Is divorce about to get too easy?
Wednesday’s new ‘no fault’ divorce law will make splitting up simpler – but at what cost, wonders Christina Hopkinson
Anew promising advertising warring campaign couples is the dream: an online, lawyer-free, no-fuss and no-blame divorce service called Amicable, where you can log on – and log out of your marriage. It’s catnip for anyone whose pandemic lockdowns have left them at breaking point with their other half.
But before you open your laptop and hit search, there’s one small point to be considered. While no one wants divorce to be adversarial, expensive or complicated, is Amicable a sign that the pendulum is swinging too far the other way? In other words, is divorce about to get too easy?
England No-fault and divorces Wales on will Wednesday, become law 17 in years after Scotland introduced the practice. So putative divorcees will no longer need to wait for two years or for one side to launch the case against the other. From here on, even the action of disentangling can be something couples do, ironically, together.
And there is likely to be a rush to take advantage of the new law. During lockdown, lawyers reported more couples than ever asking about divorce. Data collected by y Stewarts, , the UK’s largest litigation- -only law firm, showed a 122 per cent increase in inquiries between June ne and October 2020.
At times, the only thing putting some couples off divorce, once lockdown wn lifted, was the question of “grounds”, something that – until now – was required and often inflammatory. Before this week, dissolving a marriage had to be justified in one of five ways: adultery, unreasonable behaviour, two years’ separation, five years’ separation, and abandonment/ desertion.
According to the Office for National Statistics, by far the most frequently cited was “unreasonable behaviour”, a phrase so nebulous that it can be used to cover everything from bad dishwasher stacking to alcoholism.
I asked solicitor Alex Carruthers, of family law practice Hughes Fowler Carruthers (and – full disclosure – the husband to whom I’m still consciously coupled), what sort of things it covers. “Almost anything,” he says.
suggestions: affection, he “Most doesn’t lawyers she support he doesn’t doesn’t have my like a career show menu my me friends, or of hobbies.” In fact, the reasonableness of the phrase has become so dilute that he tells clients that “spitting on the street is enough unreasonable behaviour to justify ending the relationship. The reality is that the judges think the bar is so low that it becomes a pantomime.”
That suggests that although dressed up in legalese, the reality of getting a divorce was already relatively straightforward in most cases. But now, couples will be able to divorce solely on the basis that the relationship has broken down, as well as being able to make a joint application rather than one petitioning p g the other for divorce. The emotions ma may be difficult but the process is almost alm a breeze.
While tak taking the fight out of break-ups may mean less wellpaid work for divorce lawyers – like the fictional fic Defoe sisters, who will b be inciting their clients to play h hard-ball again when The Split Sp returns on the BBC tomorrow, tomor new low-key, legal-style legal operators – like Amicable Ami – are set to be mor more common.
Using U a mix of tech, “div divorce coaches” and psychology, psy it aims to work wo with both parties collaboratively. col To coincide coi with the change ch in the law, it’s ramping ram up its profile with wi new billboards proclaiming pr “It’s not you. yo It’s not me” and “En End the blame game”.
Kate Daly, one of Amicable’s two female founders, was motivated by the experience of her own “train-wreck divorce”, emerging from it emotionally scarred and £80,000 poorer.
“At every turn, I felt that the system polarised things,” says Daly, “and poured fuel on to an already smoking pyre.” She feels that the law itself is straightforward, it’s the emotions that complicate the process, so their coaches work on helping clients to do things in a more neutral way.
“Then you can concentrate on the important things like money and arrangements for the children.”
Having to draw up a legal document listing a spouse’s weird sexual kinks or obsession with weekend cycling does the opposite.
In the interests of research, I struck up a conversation with the Amicable website’s chatbot, who goes by the gender- and class-neutral name of Alex. It’s odd discussing something lifechanging, albeit fictional, with technology I associate with swearing at my laptop while trying to get a credit card replacement or travel insurance. I say I’m thinking about separating but don’t know how to get started, and in that familiar chatbox mix of the personable and impersonal, Alex outlines the basics in the space of a speech bubble. It’s straightforward and informative, but discombobulating. And it could feel somewhat trivialising at times – a cause for concern.
So is the no-fault divorce a gateway to marriage 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 yet 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 – by which 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 her “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,” she says. “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 ensure more pragmatism 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 concept 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, before levels soon fell back to normal. “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 eternal optimism we can all support.
* Some names have been changed