At 8.15 on the evening of Tuesday 25 March, 2008, at their home in Bristol, Claire Black was watching an episode of hospital drama Holby City with her husband when her marriage suddenly died. Black noticed that her husband had gone unusually quiet. “You’re rather quiet,” she said. “Are you OK?” He turned to her, having lost all interest in the TV drama. “No, not really,” he said. “I’ve been seeing someone else.”
For Black, it was a trauma on a par with anything on offer on the television screen. She’d had no inkling of underlying conditions. She went into shock and can now only recall fragments of what happened next. Their two young sons (then aged three and one) were fast asleep upstairs and her instant magical solution – having picked herself up off the floor – was to run next door to her neighbour’s house and stay there for an hour. If she was out of the house, she imagined, then he would have to stay to make sure the kids were OK. “It was ridiculous really,” she says now. “I was just giving him time to pack. By the time I went back he was ready to leave. By ten o’clock he was out the door.”
They had been married for seven years. Black says, “At the time it was the most horrific thing that had ever happened to me. But it was also the start of something that led me to where I am now.” Having been through a divorce, she has been reborn as a “divorce coach” and has written a book, Break-Up: From Crisis to Confidence, which she says “is the book I wish I’d had at the time”. Both she and her husband are now remarried and her children “share four parents instead of two”, as she puts it.
Divorce coaches are common in Australia and the US, but rarer here. A divorce coach, as the name suggests, is not there to stop you getting divorced
But she admits she made a lot of classic mistakes. The usual pointless, self-lacerating questions (“What have I done to deserve this?” “Was I that bad a wife?”); bitter and bad-tempered emails. Now she has a rule: the “24-hour rule” – don’t wing off an instant, sarcastic and vituperative response to messages from the ex. Hold on and calm down for a day or so. Black recalls seeing him by chance on the other side of the street and letting loose a volley of abuse. And then running away from the madwoman she had (temporarily) become. “Yelling obscenities on the street is never going to be a good idea,” she says. “I wanted my kids to be proud of me. So I invented a persona for myself and eventually I became the dignified, confident person I wanted to be.” She devised a new rule that would save her (and others) from this in the future: don’t react – “Stop. Breathe. Think. Act”.
The temptation, post-break-up, is to wallow in sad songs and feel sorry for yourself.
“I don’t listen to any of the heartbreak songs,” says Black. She prefers – and recommends – Katy Perry’s “Roar”. She used to listen to that one a lot. (“You held me down but I got up. Get ready ’cause I’ve had enough.”) And, later on, after she met her new man, Paul, Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine” (“I feel alive, I feel the love, I feel the love that’s really real”).
Divorce coaches are common in Australia and the United States, but rarer here. A divorce coach, as the name suggests, is not there to stop you getting divorced. Black stresses that she is not a marriage counsellor. Formerly a teacher and a solicitor, she doesn’t do mediation. The premise of her profession is that it is too late for that. You’re not going backwards, you’re going forwards. But she can smooth the path for you, if you’re into it. She can help you clarify what it is you want out of the divorce. Which does not usually include vengeance.
Black recommends writing down all your hurt (‘I am angry, blah blah’) on pebbles and throwing them into the sea. Her brand of positive thinking is a set of variations on the classic philosophy of stoicism
“You can choose to be bitter and miserable,” says Black. Or not. She trained in “NLP”, neuro-linguistic programming, which is a way of changing how you think about yourself and the world at large. The way in which we talk about divorce – “broken home” and “failed marriage” – has a big impact on how we feel about it. “I don’t use the word ‘broken’,” says Black. When your partner leaves, you can see it as more of a holiday than a disaster. List all the things you can do now you couldn’t do before: go for a run, spread out on the bed, leave the washing-up till the morning. “My ex hated ginger,” says Black. Now she has great slivers of it with everything.
Black recommends writing down all your hurt (“I am angry, blah blah”) on pebbles and then throwing them into the sea. Her brand of positive thinking is a set of variations on the classic philosophy of stoicism. Which is not so much a “grin-and-bear-it” attitude as the understanding that there are some thing you can control and others you can’t. Epictetus, the ancient Greek stoic, was, in effect, one of the first divorce coaches. It was all about coping with heartbreak. Epictetus summed it all up in a thought experiment. Suppose that your servant has just dropped your favourite Greek vase. It lies on the floor smashed into a thousand pieces. What do you do? One option is to whip your servant (or, assuming you don’t have one, whip yourself). Far better, says Epictetus, to contemplate the broken vase and say to yourself, “Behold, it has been restored.”
It’s a thought I always try to have in mind when (as they always do) things fall apart. Black has a more upbeat approach. “You can try sticking the vase back together,” she says. She recommends the Japanese technique of kintsugi, where you repair something with gold (or silver or platinum), thereby emphasising and drawing attention to the flaws rather than trying to make them disappear. “It can be more more beautiful than it was before,” she says. Black is not talking about repairing the old marriage but rather putting yourself back together again and perhaps entering into a new relationship with an enhanced sense, the next time around, of how easily things can go wrong.
My own personal image of human relationships is the knee. By and large, we forget (unless you happen to be a knee surgeon) that it’s even there. It just keeps on going and does the job. But have you ever had a good look inside the knee? There’s so much stuff in there, a spaghetti junction of wires and muscles and bones, all rubbing up against one another, it’s amazing it ever works. And yet it does – mostly. Then, of course, there are times when it doesn’t. And you can’t even walk any more. At a certain point you are going to have to get rid of the old one and stick in a new one instead.
The good news, for potential divorcees – which must include anyone who gets married – is that there are changes to the divorce laws in the pipeline. I doubt Claire Black will be out of a job, but divorce will be made easier, judicially speaking. Contrary to Neil Sedaka, breaking up will not be “so hard to do”. At the moment, unless you don’t mind remaining in limbo for several years, you have to apportion blame. From next year the quick blame-free divorce will become a reality.
Reading Break-Up, I can’t help thinking that Amber Heard and Johnny Depp might have benefited from dipping into it – or, for that matter, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. as well as many others, less high-profile, but also driven by the need to blame someone for something. The reality that the courtroom showdown conceals is that you often end up blaming yourself. “People see themselves as a failure,” says Black. “It’s their fault.”
The consecrated marriage is a relatively recent invention, dating from the rise of feudalism. Even more recent is the shift from the emphasis on property to the theory of love and romance
Maybe the fault is more to do with the institution of marriage itself. Forty-two per cent of marriages (same-sex and opposite sex) end in divorce. In 2018 in the UK alone, 90,871 couples divorced: that’s 249 bubbles bursting every single day (and, according to government figures, there is a backlog too). Black’s services have been even more in demand during lockdown. Marriages with cracks in have crumbled. There has been a spectacular rise in divorces among the over-65s, obliged to spend more time with one another then might be bearable. One woman (who worked for a friend of mine) approaching retirement, recently said, “How can I avoid killing my husband?”
It’s a fair question, and divorce may well be the answer. But Black also concedes that a lot of couples would be better off never marrying in the first place. Maybe we should have “engagement coaches” whose main task is to talk you out of it so you remain good friends instead and avoid the inevitable schism further down the road. Let’s face it, the pressures going in the other direction are considerable. As a recent convert to Selling Sunset on Netflix – a “property programme” that seems to be more about personal relationships – I notice that all the smart, fit, young Los Angeles-based women earning (potentially) gobsmacking amounts of money are nevertheless caught in a flytrap, competing with one another to acquire settled marital status (just as their clients seek real estate). Marriage is still the default setting.
But it wasn’t always thus. The consecrated marriage is a relatively recent invention, dating from the rise of feudalism. Even more recent is the shift from the emphasis on property to the theory of love and romance. In The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, the American historian Lawrence Stone attributes the rise in romance to the diffusion of the eighteenth-century habit of novel-reading. Which is probably crazy, because he then has to ignore all of Romeo and Juliet and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, not to mention Homer. It’s possible that love is culturally produced, but it’s certain that marriage is. Alexandre Dumas said of wedlock that “the chains are so heavy that it takes two to carry them – and sometimes three.”
As per Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, perhaps monogamy is a myth and multiple sexual partnerships are the norm. But it’s clear that the “couple” was once rigorously subordinated to the clan, to more extended kinship relations. The modern “closed” nuclear family has been linked to a rise in acquisitive individualism and greater equality and freedom. But it also provided Sigmund Freud with a happy hunting ground for neuroses, madness and melancholia. The rule would seem to be you either break up or you have a breakdown – you choose. Or, of course, you can do both. Marriage, with its tight, exclusive, and sometimes oppressive requirement of mutual dependency, can seem like a formula for coercive control. Charles Fourier, the great French utopian thinker, reckoned that marriage was incompatible with women’s rights. A friend told me that her husband would not only demand to know where she was every hour of the day, but was also jealous of the time she spent with her horse, and wanted him put down. He didn’t want her riding a horse, only him. That’s how narcissistic and introverted marriage can become.
In contrast, there is always the more monastic approach. Monks and nuns were not only celibate (in theory), dedicating a lot of their time to praying to God, they were also part of a community
According to Lawrence Stone, the modern western family system is “geographically, chronologically and socially a most restricted and unusual phenomenon, and there is little reason to have any more confidence in its survival and spread in the future than there is for democracy itself”. The statistics say that marriage is in decline. There are two obvious alternatives to marriage. At one end of the spectrum is the orgy, whether in the shape of polygamy (or polyandry) or the series of “dangerous liaisons” that were known, in the eighteenth century, as libertinism, and now perhaps as Tinder. There is a gain in sheer quantity. But clearly this is exhausting, doomed to ten different kinds of disaster, mental and physical, and in the era of social distancing more implausible than ever, except perhaps for Mormons or very decadent aristocrats.
In contrast, there is always the more monastic approach. Monks and nuns were not only celibate (in theory), dedicating a lot of their time to praying to God, they were also part of a community. The Sixties hippy commune attempted per impossibile to combine spiritual harmony with maximum sexual experience. Freud maintained that the point of sublimation was to divert the libido into such useful activities as building civilisation and bridges. The sublimes of the future, who refuse marriage and long-term relationships, may well find something more pragmatic to do than praying. They will be members of clans who will be dedicated to saving the planet – or perhaps destroying it.
Claire Black hasn’t been able to watch Holby City since that evening when her marriage fell apart. But perhaps in future relationships the point will be not seeing someone else or riding away on another horse (or the fear of the above), but rather banding together into cooperatives and collectives in which couples are subsumed. Marriage is not about to die, but it is entering a twilight zone. Maybe what we need is a divorce from the very idea of marriage.
‘Break-Up: From Crisis to Confidence’ by Claire Black is published by Forward Thinking Publishing. Andy Martin is the author of ‘Surf, Sweat and Tears: The Epic Life and Mysterious Death of Edward George William Omar Deerhurst’ (OR Books) and teaches at Cambridge University