In a 1997 divorce in New York, Linda Graev was awarded a $2.5 million settlement, with her husband, Lawrence, paying her maintenance of $120,000 a year. The payments would continue for 12 years — as long as she did not remarry, or cohabit with someone for “60 substantially consecutive days.”

That larger number ($120,000 a year) should have made it easy to keep the smaller number (60 days) firmly in mind. But her husband, Lawrence Graev, a lawyer and, since 2000, the head of a private equity fund, claimed that in 2004 she and a boyfriend lived together for more than 60 days.

He argued that he, therefore, should no longer have to pay her maintenance.

The New York State Supreme Court cited New York case law, or precedent, saying that cohabiting involves not just living with someone but “sharing finances,” thus melding a couple’s lives together. The court decided, therefore, that Linda Graev did not cohabit.

Her husband appealed.

Earlier this week the New York Court of Appeals ruled 4 to 3 that the term “cohabiting” means many “physical, emotional, and material factors ... depending on the parties' intent.” Because the term was “ambiguous,” they said, the case should go back to state supreme court to determine what the couple’s divorce agreement meant by “cohabitation.”

The dissenting opinion was even tougher for the wife. The three dissenting judges said that she and her partner, who lived nearby, may have not commingled their finances, but they had “spent virtually every day and night together for over 60 days from June through August 2004” in her summer home. The dissenting judges held that her husband, therefore, should stop paying spousal support.

The lawyer for Linda Graev, Myrna Felder, will argue again in trial court that her client should continue receiving the support payments. For 20 years, she said, courts had accepted cohabitation to mean both physical and financial. But, Felder said, the appeals court decision throws into question hundreds of support and maintenance agreements that have a clause about cohabitation.

“I feel sorry for all of the people who have signed these agreements who believed they were relying on the case law because now every single one of them is open to a new interpretation based upon the facts of that particular case and that particular couple,” she said.

Since decisions in New York matrimonial law often influence decisions in other states, we will follow the case back to superior court, and report on the final disposition. Until then, if there is a time limit on the amount of time you can spend in a partner’s home, keep a calendar handy, and keep records showing where you were, and when.