Why downsizing your home could lead to DIVORCE: The stresses faced by older couples moving into smaller houses may be causing a rise in 'silver splitters'

In my 45 years as a divorce lawyer I’ve seen couples split for every reason under the sun, from men running off with younger versions of their wives to women running off with their husband’s better-looking brother.

Despite being involved in around 100,000 divorces, I still regularly see trends emerge.

The latest is a growing number of older couples, known as ‘Silver Splitters’, who break up after downsizing their home.

Typically everything is going well at first. The couple are looking forward to starting the next chapter of their lives, perhaps because the children have finally flown the nest, one or both have stopped work and they are excited about enjoying the retirement they have worked so hard to achieve. Then things come unstuck – and it is often the downsize itself to blame.

Take my clients Tom and Helen*, for example, who decided to downsize last year. As they were moving from a three-bedroom house to a two-bedroom flat, it was clear that plenty of belongings had to go.

Tom insisted that Helen’s family ‘rubbish’ should be disposed of without a backwards glance. Sadly, Helen did not take the same view. Her mother’s jardiniere, big Chinese pots and a sideboard (carved by her great grandfather) should not go. Instead, Helen helpfully suggested that Tom’s collection of 78rpm records, including those of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, could go first. Tom lost his temper completely. Arguments went on for weeks with neither side willing to compromise. Tom and Helen never did downsize together, but after a difficult divorce did so separately.

Helen kept all her mother’s treasure and Tom kept his record collection. However, the case did have a happy ending since months later Tom and Helen met up by chance. They are dating again but Helen tells me they’ve agreed they will never move in together.

Another flashpoint is the family pet and what will happen when they decide to downsize from a big property with a garden to a flat.

Typically one party tends to be far more attached to the pet than the other – and would rather compromise on downsizing plans than give it up – while the other doesn’t want their preferences to come second to an animal.

Tensions can quickly escalate. Where would Rover sleep? Who would take him for a walk? And, more importantly, are you allowed to keep a pet in the premises you are intending to move into? As one client put it to me: ‘A pet should be for life, not until you downsize.’

Downsizing couples can also find their relationship was only being held together by their large family home, which allowed them to live largely separate lives but under the same roof. In closer quarters, the reality emerges.

Take my client Sally, whose husband Sebastian told her they should move to a much smaller home and that Sally would love it. She did not. In fact she hated everything about living in a flat – the noise, the lack of peace, the absence of friendly neighbours.

She felt claustrophobic and that every room she went into meant bumping into Sebastian. They used to watch their chosen TV programmes in separate rooms when they lived in the family house – now they had to watch the same things. He hated reality TV, she loved it. She hated sport, he loved it. She said she hadn’t considered that downsizing would feel exactly the same as lockdown during Covid and she just wanted to scream on a daily basis.

When Sally came to me she felt divorce was the only option. Thankfully, it turned out their marriage was salvageable – in no small part due to counselling and installing a second TV in the spare bedroom. Marriages can also come under huge pressure when downsizing due not just to the couple themselves, but the wider family.

Families are often used to piling in to stay with Mum and Dad at Christmas, family occasions or even just for childcare. It does not always go down well when this is no longer possible when older couples swap their house for a flat.

Many couples have described to me the rows that they never anticipated such as no longer being able to look after grandchildren overnight or entertain the family at Christmas.

My client Val and her husband Peter made what they considered to be the sensible future choice for their living arrangements. They had a large garden they could no longer manage themselves and it was clear the family home had to go. But they had not thought through that their children would feel so excluded from their decision that they would no longer speak to them.

Val felt that in hindsight she had been pressured by Peter to move out of their comfortable family home and into a two-bedroom penthouse and that she hadn’t had time to think it through fully. She was so distressed by the turn of events that she sought a lawyer’s advice and divorce.

One factor which has remained a constant throughout my career is that if a marriage is teetering on the edge, it only takes one big issue to push it over for good.

So there might be a bereavement of a parent or relative, a loss or change of job, a relocation, an affair, another child that one party did not want, financial worries or a house move.

Often the downsizing simply reveals problems that were there all along, but until then were yet to surface.

Downsizing can, of course, give couples a new lease of life, but it comes with its own stresses that can break already struggling relationships.

My client Cynthia decided that, as the children had flown the nest and cleaning their huge Hampstead home was too onerous (and she couldn’t find a reliable cleaner), it was clearly time for her and husband Charles to downsize to somewhere much smaller that only needed a cleaner twice a week. ‘What we need is a three-bedroom flat with a view,’ she told her husband.

Well, Cynthia got her wish for such a property but not quite in the way she had hoped. She could not have imagined that her dependable Charles, well into his sixties, would run off with the estate agent.

While Cynthia’s case was extreme, she did move into the sort of property she wanted and got a lot more besides in the overall financial settlement.

And as she later told me: ‘Without having to deal any more with all of Charles’s peculiarities.’

It is imperative that long before you make the decision to up-end your entire life as you know it, that you carefully consider all of the above. If you don’t wish to end up like Cynthia and Charles, Val and Peter, Tom and Helen or Sally and Sebastian, you must really talk through your decision.

Is it better to downsize or to be carefully advised on equity release before you do? What will the impact of your move be? Will you regret it for a multitude of reasons or relish being unhooked from onerous responsibilities that come with a larger home.

And most importantly – will you want to face your downsized future together?

❋All names have been changed to protect client confidentiality.