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 Here's a nice little dose of doom and gloom to match the winter weather. It starts with a line most famously sung by Frank Sinatra. It runs like this: “Love and marriage.......go together like a horse and carriage.”
That's what the old song says and maybe it's even true for some people. But for many others, love and marriage comes before a trip to the lawyer and penury.
Given the way that the divorce courts work in this country, it's clear that anyone with their own money who gets themselves into a wedded state is asking for trouble. Or you could look at it from the other point-of-view and say there is a fortune to be made out of marriage, by hitching then ditching a sleb.
Take that absolutely dreadful old cow, Heather Mills. If nothing else,
the break up of her financial arrangement with someone slightly less
dreadful (although not by much) allowed the rest of the world a certain
frisson of satisfaction. We could all nod sagely and say, "I told you
so." It seemed everyone on the planet, except old Mr Dyed Hair himself,
could see that she was a money-grabbing bitch, out for one thing and
one thing only, and it wasn't his young and finely honed body. I wonder
if deep in her heart she considers herself to be a prostitute?
When Her Geordie Highness first took up with Macca, every single one of
us must have recalled the immortal words of Mrs Merton: "Tell me,
Heather dear, what first attracted you to the billionaire Paul
McCartney?"
In fact, it's a wonder that anyone who has only written two decent
songs in their entire lifetime (Yesterday and Mull of Kintyre, since
you ask. OK, MOK is a lie, so make that one decent song) has managed to
amass so much money in the first place. If nothing else, that proves
Sir Paul is a decent businessman. The main point to be made here though
is that he made all that cash before HM was even born, so quite why she
deserved such a large chunk of it after a few years of a sham marriage
is unclear.
Incidentally, there was one other very good thing that came out of that
particular union. It was a Sun headline, for which the author deserves
a knighthood. Above an article speculating about the couple's love
life, the headline described it as 'Rumpy Stumpy'. Quite brilliant.
To prove these aren't the sexist ramblings of a bitter old chauvinist,
there's an equally stupid case where the roles were reversed. Late last
year, there was Guy Madonna giving it the big: "I'm not interested in
her money - all I care about is the kids" bit. But three weeks later
he’d changed his mind to a very large degree and decided that, well,
yeah, like, maybe. OK, I'll take forty million.
Never mind that despite his mockney accent he has his own family wealth
behind him, or that even without that safety net, he has probably made
just about enough from recycling Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
every couple of years to scrape by in life. No, notwithstanding all
that, he somehow figures he deserves a huge wedge from Madge's fortune,
even though he played no part whatsoever in the making of it. Why? Just
as with Macca and Mucca, logic and common sense appear to play no part
in the decision making process.
We'll doubtless have Bernie Ecclestone to add to the list at some point
in 2009, but the point has been made well enough already.
Of course, in both of the cases above, the chances of there being
anything like an amicable partnership after the divorce is shot to
shreds as one party will feel hugely aggrieved about the injustice of
it all. Sadly, the whole adversarial approach to divorce just
encourages bad behaviour. Both sides get themselves a lawyer whose sole
motivation is to make the whole thing as protracted and dirty as it can
possibly be, because that means the fees they charge keep on rising.
Human nature comes into play at this point. It is inevitable that the
longer the battle goes on, the more bitter both sides become towards
each other. So now the one with the money has two choices. Either
he/she can fight to the death, throwing more and more cash at the
lawyers, or he/she can give up and pay whatever it takes just to be rid
of the old bag/old git. Either way, it's not a very edifying way for
humans to behave, is it?
Although the tales mentioned clearly involve amounts of money beyond
the craziest dreams of us mere mortals, the principles and feelings
engendered are no less should we plebs become involved in a divorce.
However, the absence of vast wealth in a marriage has another, and even
more telling, consequence. Read on.
The results of a survey were published last year that throw quite a
bright light on the state of Britain's marriages. This column has
always taken official statistics with a bucketful of salt, because they
can be selected and spun to prove that black is white. However, in this
case, it's hard to see who had what to gain from the publication, so
let's just assume the number is correct. What it said was that 59% of
British wives would divorce their husbands tomorrow if they could be
sure of financial security thereafter.
So money, not love, is the primary motivation for most British
marriages to stay intact. That's probably no great surprise, and it
does add weight to the anecdotal evidence that many unions survive only
because the alternative is too awful to contemplate for either, or
both, of the participants. There were other stats in the survey that
backed up this point, including the fact that well over half the men
questioned considered their marriage to be "loveless". It does seem
that a vast number of marriages in this country are not very far from
the tipping point at which the alternative does actually become
attractive, the bullet is bitten, and the lawyers are consulted.
One such tipping point is Christmas. This is an assumption born of the
fact that the month in which the largest number of petitions for
divorce are filed is January. It's not hard to understand how, in the
heat of a family Christmas, with crap presents, insensitive comments
and drunken indiscretions, one partner finally flips and says to the
other, "I can't stand you, or your family, for a minute longer. I'm
outta here."
Over the years, politicians and churchmen have banged on about divorce
being far too easy, although anyone who has been through it will tell
you that it's anything but easy. Those MPs and Bishops should really
have been focussing on the other end of the chain. It's not divorce
that's too easy, it's getting married in the first place. Maybe there
ought to be a test you need to pass to prove you know what you're
doing. Just as you aren't allowed onto the road until the basic
concepts and dangers of driving have been fully understood, so the
marriage licence should demonstrate a similar awareness of the pitfalls.
Romantic? No, of course not. But boy, it might save an awful lot of pain and money a few years down the line.
Horse and carriage? More like a goldfish and lawn-mower.
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