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It's always been an interesting lawyers' question whether 'unreasonable behaviour' was an objective test, a subjective test, or something in between. As a divorce lawyer working in a largely legal aid practice where the only significant asset was likely to be the matrimonial home I used to work on the basis that it didn't much matter because (a) whether you had grounds for divorce or not, if your spouse didn't want to stay married to you then sooner or later you were going to be divorced (b) the Legal Aid Board wasn't going to pay for you to argue that your behaviour wasn't quite unreasonable enough (c) pragmatically therefore you had better bite the bullet and move on with your life. It remained the case that sometimes there were people who just didn't like their partner any more but had no real grounds for getting a divorce; and in that case they just had to stick it out, if necessary for five years. Mr Owens appears to be a man with more money than sense (unless he's hoping that Mrs Owens walks under a bus before he has to make a financial settlement) and maybe the law does need to be changed to shorten the period required for a no-consent divorce, but we are where we are.

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