Introduction – the question that reveals the gap

She hadn’t written a CV in 20 years.

Hadn’t needed to.

When her ex’s career took off, they moved every few years. She held everything else together while he earned the money. But ‘everything else’ was a lot. A job that never ended, never paid, and never came with recognition, until now, when it’s being questioned.

Because now, as part of the divorce, she’s being asked to outline her ‘return-to-work plan’.

Where does she even begin?

Her old job barely exists. Her experience feels irrelevant. Her confidence is low, her network is gone, and her head is foggy from grief, stress and the start of menopause. She’s being asked to project her future earning potential while still trying to remember who she is, and while negotiating against someone who never had to step off the career track in the first place.

And yet the expectation persists that she should rebuild. That she must, as a matter of fairness. That if he has to part with wealth, she must show a path to self-sufficiency, quickly.

In recent years, this expectation has sharpened. There is a new tone in the air. Five years of maintenance should be enough, the thinking goes. The idea had been bubbling under the surface for a while, but Baroness Deech’s proposal gave it a kind of weight. Since then, in my experience, it’s been repeated often – sometimes by a spouse’s legal team, sometimes even by their own – as if it’s simply how things are done now.

It’s folded into conversations about fairness, about moving on, about not creating long-term financial ties. A clean break is best. A capable woman will bounce back, or so the narrative goes.

But behind this narrative sits a disconnect.

Because the court may see a woman who hasn’t worked in decades and ask, ‘What’s your plan?’

But it rarely sees the woman who gave up decades of work so her husband could fly.

The gap is wide between what’s assumed and what’s actually true. And that’s the gap we need to talk about.

Throughout this article, I use ‘she’ because this dynamic, where one party steps back from paid work to support the family and the other’s career, most often applies to women. But the broader principle applies regardless of gender. The core issue is not biology, but circumstance, the party who supported the system being asked to justify their worth only when it ends.

The silent career swap: when one career is chosen, and one is lost

In many executive marriages, there’s a moment, sometimes spoken, often implied, when the decision is made: his career will lead. And hers … won’t.

It happens gradually. A job she loves is put on pause for the first relocation. Then comes the second. Then the third. With every move, her sense of professional identity gets softer at the edges. The LinkedIn profile is left untouched. The references fade. The time since her last role stretches.

But what grows in its place is something else entirely, the scaffolding that holds the whole family together.

She builds homes, carves out new communities, finds the right schools, soothes the kids through every transition. She becomes the social secretary, emotional barometer, project manager, caregiver. She doesn’t stop working, she just stops being paid.

And now, years later, that contribution has no line item in the ES2.

Instead, she’s asked how she’ll become financially independent. She’s told to produce a return-to-work plan. She’s asked to quantify her potential.

What gets missed is that her potential has already been spent, not wasted, but used, poured into the life they built together. It enabled his promotions, his travel, his rise. But now, when it matters, that contribution is invisible.

The truth is, for many women, the divorce settlement is the first time their contribution is held up to the light, and the first time they realise how easily it can be disregarded.

A client of mine once said, ‘I didn’t leave my career. I traded it’. And yet no one seems to remember what it bought.

A professional world that moved on without her

The expectation seems simple enough, re-enter the workforce. But re-enter where, exactly?

For women who’ve been out of paid employment for 10, 15, or even 20 years, the world they once worked in no longer exists in the same form. Industries have transformed. Digital skills are assumed. Professional roles that once provided a viable route back – part time PA work, project support, middle management – have either been automated, restructured or made so competitive that returning newcomers simply don’t make the shortlist.

Even women with impressive qualifications face this. A woman who once worked in publishing finds the entire landscape now ruled by digital marketing and algorithmic targeting. A civil servant who managed regional teams now finds entry level admin roles asking for software experience she doesn’t have.

And in many cases, she’s not just behind, she’s priced out of the retraining she’d need to catch up.

This is where the return-to-work narrative becomes especially hollow. It fails to account for the actual conditions of the job market. It assumes that opportunity is waiting, that confidence is the only missing ingredient, and that effort equals access. But in reality, many of the roles available are low paid, precarious or fundamentally incompatible with caring responsibilities.

Even if she does secure work, and many do, her starting salary rarely justifies the pressure that was placed on her. It may be £20,000. Perhaps £35,000 after a few years. Maybe £50,000 in time, if the stars align. But in the context of a high-net-worth divorce, where the family budget once exceeded £300,000 a year, these numbers don’t even register. They aren’t life changing. They don’t meaningfully reduce the need for maintenance. And they certainly don’t close the gap between his ongoing wealth trajectory and hers.

Yet the court asks the question anyway.

In lower income divorces, this question may be economically essential. But in high-net-worth worth cases, it’s often symbolic, a way of testing intent, not changing outcome. And it’s time we acknowledged that distinction.

Because when the court insists on a return-to-work plan that will, in practice, barely move the financial dial, we’re no longer talking about equity. We’re just measuring effort for effort’s sake.

No one wants to be the one to say it. But this isn’t real. It isn’t working. It isn’t even close.

It’s the Emperor’s new clothes.

Reform or retreat? The rhetoric behind the return-to-work plan

The return-to-work plan might not be openly demanded in every case, but it’s quietly shaping expectations anyway. So where did this idea come from?

The roots go deeper than any one person or policy. Over the past decade, there’s been a noticeable shift in tone around spousal maintenance, particularly following the case of SS v NS [2014] EHWC 4183 (Fam), where Mostyn J set out a series of principles that are widely seen as having tightened expectations. Since then, the idea of a clean break has gained momentum, especially in high-net-worth divorces.

It’s against that backdrop that Baroness Deech’s 2019 Divorce Bill landed. Her proposal to cap maintenance at 5 years, and her call for greater individual responsibility, gave cultural weight to an idea that was already taking hold.

Her argument? That the current legal framework encourages dependency and sends the wrong message, that ‘getting married to a well-off man is an alternative career’. She suggests that modern relationships should start from a place of equality, and end with a presumption that each party will move forward on their own two feet.

The Bill, to be clear, still allows for discretion. Clause 5 permits maintenance to extend beyond 5 years where necessary to avoid ‘serious financial hardship’. So, technically, things can still remain bespoke.

But that’s not how it lands.

What’s emerged, even in the absence of new legislation, is a shift in tone. There’s now a subtle but growing presumption, particularly in high-net-worth divorces, that 5 years of maintenance should be enough. That returning to work is a given. That needing more time or support is a mark of failure, or at best, a temporary weakness to be swiftly overcome.

The danger in the narrative is that it collapses in context. It assumes that because most women now work, and because short marriages with modest assets make up the majority of divorces, a uniform approach will produce faster and fairer outcomes.

But for women in high-net-worth marriages, the reality is more complex.

They often stepped back from careers not because they lacked ambition, but because the structure of the marriage demanded it. Multiple relocations. Solo parenting. A partner with an intense or public-facing career. These women didn’t see the marriage as a shortcut, they simply made sacrifices no one else was in a position to make.

And while the current law already allows for those contributions to be recognised and valued, the cultural shift toward fixed timescales and performance-based fairness risks undermining that progress.

Because even when flexibility remains on paper, it becomes harder to claim in practice, especially in an environment where the return-to-work plan has quietly become a test of legitimacy.

Burnout, grief and midlife collapse: the hidden cost behind the performance

By the time she’s asked to write a return-to-work plan, she’s already running on empty.

It’s not just the divorce that exhausts her; it’s the accumulation of years spent holding the whole system together. Moving cities, rebuilding social networks, managing the household logistics, being the consistent parent, while he focused on his career. Her work was invisible but relentless, and it came without time off, validation or a pension.

Now, just as life unravels, she’s expected to start a brand-new path forward. While she’s in shock. While she’s trying to hold her children steady. While she’s navigating a system that seems more interested in what she might earn someday than in everything she’s already done.

And for many women, there’s another layer, peri menopause.

It’s not something many people talk about in divorce proceedings, but they should. Because hot flashes and hormone swings are the tip of the iceberg. Many women experience debilitating fatigue, brain fog, panic attacks and disturbed sleep, all of which make it harder to think clearly or advocate for themselves. Research shows that peri menopause is a leading reason that women are leaving the workforce, so imagine being told that despite your symptoms, it’s time to start looking for work again?

This isn’t emotional overwhelm. It’s neurological. Cognitive. Physical. I’ve sat with women who used to lead teams, run departments, run entire families with ruthless efficiency, who now feel incapable of answering a straightforward questionnaire without confusion.

It’s not because they aren’t competent, it’s because of peri menopause. But they are still expected to deliver clarity, strategy, vision. And they’re being quietly judged if they can’t.

This is not resistance to work.

It’s a woman who has spent everything she had, emotionally, physically, psychologically, and is being told that rebuilding is simply a matter of effort.

We need to stop measuring her future potential while she’s still sifting through the rubble.

The fairness gap no one talks about: media, perception, and the 5-year myth

Beyond the legal framework and emotional strain of divorce, there’s another invisible player influencing her next steps, the court of public opinion.

Because even when the law allows for discretion, and even when her lawyers understand the nuances of her case, there’s another force at large, the cultural narrative about who deserves what can overshadow everything.

This narrative is powerful, persistent and dangerously oversimplified. It shows up in headlines about ‘gold diggers’ and ‘meal tickets for life’. It suggests that any woman who isn’t visibly rebuilding fast enough must be taking advantage. That wealth belongs to the person who earned it in the traditional sense, and that anyone else is just trying their luck.

It’s not just that this narrative is wrong, it’s that it reshapes how women behave.

They know they’re being watched, talked about, judged. Not just by strangers, but by family, friends and sometimes their own professional team. So, they get ahead of it. They tone down their requests. They apologise for their lifestyle. They position themselves as ‘not that kind of ex-wife’.

And that’s how the fairness gap widens, quietly. Not just in settlement figures, but in mindset. In how confidently a woman feels able to say, ‘this is what I need’. Because when support is treated as suspect, women don’t feel safe asking for it, even when the law entitles them to.

Increasingly, this discomfort has crystalised around the idea of the 5-year career plan.

It isn’t always official or explicit. It doesn’t even need to be widely endorsed.

Its power comes from something subtler, the anxiety it creates about perception, quietly turning into an unspoken benchmark that defines whether a woman is seen as reasonable, or greedy.

But here’s the thing, the 5-year plan is not always rooted in possibility.

It’s often rooted in optics.

It’s a way to prove she’s doing her part.

It’s a defence mechanism, not a financial strategy.

And so, just like that, the return-to-work plan becomes less about her, and more about them. About how she’ll be perceived. About how quickly she can end the shame of needing support. And how far she can distance herself from the stereotype.

This isn’t what fairness looks like.

This is survival mode in a system that doesn’t fully believe her contribution counts.

And until we shift the tone – not just in courtrooms, but in the culture around divorce, we’ll keep mistaking performative progress for meaningful equity.

The ideological shift no one wants to admit

I’m not a lawyer. I come to this as an outsider, someone who sees, day after day, what these decisions mean in real lives.

And from that position, it’s hard to not notice a shift. Quiet, ideological, but real. A growing discomfort with long-term maintenance. A leaner tone creeping into negotiations. A cultural pull toward the idea that everyone should move on quickly and stand on their own two feet.

If family law swings on a pendulum, it feels like we’ve moved far from the kinder and more realistic days of C v C [2018] EWHC 3186 (Fam) and Flavell v Flavell [1996] EWCA Civ 649, and into something harsher. And maybe it’s unfashionable to say this, but I think Waggott v Waggott [2018] EWCA Civ 727 was wrongly decided.

Because when I look at that judgment through the lens of family life, not just legal theory, it doesn’t feel fair. It treats future earning potential as something clean and quantifiable, detached from the years of sacrifice that shaped it. It treats the family as though it no longer matters once the marriage ends.

And that approach, however neat on paper, lands disproportionately hard on the women I work with.

I wonder how long it will be before the Supreme Court is forced to confront that truth? Before we have another White v White moment.

One that resets the conversation, not just about how we divided money, but how we value what was given to earn it.

What needs to change? A more honest framework for fairness

If we want fairer outcomes in high-net-worth divorces, we need to start by acknowledging that this group of women exists.

The ones who traded their earning power for family stability.

The ones who enabled someone else’s success.

The ones who quietly stepped back, because the structure of the marriage demanded it.

They don’t fit the story we like to tell about modern relationships, that everything is equal now, that women don’t step back anymore. So instead of being recognised as a group with specific needs, they are left out of the conversation entirely.

If we can’t name their reality, we can’t design a fair response.

Because yes, some women will go on to build new businesses, careers and income streams.

But many will not, not for lack of talent or will but because they’ve already given that energy to a system that quietly demanded it and now offers little in return.

We need to stop treating the return-to-work plan as an option equally available to everyone and start recognising the specific reality of women whose work made someone else’s success possible.

So what needs to change?

We need to stop designing solutions around the people who stayed in the race and start accounting for the ones who built the track.

Instead of asking, ‘How quickly can she earn again’, we should be asking ‘What did it cost her to support this life, and what would true equity look like now?’

Next, we need to recognise rebuilding as a process, not a quick fix.

That may include:

• Time-limited maintenance that actually allows for recovery and retraining.
• Practical support for requalification, education or entrepreneurship.
• An honest discussion of age, caregiving responsibilities and market realities.

But more than anything, the tone needs to change.

The unspoken assumption, that she will return to full financial independence within 5 years, isn’t written into law. It’s not universal. But in many high-net-worth divorces, it lingers beneath the surface. It can be referenced, suggested or simply felt, quietly shaping the tone of discussions and setting the bar for what she’s expected to prove.

It’s a tactic. A tone-setter. And it’s fundamentally adversarial.

Because that’s the deeper issue here, divorce law is still framed as you versus me. And in that dynamic, the return-to-work plan becomes just another tool of positioning, a way to argue, minimise or prove a point. Not a genuine inquiry into what will help both parties move forward with dignity and fairness.

If we want better outcomes, we need to stop using her recovery as a negotiation strategy.

Because the truth is, many of these women weren’t dependent as the way the word is often used: passive, weak or unwilling.

They were economically reliant, yes, but as part of a family system that functioned because someone stepped back.

They weren’t less than. They were essential.

And now, all they’re asking for is recognition for the position they’re actually in, not the one the system assumes they should be in.

We already know this return-to-work plan doesn’t fit everyone.

We’ve seen how little it moves the financial dial.

We’ve seen how it pretends not to notice that women like her still exist.

But still the expectation persists.

Still the plan is presented like a solution.

But the truth is, we’ve seen this story before.

The clothes were never real.