OPINION:
The forthcoming coronation, with its plethora of exes, stepchildren and blended families, reminds us that navigating divorce is a feature of modern life that affects most of us, royal or not.
As a founding partner of Hughes Fowler Carruthers, one of the country’s leading family law firms, I’ve worked with divorcing couples for over 25 years, specialising in high-net-worth individuals and complex cases. While the vast majority of people getting divorced don’t fall into either category, there are common factors to most couples, even if they are not billionaires, titans of industry or celebrities.
Contrary to popular fiction, we divorce lawyers aren’t rubbing our hands in glee when presented with an acrimonious split. We’d far rather people remain happily hitched and, if they do come to us, a good lawyer will seek to settle the divorce as cost-effectively and harmoniously as possible. Increasingly we’re looking to reduce rather than increase our workload. Leading family solicitor Baroness Shackleton, for example, is funding research into educating children about how to choose partners wisely as a preventative measure.
In the unlikely event one of my three teenage children came to me for relationship advice, here’s what I’d tell them. It might, after all, save some of them a trip to one of my colleagues in years to come.
1. Don’t marry too young
The most common reason my clients give me for their split is that they have “drifted apart”. This drift is far more likely if you marry just out of your teens and your lives turn out nothing like your youthful predictions.
I see this with tech entrepreneurs who, like Elon Musk, marry their university love, go on to make unimaginable amounts of money and find that they no longer have anything in common. Where’s the starry-eyed idealist who wanted to save the planet, one half wonders, while the richer one fumes at their spouse fretting about the environmental cost of the private jet and the multiple homes.
Scans show us that the brain continues to develop until our twenties and even thirties. In other words, there’s a part of us that remains an immature teenager long after our 20th birthdays. In the same way that you wouldn’t want to be stuck with a tattoo that you got done on a post-high school holiday, do you really want to make life-long choices while your brain is still in an addled state of adolescence?
The whole path of history would have been different had Prince Charles questioned the wisdom of proposing to a 19-year-old Lady Diana.
2. Put sense above sensibility
As Jane Austen knew, marriage isn’t a romantic pact, it’s a long-term business contract. By all means go out with the wild ones with motorbikes or who dance topless on tables, but those legends of the night don’t make the best partners. Would you go into business with the person that thinks rules are for little people? Probably not. In which case, why would you have children, buy a house and pledge the rest of your life to someone who sets fire to their hair or shoplifts for kicks?
A related red flag is a partner who claims that all their exes are “nutters”. I’ve had clients who’ve dismissed warnings from these “mad” exes only to find themselves in the exact same predicament down the line.
3. Are they like your friends and do they like your friends?
What survives of us is not love so much as friendship – marriage is a long conversation, so you want it to be an engaging one. The language of love is limited, while that of idle chat, humour and shared interests is rich indeed. An easy test is to look at your friends and identify the characteristics you most like in them. Your partner isn’t going to have all of these qualities, but if they have none of them, be afraid. Friends, after all, are people you’ve chosen without the complicating factor of sexual attraction.
A common example of unreasonable behaviour given to me by a divorcing spouse is that their partner never liked their friends and prevented them from spending time with them. The antipathy is usually mutual.
4. People change ... but not in the ways you want them to
Over a lifetime, waistlines, bank balances and voting intentions change, and it’s wise to expect and accommodate that. But don’t assume that someone will transform for the better or the way that you hope they will. Some people go into marriage thinking they can improve their partners, but generally the union amplifies all that you find disagreeable. It’s far better to take it as read that the bad habits will get worse. Far worse.
If she has three cats that you hate, work on the assumption that you will be living in a cat sanctuary by the time you’re 50. If he plays golf every fortnight, it will more likely become weekly or take over whole holidays than cease entirely. This is especially true of far less benign habits like drinking, gambling and financial irresponsibility.
5. Consider where you’ll be in 10, 20, 30 years
When you first fall in love, it’s hard to think beyond tomorrow’s breakfast, but I see clients who have fundamentally different views of what makes a good life. A classic example is city vs country living, and it’s a hard one to solve without one half of a couple feeling resentful that they are trapped in someone else’s dream.
Of course, some things are unpredictable and life throws unexpected curveballs. I saw a lot of couples after Covid who had responded to lockdown in antithetical ways. There were some who became health worriers and retreated into their shells, causing significant problems for their partners who wondered what had possessed the adventurer they’d married.
6. Be on the same page when it comes to children
It’s not uncommon for clients to split up because one wants children and the other doesn’t – it’s a fundamental decision and one that rarely has a workable compromise.
Even if you agree that you both want children, there are more details to consider. How many? What are the values that will guide you in bringing them up? Few couples are as extreme as Jeremy Corbyn, who allegedly split up with his second wife because they couldn’t agree on whether their son would go to grammar school or comprehensive, but disagreements over vaccinations, education and even haircuts are cited by clients as having contributed to the breakdown of the marriage.
7. Be careful if marrying someone from the other side of the world
I’d never go so far as to say “don’t marry an Australian” – some of my best friends are Antipodeans and all that – but access to children is harder to negotiate over 10,000 miles, a continent or an ocean.
Far better to have awkward conversations about where you want to live and bring up your family now, rather than later with a divorce lawyer.
8. Be as equal as possible – at least at the beginning
Points of difference help you fall in love, but similarities keep couples together. Life is easier if you are, for example, the same age and have similar levels of education, wealth and even attractiveness. A colleague observes that first love is about escaping your upbringing, but lasting love is about coming back to it.
9. It’s all about affection
When I look over the examples of unreasonable behaviour given to me by clients, the emotion that appears more often than any other is affection, or lack of it: “the respondent has failed to support the petitioner emotionally”; “the respondent seeks to undermine”; they “make the petitioner feel unloved and insecure”. While some aspects of unreasonable behaviour are more commonly cited by men and others by women, both invariably say that their partner has become unaffectionate – emotionally and physically. It’s the death knell to a relationship.
How we choose to show this affection changes as we get older. A surprise booking to a favourite restaurant might become a cup of tea later in life, while passionate sex can become a little, or a lot, more infrequent. But if these spontaneous displays of love aren’t there at the start, then they sure won’t be at the end.
- Alex Carruthers is a partner at family law specialists Hughes Fowler Carruthers
