In divorces that involve children, the parents’ paramount questions are often related to custody and include concerns such as how custody is determined or the various types of custody. One common issue that arises when determining the answers to these concerns involves how siblings affect the custody process in general. Siblings’ relationships with each other can often be very close, and the existence of these additional close relationships may complicate the custody process.

Generally, there are two major concerns related to siblings and custody. These include whether the court will keep the siblings together and whether siblings are allowed visitation rights to the other siblings. Unfortunately, neither question has a concrete answer. Family law is a discipline with many unique scenarios. However, there are legal guidelines within which courts will work.

Keeping Siblings Together 

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A past post on this blog highlighted the disparate impact that divorce has on girls because marriages with firstborn daughters tend to end more frequently than marriages with firstborn sons. That post highlighted a study that posed a variety of sociological explanations for that gender gap, such as fathers feeling more obliged to provide a male role model for sons or parents’ inaccurate perceptions that girls are more costly to raise increasing stress within the marriage.

Now, a new study has discovered a possible biological explanation for the gender imbalance in divorce. This explanation is known as the female survival advantage. The female survival advantage is a term for the generally-observed fact that women appear to be more physically resilient and more likely to survive than men. This trait carries over throughout all stages of life. In fact, men have documented higher mortality rates for all ages from zero to 100.

What the Study Found

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One of the key portions of any divorce proceeding is the determination of spousal support, also referred to as alimony. This is the money that one former spouse pays to the other to support them as they transition back to their single life. The current system of calculating spousal support is based on a wide array of factors, including things like both spouses' incomes and property, the spouses' needs and earning capacities, the standard of living that occurred during the marriage, and the duration of the marriage. This has led to spousal support amounts being somewhat unpredictable at times.

Now, a new bill that is currently awaiting the governor's signature plans to reform that. The bill will not remove those factors from play entirely, but it will provide more concrete guidelines for judges to follow. The bill adds a new method of calculating support terms and the amount of time that the supporting spouse will be required to pay support, which will now be based on the length of the marriage. Additionally, the bill provides more strict mathematical formulas for calculating the amount of spousal support that a person will owe.

New Support Terms

The first set of guidelines that the law creates are a set of support terms. These are suggested periods for which supporting spouses must pay alimony, based on the length of the marriage. The new law applies a simple mathematical formula to calculate the support term. The judge multiplies the length of the marriage by a specific factor that changes based on the length of the marriage, as shown in the table below.

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On November 20, 2013, the Governor of Illinois signed a law legalizing same-sex marriage in Illinois, and that law went into effect on June 1, 2014. This new right to same-sex marriage has attracted many people from out of state seeking to get married in Illinois because their home states do not yet recognize same-sex marriage.

However, an old Illinois law, Section 217 of the Illinois Marriage and Dissolution of Marriage Act, may prevent the marriages from being legitimate. The law voids marriages in Illinois if they take place between people who live in a state that would not, itself, recognize their marriage. This means that a marriage between a same-sex couple, whose home state did not allow same-sex marriage, would be void.

What the Statute Says

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A pioneer longitudinal study has recently revealed that people who end troubled marriages when they are middle aged, colloquially referred to as “silver splitters” or “grey divorcees,” can often find later marriages to be much happier. The study in question, the "Grant Study," tracked young men over their whole lives, starting in the 1930s. The study, which focused in part on relationships, recorded whether the participant got a divorce, how long the participant’s marriage lasted, whether the person remarried, and the qualitative happiness of the marriages using periodic survey questions.

The Grant Study

The Grant Study, formally known as the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School, began in 1938, when researchers started tracking the lives of then 19-year-old Harvard students. The study began with 268 participants, but only 242 remained following World War II, in which many of the men fought. The researchers required participants to answer periodic surveys about their families and their relationships, usually annually or every other year. This allowed the researchers to track marriage length and marital status.

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