What's Next? Gay Divorce

Getty Images As Maine's governor signs same-sex marriage into law, there's a new problem creeping up: undoing the vows.

When Cass Ormiston and Margaret Chambers, partners of 11 years, decided to get married in May 2004, it was a joyfully impulsive decision. The Massachusetts Supreme Court had just declared same-sex marriage legal, and Ormiston and Chambers wanted to get hitched before then-Governor Mitt Romney invoked an obscure state law that would ban out-of-state gay couples from marrying there, which he did soon after. They rushed from their home in Providence, Rhode Island, to the county court in Fall River, Massachusetts, just over the state line, and told the clerk they were ready to make a legal, lifelong commitment.

When Cass met the new love of her life, she couldn't marry her because she can’t divorce her former partner. Or, as she puts it, she’s "married forever to a woman I do not love."

The two women were in a hurry, and in love, which is why when a judge granted their request to waive the three-day waiting period for a marriage license, he looked each of them in the eye and asked in earnest, "Do you know what you're doing?" Of course they did, Ormiston, now 62, says they told the judge. "Imagine me at 58," she says, "never imagining that I would enjoy the right to marry the woman I loved, being able to do it. It was elating."

But it turned out the couple did not entirely know what they were doing. They found that out two years later when, for reasons Ormiston declines to discuss, they split and moved into separate homes. Then, says Ormiston, Chambers served her with divorce papers. (Chambers could not be reached for comment.) But when a judge in Rhode Island's Family Court asked the state's Supreme Court if he could grant a gay divorce when the state didn't even recognize gay marriage, the Supreme Court responded that no, he could not. Ormiston’s marriage would have to stand.

Which meant that when Ormiston, a former property developer, met the new love of her life—ironically, a gay-marriage activist named Susan McNeil—she couldn't marry her, in Massachusetts or anywhere else, because technically she’s still married to Chambers. Or, as she puts it, "married forever to a woman I do not love."

Ormiston’s impasse is the less-heartwarming flip side of the gay-marriage movement, which in recent weeks has bounded forward. This month, Vermont and Iowa joined Massachusetts and Connecticut in allowing same-sex marriage. New York Governor David Paterson introduced a gay-marriage bill yesterday that he promised to make a personal crusade. And today, Steve Schmidt, who effectively ran John McCain’s presidential campaign last year, is expected to tell a gathering of the Log Cabin Republicans that the party needs to get behind same-sex marriage. But as with marriage generally, same-sex marriages sometimes go bust. Unlike marriage generally, however, the process of ending a same-sex marriage can be a Kafkaesque experience.

Part of the reason is because there still isn’t much precedent. A recent UCLA study of same-sex couples in states that offer civil unions or legal domestic partnerships showed that these couples broke their legal bonds at about the same rate as straight couples: 2 percent per year. But because it’s only been a few years that gays have had legal unions at all, this amounts to relatively few dissolutions. Also, because most gay couples who've married thus far had already been together for many years, the gay divorce rate is still low, says Evan Wolfson, founder of the national gay-nups lobby Freedom to Marry. "I expect that, over time, gay people will probably have the same rate of [marriage] failure as non-gay people," says Wolfson. "And that's part of the point. People should be treated equally."

But untying the knot can be tricky for people like Ormiston, who no longer lives in the state where she tied it. Because states that offer gay marriage are few and far between, many gay couples have never lived in the state where they got married. Only a few states recognize, and hence will undo, a gay marriage performed in another state. So if you married in Massachusetts but live in Rhode Island, to get divorced, you’d need to actually move to Massachusetts and declare residency.