Sitting in an eclectic, art-filled law office in Nashville, I turned off the location services on my phone. I didn’t want my husband — my partner of eight years, six of them married — tracking my movements. The divorce attorney who greeted me in the lobby seemed warm in a way I hadn’t expected. Angry on my behalf, he apologized for what I’d endured, but he was nevertheless honest: I was in a terrible position to negotiate from.
A month earlier, I’d learned my husband, Scott, had been cheating on me for almost a year. We’d never signed a prenup. The vast majority of our household income came from my work as a fashion influencer, but under Tennessee’s equitable-distribution laws, marital assets in a divorce are subject to division regardless of who earned them. I had never before considered that a source for concern. If anything, it’s what seemed most fair: The laws exist in part to protect spouses who step back from wage-based work to focus on unpaid labor that’s no less demanding, like keeping a home or raising children.
