Getting a Divorce When Your Spouse is Missing

My spouse is gone. Am I stuck married?

No, you're not stuck - and you'd be surprised how often this comes up. Spouses separate, years pass, people move, phone numbers die, and one day you realize you have no idea what state your legal spouse even lives in. Missouri law does not require you to stay married to someone you can't find; it just requires you to jump through a few extra hoops on the way out. The process is called divorce by publication, and this article is the overview.

First, we actually try to find them

Publication is the last resort, not the first move, and the courts treat it that way. Before a Judge will allow service by publication, you must show that genuine, diligent efforts were made to locate your spouse. In practice, that means a professional skiptrace - a search of the various databases that know where people live, work, and get their mail - followed by attempted service at any address that turns up. Why do we go through all of this? Why not just say we can't find your spouse and move straight to publication? Because due process requires that people be told they're being sued whenever it's possible to tell them, and because - more often than you'd think - the skiptrace works, an address surfaces, and the case proceeds by ordinary service instead, which is faster and cheaper for everyone.

Then, the publication

If the search comes up empty, the court authorizes notice by publication: a legal notice of the divorce runs in an approved publication (a newspaper most have never heard of - the St. Louis Countian, for example) once a week for four consecutive weeks. Your spouse is presumed notified whether or not they ever see it - and, between us, nobody sees it. After the publication period runs, plus the required waiting time for a response that isn't coming, the case can proceed to a hearing and Judgment.

The fine print (i.e., what publication can and can't get you)

Here's the legal limitation worth understanding: when a spouse is served only by publication, the court gains the power to end the marriage, but generally not the power to order that spouse to do anything. In other words, the Judge can declare you divorced, but typically cannot divide property that's in your missing spouse's possession, order them to pay child support, or award maintenance - those require personal jurisdiction, which publication doesn't provide. For most people in this situation, whose missing spouse took their possessions with them years ago, this limitation is more theoretical than painful. But it's real, and you should know about it going in.

Cost and timeline

Divorce by publication is the rare case in my practice that can't be handled entirely by email, phone, and mail: it runs about $3,000 all-in - my base fee, roughly $100 or so in skiptrace and process server costs, and the publication fees - and it requires a court appearance at the end. The timeline runs about 100 days, give or take, once you stack the search, the four weeks of publication, and the response period. Not the quick-and-easy version of my practice, admittedly, but a reliable road out of a marriage that has, in every practical sense, already ended.

This article is the summary; the full, day-by-day treatment lives on the Divorce by Publication page, which I'd encourage you to head on over to if this is your situation.

Thank you for reading. Please feel free to contact me for more information.