Opinion ID: 1961989
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Separation Without an Agreement

Text: The Appellate Division held that an oral agreement to separate accompanied by physical separation proves that the marriage is dead. This principle is a virtual abandonment of the rule in Painter that designates the date of the divorce complaint as the end of the marital partnership. The pragmatic considerations which guided our choice of the termination date in that case, see Painter, 65 N.J. at 217, persuade us to retain the presumption that the marital partnership continues until a complaint for divorce is filed. As we recognized in Painter, the task facing the trial judge in making an equitable distribution of marital assets will seldom be an easy one. See 65 N.J. at 212; see also Rothman, 65 N.J. at 232-233. The burgeoning divorce rate in New Jersey, see Annual Reports, Administrative Director of the Courts (1969 through 1978); Supreme Court Establishes Committee on Matrimonial Litigation (Statement of Chief Justice Hughes), 102 N.J.L.J. 545, 552 (1978), and the complexity of the many issues facing a matrimonial court call for rules that possess some degree of certainty and ease of application. When a complaint has been filed or the parties themselves have implemented a separation agreement, the date on which the marital partnership has terminated is not impossible or extremely difficult to determine. Smith, 72 N.J. at 361. But mere physical separation alone is an insufficient indication that a marriage is effectively at an end. Judicial inquiry into the circumstances of a separation would introduce all the difficulties we have consistently sought to avoid. Case-by-case searches for the elusive point when a marriage disintegrates would be necessary. Trial courts would be embroiled in analyzing the entire course of events during the period of separation. Any contact between the spouses would require scrutiny. Much of the evidence would come from the parties themselves; credibility and corroboration would be persistent problems. Any examination of the nature and meaning of the parties' separation would require extraordinary amounts of judicial time and energy. Because of the character of the evidence which would be involved, the resulting adjudications would be neither reliable nor consistent. On balance, we find no injustice in requiring a more definite indication than mere physical separation to support a conclusion that the marital partnership terminated prior to the date of a divorce complaint. We have held that the execution of a separation agreement will mark the end of the acquisition period. See Smith v. Smith, supra ; Carlsen v. Carlsen, supra ; DiGiacomo v. DiGiacomo, supra . Although agreements will not bar equitable distribution unless they are equitable and fair, they will limit any required judicial distribution to assets acquired prior to the date of the agreement. Since separation agreements are no longer subject to the rule of unconscionability when later modification is sought, see Lepis v. Lepis, 83 N.J. 139 (1980), any risks associated with such an approach have been substantially reduced. Thus the acquisition period can be terminated close to the time of separation if the parties enter into a separation agreement. Under our no fault ground for divorce, a complaint may be filed 18 months after the parties separate. N.J.S.A. 2A:34-2(d). Given the relative speed and ease with which a divorce action may now be initiated, we do not consider the Painter date-of-complaint rule to impose any great hardship on a spouse who is not able to enter into an agreement with the other spouse.