage is really hard and so you want to be sure you’re doing it with the right person. There are huge strengths and opportunities that come from being single that you give up when you get married, and so you need to make sure that you are happy with that trade-off. It’s not, I want to be married, but I want to be married to you. You’re worth giving up all this freedom for.”

What advice would you give to a couple that’s about to get married?

“Make sure you’ve had those conversations we’ve talked about: children, money, where you’re going to live and what you think life is going to look like – not a year down the line, but five years down the line, 10 years down the line. I also like to say that the heart expands. It has this infinite space, so keep the space for all the love. Some of the happiest times I ever had was when I was still single around the homes of my married friends, because it’s just more love, and that’s really beautiful. There’s all kinds of love and friendship and support in life and it might come from siblings, friends, a spouse. We kind of need it all, right? So just keep nurturing those things.”

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