The Divorce Act specifies the sole grounds for divorce as marital breakdown, and provides for three basic ways for proving it. First, you and your spouse have to be separated for one year. This is the easiest to prove and the most commonly used ground for divorce. The Act does allow for periods of attempted reconciliation lasting for 90 days or less - these periods do not "reset the clock" on your separation. However, if you live together for 91 days or more and then re-separate, the 12 month cycle starts again. The reason for your separation does not matter; all that matters is that you are in fact separated. You can also be "living separate and apart" while living in the same dwelling, although it is difficult to prove. You must be living entirely different lives each doing you own cooking, laundry, and home maintenance and, of course, not sharing the same bed. Second, your spouse has committed adultery. You do not have to name the person with whom your spouse committed adultery unless you are making some immediate claim against that party. You also do not have to find your spouse in bed with the other party, you only need to establish a high probability that adultery occurred especially if it is not denied by the adulterous spouse. The simplest way to prove adultery is if your spouse is willing to admit it. You cannot invent the adultery simply as a way of obtaining a divorce. The act must have truly occurred and it must not have been condoned by yourself. Third, your spouse has treated you with intolerable mental or physical cruelty. The courts have interpreted cruelty as conduct that would make unbearable if you continued cohabitation.

After long and bitter parliamentary debates, the federal Divorce Act was revised. Additional grounds for divorce included desertion, imprisonment, or separation for at least three years plus marital offences of physical and mental cruelty. The new law eliminated the need to appear in court in most cases - often the most personally humiliating experience in the older legal procedure. The law later changed again in 1985, where it eased off yet again, to allow divorces after only a year's separation. The broad trend in Canada was to make divorce easier. It was accomplished by making it less fault oriented where most divorce applications to the courts are no longer contested which eliminates the need for a formal court hearing where both parties testify and ask for different things. With no fault splits in place, the social stigma of divorce shrank. As more people divorced the stigma weakened further. The cycle continued while the divorce rate soared. In 1951, there had been only one divorce for every 24 marriages, by 1987, o

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Approximate Word count = 1808
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