This Note addresses the recent amendment to Minnesota’s spousal maintenance statute—the addition of Minnesota Statutes section 518.552 subdivision 6 (the “cohabitation amendment”)—which permits modification of spousal maintenance payments based on the spousal maintenance recipient’s cohabitation with a new partner. The Minnesota Supreme Court discussed cohabitation as a potential ground for modification in 1979, but the Minnesota Legislature did not enact the cohabitation amendment until thirty-seven years later, in 2016. The cohabitation amendment addressed the economic effect of cohabitation on an ex-spouse’s need for maintenance at a time when cohabitation among unmarried adults was increasing. Minnesota followed the example set by other states that also reformed their spousal maintenance statutes in the 2010s in an attempt to make maintenance awards, a deeply ingrained aspect of divorce, more equitable.
In Minnesota, a movant seeking to modify a spousal maintenance obligation based on the obligee’s cohabitation must first establish the cohabitation constitutes a substantial change in circumstances that renders the original maintenance payment scheme “unreasonable and unfair.” As part of determining whether an established change in circumstances renders a maintenance scheme “unreasonable and unfair,” the cohabitation amendment provides four factors that courts must consider when determining whether to reduce, terminate, reserve, or suspend a spousal maintenance award:
- whether the obligee would marry the cohabitant but for the maintenance award;
- the economic benefit the obligee derives from the cohabitation;
- the length of the cohabitation and the likely future duration of the cohabitation; and
- the economic impact on the obligee if maintenance is modified and the cohabitation ends.
Trial courts have significant discretion in evaluating these factors, and appellate courts will grant trial courts’ findings significant deference absent a clear abuse of discretion.
This Note will discuss the Hennepin County District Court’s findings in Sinda v. Sinda, which were later reviewed and affirmed by the Minnesota Court of Appeals, producing the first precedential appellate opinion construing the cohabitation amendment. At the time that this Note is being authored, the Minnesota Court of Appeals has reviewed district court orders based on cohabitation only four times since the amendment was enacted, and only Sinda is precedential. This Note will analyze that precedential appellate opinion and highlight inconsistencies in the court of appeals’ application of the statutory factors as well as how its analysis contradicts precedential analysis of the spousal maintenance statute that predated enactment of the cohabitation amendment.