On Wednesday, the “no-fault divorce” law comes into effect in England and Wales, the result of years of campaigning by lawyers and family rights groups, to take the acrimony out of separation. The law until now was peculiar in ways that you probably wouldn’t realise until you were at the point of getting divorced – tethered to old-world values about the sanctity of marriage, with workarounds to reflect the modern understanding that, sometimes, shit happens.
So if you wanted a divorce and hadn’t been deserted or gone through the process of separation, you had to sue your spouse for either adultery or unreasonable behaviour. In the first case, obviously that had to be brought by the “adulteree” rather than the adulterer, which was kind of rum, that one party would get cheated on and made to carry the burden of legal admin. As for what’s unreasonable, the bar was set incredibly low, and unless you said: “He has this way of breathing where it always sounds the same,” a judge would be unlikely to refuse you. It sounds easy, but it set the tone: two people scrabbling through the mud of the marriage to find the worst bits in it, which intensified the adversarialism. Even couples who managed to keep it “round the table” (a mediated separation) rather than head to head (with a family court involved) would nonetheless often be embarking on their journey as co-parents with a whole list of charges and counter-charges, burning away at their brains, offending their natural sense of justice.
So “no-fault” feels like a magic bullet, yet fails at the level of language. It makes it sound like an entirely neutral event, containing neither intention nor emotion – it could be two drivers, innocently colliding as they both try to change lanes; or two robots, accidentally chasing each other off a cliff, after a motherboard malfunction. That’s not how most people feel about their divorce. It’s not always the letter of the law and the processes of the court forcing couples into hostile positions; often people can only make sense of what has happened with a painstaking analysis of its many unfortunate events. The phrase they’re looking for, if they want to take the sting out of the process, while still reflecting on its reality, is an “everybody’s-fault divorce”.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
