Love, honour ... and annoy

Jennifer Aniston and ex-love John Mayer. No longer two halves of a heart thanks to social networking site Twitter. Photo / AP

It's the season not for blossoming ardour, but for that still more time-honoured romantic phenomenon: unreasonable behaviour (UB).

Fessing up to a spot of unreasonableness allowed Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone a positively boy-racer divorce. The behaviour in question centred on his workaholic, 18-hour day tendencies.

However, it is entirely possible that his ex merely woke up one morning and found it unreasonable to be married to Ecclestone. And it's not just married types. Everybody's favourite desperado-next-door, Jennifer Aniston, is believed to have dispatched warbler John Mayer on the same grounds.

The issue appears to have been that, while too busy to be in touch with his inamorata, Mayer was never too hectic to drop his addiction to social-networking-via-haiku site Twitter.

Recent gems charting the celebrity couple's off/off relationship include Mayer's immortal: "Half of my heart is a shotgun wedding to a bride with a newspaper ring/Half of my heart is the part of a man who knows he's never really loved a thing". Not unreasonably, this made the Friends star retort that it was, like, totally over.

Shortly after said dumping, Mayer's Twitter update lamented: "This heart didn't come with instructions." Mayer is 31. Ah, unreasonable behaviour - can't live with it, can't break up in Celebrityville without it.

For, while we civilians may behave unreasonably, unreasonable behaviour as a lifestyle choice is a VIP preserve. The reason is clear. When celebrities want something, they want it now: a smoothie, an African nipper, a divorce. Without unreasonable behaviour they will have to wait two years for a decree nisi - years that might usefully have been spent totting up other marriages.

Instead, with a spot of unreasonableness, it's adios, re-route the offspring, and find yourself the requisite Brazilian. The beauty of UB is that it can be all things to all men; and, more specifically, a certain type of woman.

American novelist Edith Wharton got this spot-on in The Custom of the Country, where her heroine - the sublimely monstrous Undine Spragg - defames not one, but two paragons of former husbands with the charge. For although violence, abuse and the like may be a factor, what is more usual is a series of ostensibly blameless defects - the cumulative effect of which is the mother of all hissy fits.

Moreover, as with Spragg, the boot may often appear to end up on the wrong foot. Word on the street is that Madonna alienated ex-husband Guy Ritchie by her refusal to eat normal food or subscribe to a normal religion, her penchant for smothering herself in $800-a-jar unguents and her rage when he would not concede that she was "bigger than Jesus".

Accordingly, it comes as no surprise to find the singer divorcing him for the unreasonable behaviour that is watching television, enjoying the odd roast, and going to the pub. Here, too, lies another truth about UB: all too frequently the behaviour in question is what the complainant appeared to sign up for.

Thus, when Paul McCartney accused Heather Mills of the unreasonable behaviour of being rude, argumentative, and more than a little screwball, the collective response was: "Really, Sir Paul, d'ya think?". Moreover, the Macca proceedings illustrate a further crucial dictum: canny divorcees keep it uncontested. This is vital in order not to devolve into "you wouldn't fetch my leg so I could take a leak"-type jiggery-pokery.

Otherwise, the form is clear. Keep things vague - "we have to maintain different continents" - and stick to the correct platitudes: the behaviour should not be affecting one's health, yet "continuing".

- INDEPENDENT