No Cohabitation When Man Spent Some Nights at House

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Tennessee alimony modification case summary after 21 years married.

Deborah Lynn Mathews v. Douglas Clay Mathews

The husband and wife in this Davidson County, Tennessee, case had been married 24 years at the time of their 2011 divorce.  The parties entered into a marital dissolution agreement which, among other things, required the husband to pay alimony in futuro of $10,000 per month, but the obligation would terminate if the wife remarried or cohabited with a paramour.

The wife had been dating a man in 2012, and they formed a general partnership for purposes of purchasing a home.  The partnership was later dissolved, and the two owned the property jointly.  The wife later moved into the house.

In 2015, the husband filed a petition to end his alimony obligation based on cohabitation, as well as raising other grounds.  In 2018, a trial was held before Judge Philip E. Smith, who denied the petition.  The trial court noted that the agreement hadn’t defined “cohabitation,” and that the wife and paramour spent only one or two nights per week together.  It noted that the paramour’s driver’s license showed a different address, and that he didn’t keep clothes or toiletries at the wife’s house.  He had a key, but was not allowed unfettered access.

The court also noted that the wife’s increase in income was not a material change of circumstance, since it was foreseeable.

The wife appealed regarding an unrelated issue, and the husband appealed to the Tennessee Court of Appeals on the grounds that the trial court erred in finding there was no cohabitation.  The appeals court turned first to the cohabitation issue.

The court first noted, like the trial court, that the agreement hadn’t defined the term cohabitation.  It then looked at the definition contained in prior cases and the dictionary.  In particular, it noted an earlier case where the paramour had spent 206 days in a nine-month period, and kept many clothes at the house in question.  The appeals court distinguished that case, and instead pointed to a case where the paramour spent only 104 nights per year.  In particular, the court pointed out that cohabitation requires more than spending the night on several occasions.  In this case, the appeals court agreed with the lower court that the case amounted to spending the night on several occasions.  For that reason, it agreed with the lower court that there had been no cohabitation.

After addressing the wife’s issues, the Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court’s ruling.

No. M2018-01886-COA-R3-CV (Tenn. Sept. 11, 2019).

See original opinion for exact language.  Legal citations omitted.

To learn more, see Alimony Modification in Tennessee Law | How to Modify Alimony.