Breaking Up is Hard to Do When Texans Russell Smith and John Anthony traveled to Vermont to join in a civil union in February 2002, they had all the romantic intentions of any couple exchanging “I do’s.” But like the 50 percent of Americans whose marriages end in divorce, Smith and Anthony later decided to call it quits. Because the two had shared business deals. Smith worried he might one day face financial obligations from his ex. So he filed fro divorce in a Texas court. Though a district judge initially agreed to grant one, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott intervened. He feared granting a divorce would signal that the state recognized the union in the first place — a step Texas and other states aren’t yet willing to take. “A court cannot grant a divorce where no marriage existed,” Abbott argued. The judge reversed the divorce and the couple was forced to hash things out on their own. “They were just wanting to legally terminate this relationship,” says Anthony’s lawyer, Tommy Gunn. “Obviously the divorce route did not work.” If gay couples think it’s tough to get married, they may find it’s ever harder to split up. Few want to think about it on the way to the altar, but “we’re not immune to relationship problems,” says David Buckel, an attorney who directs the marriage project at Lambda legal. Though all it takes is a romantic weekend to tie the knot under Canada’s just-passed same-sex marriage law or get linked by civil union in Vermont, both places requires at least one member of the couple to establish residency for a year before granting a divorce or official dissolution. Of the roughly 5,000 civil unions performed so far in Vermont, the only state that legally recognizes the same-sex commitments, 85 percent went to out-of-staters. That has left other states grappling with what to do when civil unions sour — and whether standard divorce laws can apply. A West Virginia family-court judge agreed to use divorce laws to dissolve a civil union there last year. But Connecticut courts dismissed the divorce case filed by Glen Rosengarten, who decided to end his 15-year relationship shortly after he and his partner got a civil union in Vermont. Dying of AIDS, Rosengarten wanted to preserve his estate for children from an earlier marriage, says his lawyer Gary I. Cohen. “He had incredible anxiety about it — he really wanted closure in his life,” Cohen says. Rosengarten appealed to the state Supreme Court, but died before the case was heard. Medical bills ate up his estate, so inheritance became a moot point, too. Without access to divorce, all the benefits gay couples get with a civil union — shared property, adoption rights, insurance — must be undone one by one. If they can’t dissolve the union, they may not be free to enter into a new union or marriage, either. “ It shoves gay people into a no man’s land where they have to fight it out for themselves,” says Evan Wolfson, director of Freedom to Marry. “Because it’s not marriage, people don’t have one of the automatic protections that comes with marriage,” Gay couples can’t hope to erase the pain that comes with parting. But after last week, there’s at least a chance they may one day get a little more help when things fall apart.