THAT IRKSOME SEVENTH SUGGESTION

Adultery is inevitable, but divorce is not (Minette Marrin, The Times, April 23, 2006)

Marriage, as my ferocious mother-in-law always used to say, gazing balefully about her, is not a love affair. I always used to find that rather discouraging, especially when I was first married to her son. However, I do know what she meant. Marriage isn’t only a love affair, though ideally it begins with one.

Marriage is, most importantly, a social contract, the most important social contract there is in a civil society. I think it should be seen as a contract. No one should be allowed to break it with impunity. The odd thing is that people often do break up their marriages with impunity, without any sense of one party being more to blame than the other.

That sort of perverse moral equivalence seems to be a tendency of the time. There are always two sides to a story; one side is just as responsible as the other; it’s impossible to judge — those are the things people nearly always say when their friends separate. Fifty-fifty is the outward and visible sign in the law courts of this attitude. The number of divorces where the family wealth is split equally between husband and wife has been growing. The figure more than doubled between 2004 and 2005, when it applied to 63% of cases, according to a survey published by Grant Thornton, the chartered accountants.

That may be right in some cases, but it is clearly wrong in others. If a wife gets bored with her perfectly reasonable husband and runs away with her well-toned personal trainer, it is wrong that she should be able to take the family home, children, maintenance and pension rights with her, totalling at least 50% of what the poor man has. Similarly if a husband abandons his perfectly reasonable wife and family for the office vamp, his spouse ought not to be the one that suffers more, financially; he should. If marriage is not a love affair, falling in love with someone else is not a good enough reason to end it without impunity. Nor is being bored.

This all might sound harsh. Of course I understand that life is complex, especially married life. All the same I have come across many cases of clear injustice when someone is not only abandoned, but impoverished, in someone else’s unreliable pursuit of happiness.

So I felt, I admit, a sneaking pleasure in a headline last week that said adulterers may pay the price for their marriage break-up. Why not, I thought. Bring back blame. Since marriage is a contract, blame can usually best be expressed contractually, ie, financially.

By that I don’t mean adulterers should necessarily be named, shamed and blamed. On the contrary, I am a bit of an apologist for adultery. It seems largely inevitable for many people. What I am against is divorce. People who break up their marriages simply because one person has fallen in love with someone else should usually accept the greater share of blame.

This is the kind of “smarten-up” appeal to responsibility that many conservatives hope might be sufficient to reverse the modern plague of family breakdowns. It won’t work. Ms Marrin’s casual attitude to adultery (one detects more than a whiff of British aristocratic tradition here) while professing to oppose divorce betrays the same naivete she rightly accuses the “everyone is equally to blame” crowd of. The hard fact is that very few marriages can survive adultery and the corrosive sense of betrayal that comes with it (that's why family feuds and civil wars are so savage), and it can be cruel in the extreme to demand it be tolerated or forgiven as just one of life’s little unpleasant surprises. It is simply beyond the emotional and psychological (or even physical) capacity of most people to continue to live with an adulterer in whom one has invested all one’s faith, trust and material future, children or no children.

Adultery may be inevitable the way armed robbery is inevitable, but that is not what Ms. Marrin appears to mean. She seems to want to oppose divorce while preserving the very modern notion that sexual satisfaction is both a need, right or entitlement and no big thing, all at the same time. As long as that thinking prevails, adultery will thrive and so will divorce.