Family Law · October 21, 2026
Comfort is not security: what the year of Strangers is teaching women
Belle Burden's memoir has put money — and what women give up without noticing — on every book-club table in the country. Here is how we read it, and what to do about it.
4 min read
There is a book every woman seems to be reading right now: Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden. It began as an essay and became the publishing story of the year — a memoir of a twenty-year marriage that ended with one phone call in the early days of the pandemic.
But what keeps women up at night is not the heartbreak. It is the arithmetic. A marriage in which one person earns and one person holds the household together; a prenup revised in the days before the wedding; and at the end, a woman of independent mind and considerable contribution left without a claim to the wealth her life had built.
You can be loved, and comfortable, and still not protected. All three are different things.
The women in our practice know this story in their bones, whatever their income. The lawyer who paused her practice for a decade. The founder whose company grew during the marriage while she signed the mortgages. The woman whose name is on no account at all because it was never discussed.
What we would have you take from the book
- —Contribution is not only financial. Raising children, holding the household, supporting a demanding career — Ontario law recognizes all of it, but the record has to be built.
- —Financial visibility is a practice, not a crisis measure. Know what is held where, in whose name, long before you need to.
- —Agreements are strongest when they are calm. The document signed in love is worth more than the position asserted in fear.
- —Your independence is not a betrayal of the marriage. It is what makes the marriage a choice rather than a dependency.
Whether you are engaged, newly wed, or twenty years in, the work is the same: understand your position, and write it down while everyone still means it kindly. We help women do exactly that — and when a marriage does end, we are the boutique firm that follows your case through, personally, from the first conversation to whatever it requires.
General information, not legal advice about your circumstances.