Divorce should not be as easy as ending a gym membership

Yes, yes, yes. Of course I feel sorry for Tini Owens, for who could not be sympathetic to her plight? she is the 68-yearold wife (pictured below) who is so desperate to divorce her husband Hugh, 80, that she has taken her fight to the supreme Court.

This week, she learned justices have once more refused to grant her a quickie divorce. They ruled on the not unreasonable grounds that her husband refused to accept he had behaved unreasonably — and she had failed to prove their 40-year marriage had irretrievably broken down.

Tini’s complaints about her husband include her distress that he speaks too loudly in public, that he once moaned about having to have dinner in a pub rather than at home, that they had a row about her incorrect stacking of the recycling cardboard and once had a meltdown argument in an airport over the selection of a gift for their housekeeper.

she also cited the fact that he sometimes said to her: ‘Can I say something without you flying off the handle?’

Holy non-hullabaloo. It all sounds so terrifying familiar, I feel I could be married to Hugh myself, give or take the housekeeper.

And if Tini’s chief beefs were really all that it required to get a divorce, there wouldn’t be a marriage left between here and the dark side of the Moon.

I know couples for whom such humdrum travails would constitute an average weekend, with further disputes over emptying the dishwasher, control of the TV remote, venturing the opinion that, yes, bum does look big in said garment, plus an additional fiesta of: ‘I’m not calling her, she’s your bloody mother.’ Then they get over it, have a laugh about it, accept it as just the rough-and-tumble of married life, fall in love with each other again and move on. Together. Yet this case has become a huge legal talking point, raising questions for Parliament to answer on whether the law for fault-based divorce, which has been part of our legal system for half-a-century, really does remain satisfactory. some want reform and the introduction of ‘no-fault’ divorces, which would make it easier for couples to untie the knot — perhaps even easier than untying the gift wrap knot on their wedding presents. Yet surely, marriage is an institution, a solemn legal commitment, something precious that should not be so devalued? If a spouse can make a unilateral decision that it’s over simply because they are a bit fed up when their other half TALKs TOO LOUDLY, where is the merit, where is the value, in marriage? The rules have to be strong, for marriage is something that has to be taken seriously at the beginning, in the middle and at the sad end, should that come. Otherwise, why marry in the first place? Much of the religious significance has already been eroded. If a marriage can be ended like cancelling a gym membership or ditching a coffee shop loyalty card, what is the point? Of course, Tini Owens is now seen as a feminist heroine. How exhausting and tedious. Any public issue these days in which A Woman Does Not Get Her Own Way or is somehow thwarted by law or circumstance or Pesky Menfolk is immediately swept into the great gulch of feminist grievance, there to flourish unchecked, like Japanese knotweed.

some have even described Mrs Owens’s position as the ‘forced continuation of marriage’ and compared Britain’s divorce laws to slavery. What epic nonsense.

After building their mushroomgrowing business together, Mr and Mrs Owens are an extremely wealthy couple. They have two adult children and perhaps had a reasonably happy marriage until she had an affair. After this, she said her husband made her feel ‘unloved, isolated and alone’. They have been living separately, in handsome neighbouring homes in Worcestershire, since 2015.

A year later, a family court judge rejected her initial divorce petition, describing her complaints as ‘flimsy and exaggerated’.

Some marriages end in violence, in temper, beached by money problems or unable to survive trauma. And some just slowly boil down until only a bitter residue is left.

Two adults who once loved each other, now calcified in their petty hatreds, are each determined to exert power and have the last word, no matter what. That is how I think of the Owenses, now forced to remain legally shackled for the next two years.

How horrific, how medieval, how downright torturous, particularly for Tini Owens to be stuck in a loveless marriage. To try to escape, but find all exits blocked. To have her husband clinging on, perhaps only to punish her — surely if he loved her, he would let her go?

And then to turn to the highest court in the land, only to be told that you must remain legally affixed to the man you cannot stand for the next two years.

It’s like something that might happen in the stone Age. Yet it happened here this week.

It is awful, but it is also right. In a throwaway society, some things must remain sacred.