So is the no-fault divorce a gateway to society becoming ever more disposable? As any long-standing couple will report, there are always rocky times in the most loving marriages, where if you could just get chatting online to an Alex, you might ditch a 10- or 20-year partnership that could otherwise pass this phase and go on to last another couple of decades.
And while “no-fault” is definitely in keeping with the world of “Be Kind”, might it also allow partners – here, I mostly mean men – to walk away from their responsibilities without even addressing their own behaviour?
Comedian and author Helen Thorn wrote her book Get Divorced, Be Happy after “my marriage ended very abruptly because of my husband’s affair”. She would have hated the option of a no-fault divorce.
“I didn’t feel it was my fault,” says Thorn. “I see my children less, have less money, have a really high mortgage – I’ve made so many compromises because of a decision he made. To file it under adultery was important to me as a public acknowledgement that I didn’t do it, even though I had to go through the process.”
My friend Lizzie* is displaying saintly levels of co-operation with her estranged husband, going on holiday with him and their sons, spending Christmas Day together, smoothing the wheels of his weekends with the kids. It looks like an advertisement for the perfect divorce, but she admits that it has become “another thing for me to have to manage, and it’s getting harder as the kids become teenagers”.
What is welcome is a progressive change in the vocabulary surrounding divorce, taking it from a shameful disaster to a normal life event. Given that almost half of all marriages end in divorce, Thorn argues that there’s no place for “loaded phrases like ‘broken homes’ and ‘failed marriages’”.
Carruthers agrees that the stigma has all but disappeared: “It’s rare to have clients who feel it’s wrong to get divorced. Most people think it’s a contract and contracts are broken all the time.” Thorn feels that taking out some of the wild romanticism of going into a marriage would help be more pragmatic on coming out of it, while Lizzie refers to “still operating like a family business”, post-separation.
But is using a chatbot to sort out your separation or referring to a family break-up as merely a broken contract downgrading the idea of divorce, putting it more on the level of booking a Ryanair flight? Part of the reason that the change in the law was 50 years in the making was because many felt that the sanctity of marriage was at stake.
“I don’t think divorce is ever easy,” says Daly, “but making sure the process isn’t punitive and that it protects parents and children is crucial.” For her, it’s not marital breakdown that costs the taxpayer an estimated £51 billion a year in additional benefits and other interventions, but the way that we treat that breakdown, leaving “damaged people spat out the end”.
She points to Scotland, where the introduction of no-fault divorce led to a small spike in divorces the following year, but levels soon fell back to normal levels. “If there’s an uptick in divorce,” she says, “it won’t be due to the change in the law but the pandemic.”
What remains consistent is that most of us still go into marriage with high hopes for amiability, not plans for divorce. That’s an eternal optimism we can all support.
* Some names have been changed
