For Millennials, The Division Of Assets Is More Emotional Than Financial

In When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal’s character yells at two of his friends early in their cohabitation after they ask his opinion about a coffee table. “Right now everything is great, everyone is happy, everyone is in love, and that’s wonderful. But you’ve got to know that sooner or later, you’re gonna be screaming at each other about who’s going to get this dish. This $8 dish will cost you $1,000 in phone calls to the legal firm of ‘That’s Mine, This Is Yours,’” he shouts, waving a cornflower dinner plate in the air.

Whether or not you find yourself hiring a legal firm with a snappy name to sort through your assets, Harry was right about one thing — the toll that untangling two lives takes is often far more expensive than the acquisition of the goods themselves, whether financially, emotionally, or both. Things have changed a bit since the time of this iconic ‘80s Ephron film, though. Millennials are not only delaying getting married, we’re at least partially responsible for the declining divorce rate. We’ve also contributed to the rise of the prenuptial agreement; however, for a generation more likely to hold significant student debt than a significant investment portfolio, prenups are sometimes more about walking away clean than protecting those capital-A assets.

To that end, Talaiya Safdar, a matrimonial attorney and mediator based in New York, says that she’s seen much of the landscape of divorce change over the past few years of her practice. “I'm seeing that for the younger generations, people have a very clear delineation of assets, of what is joined and what is separate,” she says. But just because younger couples may already have this delineation in mind — prenup or not — it doesn’t make the dissociation of two lives any easier. “I see people projecting where they are emotionally onto tangible property,” she continues, “but actually that attachment is to the relationship, not the asset.”

KitchenAid Tug-Of-War

While some go to court to throw down over accumulated assets and others choose a mediator, like Safdar, to pursue a collaborative divorce, others decide to roll up their sleeves and go it alone, together. For those of us without much shared capital to speak of, we’re the ones in the ring, arguing over bookcases and bedroom sets and Instant Pots. We stay up all night stewing on our own behalf about souvenirs, wall hangings, and plants. We’re the ones who not only bear the consequences but who bring them to fruition in the first place. I know about this version of divorce firsthand.

When you’re one on one, fighting your last fight and on the brink, it feels crucial to cling to these tangible things like a tug-of-war, even if your hands burn in the process.

My ex-husband of three years still has a KitchenAid stand mixer he gave me for my birthday, and I still have a beautifully worn-in denim jacket of his we used to share. These things were hard-won in the first days of our separation; arguments were formed, decisions were made. In a battle like this, you have to get scrappy. It can often feel like it’s to the death. When you’re one on one, fighting your last fight and on the brink, it feels crucial to cling to these tangible things like a tug-of-war, even if your hands burn in the process.

The end of my own marriage came as a shock to my ex, Dane. Our partnership wasn’t a bad one, but I needed to explore my queerness on my own, a revelation that had been slowly simmering before bubbling over suddenly, necessitating our separation. At first, I was fairly content to take only the bare minimum to get myself started and let him go through the rest, but there was another feeling, deeper down. Technically, I was the one leaving him, but I knew I was making the right call for all parties; I believed there was only resentment in our future if we stayed together, and we both deserve to be fully loved. Yet still, between every T-shirt, single kitchen utensil, and sneaker in my suitcase, I also packed traces of guilt, only visible to me. And while it was my own guilt rather than any request from him that prevented me from taking what I wanted, a question lingered, and I let myself stew on it: Why shouldn’t I get my pick of the items we’d accumulated together?

Getting To The Good(s) Stuff

Kelly, a 32-year-old living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, says the only shared item her ex-husband asked for in their 2019 divorce was a painting they’d purchased together for €5; it was the first piece of art that went up in their dwelling together and the only thing she truly wanted as a memento of their partnership. As she walked around the house and helped him pack, she remembers feeling shocked that he barely took anything; he hadn’t even asked for custody of their dog. Then, it happened.

“His truck was packed and idling in the driveway by the time he took a last look around the room and said, ‘I want the hawk,’” she recounts. “I felt my heart break and a lump swell in my throat. I was blindsided by his asking for it and cried when I pulled it off the wall and handed it to him.”

Other times, sifting through once-shared items is more confounding than it is heartbreaking. Zach, a 33-year-old living in Houston, Texas, says he was as surprised by what his ex-wife chose to take as the message he gleaned from what she left. The two had grown up in a small town in Texas with a high evangelical population, and though they’d since moved to a bigger city within the state, they remained involved in religion together for a time. When they eventually separated, not long after he informed her he was leaving the church, she came over with some folks from her Bible study group to take what she wanted. Zach says that what she left with didn’t amount to much, but the specificity of her choices left an impression.

“I went to check the DVD folder, and the area where all of the Christmas movies had been stored was empty. Movies like Christmas Vacation, A Charlie Brown Christmas, A Christmas Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Santa Clause, and Elf [were missing]… none of them exceptionally ‘Christian,’ but all Christmas-themed, some of them I had bought long before we were together,” Zach recalls.

He called to ask her why she took these particular titles. “While I don’t remember the exact quote, she told me something to the effect of ‘It’s not like that holiday should mean anything to you anymore,’” he says, a choice made all the more amusing by the fact that she and the Bible study “had taken a number of Christian books off of [the] bookshelf and put them on the coffee table, almost like they had thought about taking them but then thought, ‘No, he needs them more than we do.’”

Thankfully, Dane and I actually didn’t fight over too many material items, in the end. We didn’t have to; there wasn’t too much to fight over in the first place, and as with our lives, we wanted different things. I ask him now, more than three years later, about how the experience was for him, and he tells me, “I was really focused on the emotion of loss. There’s so much you lose beyond the relationship itself, I wanted to feel the depth of that — to grieve it as fully as possible — so I could let go of any attachments. There wasn’t anything, in particular, I wanted you to have or me to keep; those were things that tied us together and I was trying to accept our separation and move on.”

It’s Never About The Couch

In Marriage Story, Charlie (played by Adam Driver) tells Nicole (Scarlett Johansson), “We might not even need a mediator. We’ll split everything anyway. You can have most of it; we want the same things.” But in a later scene in a bar, he’s hung up on one particular item of furniture. “The couch was technically hers pre-marriage, but I mean, it was our couch. It's not like I was going to buy another couch, but then when it comes time to split, it’s suddenly her couch, and I have no couch, and... I’m sitting on the floor, is the short version.”

The thing is, he does have a couch. We’ve already seen it in his new apartment in Los Angeles, where he relocated (albeit temporarily) to be closer to Nicole and their son, Henry. Clearly, this is not about the couch at all.

While one party having a change of heart over how to split things might be confusing — even frustrating — it’s actually quite common, and there’s usually something deeper at the root. For many, it’s about grief. Zainy Pirbhai, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in Los Angeles, believes it’s crucial to give yourself permission to mourn the loss of important relationships; however, in these initial stages, you may not be aware that’s what you’re doing. “When you're going through a divorce or a separation or anything like that ... think about all the different cycles: There’s bargaining; there’s denial, depression, anger; and think about the idea of ‘stuff’ and where that can fall in all of those,” she says.

“If you’re in the acceptance phase, you may say, ‘I don’t need anything. It’s fine. I have what I need, I’ll buy what I need, it’s fine.’ And then all of a sudden, anger hits. You’re like, ‘No, that’s mine, actually. You did this thing to me, this one time, and that was really messed up.’ All of the emotions start flooding back ... and it can be very confusing for the other party, but it’s such a natural piece of what happens,” she says.

Amos Wolff, a licensed marriage and family therapist at IHI Therapy Center in New York City, has another take on this process. “When the relationship is off-kilter or in the process of destruction, the individuals that make up the couple often revert back to scarcity instincts learned from previous experiences,” he says. “This may manifest as power struggles over seemingly trivial objects in an attempt to grasp control.” My attempts to take just one more coffee mug (from a set I didn’t even like), just one more picture frame, just one more throw pillow — these were not mere attempts to furnish and decorate my tiny, sad, dimly lit new apartment. I was desperately trying to gain control during a period when I had very little.

Replacing The KitchenAid

OK, then what do we do? How do we remove emotions from this exercise, fairly sort through the debris of a relationship, and part ways as amicably as possible? Of course, it’s easier said than done, but there are ways to move toward a healthier process. Pirbhai suggests her clients try to step back and gain some perspective and then make a list. “I ask them, ‘OK, what really matters to you?’ And don't even think about your partner when you make this list. This list is for you. What are things that you genuinely care about? My goal with them is always trying to separate the feelings from the stuff, which is really hard,” she says.

“You want to take charge of the narrative, right? You want to be the one that has the control, and now the thing lets you have a say.”

Wolff also encourages his clients to ask themselves questions about the stuff itself. “Our capitalist society encourages the commodification of emotion, from gifts around births and anniversaries to weddings and funerals,” he says. “When the earth begins to erode under your feet, we’ve been trained to grasp for a bright shiny object to distract ourselves from heartbreak.” Some material things, however, do hold emotional charge and real value, and while those things may be worth fighting for, it’s important to ask yourself why.

So, let’s go back to the beginning: the KitchenAid and the jacket, a birthday gift from Dane, and an item of clothing we both wore countless times — not things we thought much about during our day-to-day lives, but they took on meaning in our split. “If there's a story behind it, that comes to the surface and has so much more meaning toward the end even if it wasn't a big deal during the relationship,” Pirbhai says. “You want to take charge of the narrative, right? You want to be the one that has the control, and now the thing lets you have a say.”

It’s now been more than three years since we got divorced, and our narrative has changed; partially as a result of putting hard work into shifting our relationship to each other, partially as a function of time. And almost as a joke, he got me a hand mixer for the holidays last year, which I’ve since realized is actually much more appropriate for the size of my apartment. He’s also replaced the denim jacket; while he tells me he doesn’t like his new one as much, I suspect this will also take time, as these things always do.

Experts:

Talaiya Safdar, a matrimonial attorney and mediator

Zainy Pirbhai, LMFT

Amos Wolff, LMFT