Right, short answer is no you don’t. Behaviour has never had anything to do with financial settlements except in VERY extreme circumstances where illegal or life threatening activities have taken place.
secondly, you can’t divorce on basis of unreasonable grounds now anyway. All divorces have been no fault since April.
I suggest you go and look in more detail at the divorce process in government online site- very simple to use. Good directions on how divorce is done. It is designed for you NOT to need a solicitor for your petition. Do not pay a solicitor to do this part.
Then go to the link MN has provided above to ADVICE NOW guides. There is one there about divorce financial settlements. It costs £20 to download, but cheap at the price given a solicitor cost £200 an hour , or around £3.5o a minute just to explain what your situation is. These guides explain how a court decides your financial settlement is “fair”. There are 10 or so criteria that have to be met first before 5o:50 comes into play, find those, look at that, figure out how they apply to your situation -that will give you chance to get accustomed to the impact and assess your options, before you start to talk to your STBex. It doesn’t matter if you are going to agree a consent order between you, use mediation or hire the most expensive solicitor you can find- unless you are extremely wealthy the outcome won’t change much as courts have a duty of care to assess whatever type of financial agreement is made against those 10 criteria. The difference is if you use a solicitor to fight it out it can cost you £1000s , whereas if you figure it out yourselves, and accept you’ll both be poorer and neither get exactly what you want, you’ll have a bigger pot to split and you can divorce for around £1500.
It took me a while to get my head around the most likely outcome (I divorced 18 months ago under unreasonable behaviour when I could still do that). As I was higher earner and bigger pension, it was a hard pill to swallow given his behaviour. However, we did manage the divorce very quickly, very cheaply, and with minimal stress . Using ADVICE NOW guides was best thing I did - they’re brilliant in explaining