Couples ‘regret divorce after 5 years’

COUPLES who divorce are likely to regret it after five years, a former High Court judge claimed yesterday.

Family judge Sir Paul Coleridge said living with the consequences of separation makes many wish they were together.

The news follows a survey that shows more than one in five divorced or estranged couples believe that they should have tried to save their marriages.

Sir Paul said: ‘Of course there are cases where divorce is inevitable.

‘But it has been obvious to me that, by and large, a significant proportion of people who separate wish they had not five years down the line.’ Sir Paul, who retired from the High Court after launching the Marriage Foundation think-tank, told BBC2’s Victoria Derbyshire programme that family breakdown was the ‘scourge of society’ – and cost the country £47billion a year.

The regrets of divorcees have been revealed in a survey carried out by the law firm Seddons, which said 22 per cent of those who were divorced or separated felt later they had made a mistake.

However, many academics, researchers and lawyers claim separating may be a good thing. The family lawyers’ organisation Resolution said last year that eight out of ten children think their parents should separate rather than patch up a rocky marriage.

But Sir Paul said divorce was ‘painful’, adding: ‘People don’t like to talk about it.

‘Family breakdown has a devastating effect on children, who by every measure of success do worse than children from unbroken families.

‘The reason we have had such an upsurge in family breakdown since the Eighties is because of the huge upsurge in unmarried relationships producing children. The fact is marriage provides a great deal of extra security during the period of very great stress in bringing up children.’