Disparity in Income
Where husband may not have been able to develop his career as successfully as he did without wife’s support in her role as the family’s designated homemaker, viewed in legal terms, their marriage, because of its duration and circumstances, constituted a “moral and financial” partnership in which the interest of each partner could be neither easily ascertained nor easily terminated because of the substantial and continuing effect that partnership had and would likely continue to have on their lives. Thus, where the trial court viewed the matter as if wife bore an obligation to find a full0time job to support herself, which at best would have provided her with but a fraction of husband’s income or the income they enjoyed while married, and her failure to do so precluded her from receiving any extension or increase in her maintenance, in punishing wife for what the court perceived as her lack of diligence, the court unduly encroached upon her reasonable expectations to be able to live in the future in a fashion remotely resembling how she had been able to live in the past, and her expectations in this regard were particularly reasonable in view of husband’s six-figure income; thus the gross disparity in potential incomes and the apparently drastic change in wife’s lifestyle supported her claim that her maintenance should have been extended and increased. In re Carpel
See Additional Case Law @ Divorce Lawyers New York
