When a serious injury changes your spouse’s life, it can change your marriage, too. A loss of consortium claim may allow you to seek compensation for the personal and emotional impact an accident has had on your relationship.
What Is Loss of Consortium?
Injuries sustained by a person can have negative and permanent consequences for their relationship with their spouse. The non-injured spouse incurs damages even though the at-fault party did not physically injure them.
For example, a person in a car accident sustains a spinal cord injury resulting in partial paralysis. Because of the injury, the person cannot bear children or engage in sexual relations. As a result, the spouse would have a claim for loss of consortium for the damages of not being able to have children or intercourse with their spouse.
The loss of consortium is the damage to the relationship between the spouses. That could include:
- Inability to have sexual relations or bear children
- Loss of love, affection, moral support, solace, and companionship
- Inability to perform household chores or care for children
- Loss of society and the ability to engage in activities with the spouse that the couple enjoyed before the injury
- Loss of assistance, care, and protection
Loss of consortium claims fall under non-economic damages, which is the same category of damages that pain and suffering fall under for the injured spouse. Non-economic damages do not have a specific monetary value. Instead, their value is measured in terms of the severity of the impact on the person’s life. A loss of consortium claim does not include compensation for economic damages, such as medical bills or lost wages. Instead, the claim is only for the pain and suffering experienced by the non-injured spouse.
