Breaking up is hard to do: divorce reforms would make it easier

I would like to be taught how to fight. Not boxing or karate or anything you need a costume for, just lessons in common basic argument, between people who love each other. New York magazine interviewed a collection of couples, asking what they wish their partner would say in a fight. “What I need him to say is: ‘Yes, [my family] are assholes and they are snobs and I can’t imagine how much it sucks to hang out with them when you’re not biologically obligated to, but please, I need you there with me, and I’ll buy you a huge thank-you present for it.’” I wanted a stream of these truths, hooked straight to a vein. “She said I was disempowering her in front of her children and taking her voice away. I wish she said: ‘Shit, you know what? You’re right. I took it too far. I’ll check myself next time.’” MORE. “I just snapped. I said, ‘If I miscarry, it’s because you didn’t take good care of me.’ He was, like, ‘You are awful. Listen to what you just said…’ I wanted him to say, ‘Jesus Christ, get off your feet right now. You’re not lifting a finger until we know this pregnancy is healthy. I forbid you from taking any risks because I love you and our future baby too much.’” Raw, irrational, so real they sting like menthol shower gel, and reason enough, if more reason was needed, to question why we tie ourselves together, and in knots, and forever.

I so welcome these opportunities to peer into other people’s marriages, places we never get to visit, even on the most tropical of gap years. It’s something that feels particularly timely, too, as the justice secretary David Gauke proposes welcome reforms to divorce law. At the moment, in order to divorce, couples either have to separate for two years (five if it’s contested) or prove their ex was officially hideous. Which, of course, is not always the case. People change, relationships disintegrate, slowly. And if we’re grown up enough to decide to be together, we’re more than grown up enough to decide to be apart.

The current iteration of divorce, which requires formally shit-talking the person you once loved, not only creates unnecessary conflict, digging into existing wounds, but, like a ball pit in a Shoreditch bar, infantilises adults to the point of injury. And yet, like the pitiable dullards who insist easy access to the morning-after pill increases the chance of underage sex, there are similar marriage-fetishists who say legislation for no-fault divorce will undermine the union’s dusty sanctity. These are people after all, who believe marriage is so fragile they were threatened by the idea of opening it up to gay people. “This will increase the insecurity that many people feel within their marriages,” said Simon Calvert of the Christian Institute think-tank, “since it will mean that one partner can simply resign.” “It is an absolute disaster for the institution of marriage,” a spokesman for the Coalition for Marriage group said. “All this will do is speed up the divorce process.” Well, yes? Yes! Yes – it will release unhappy people from relationships that are killing them, rather than punishing them for failing at love, or shaming them into staying in the ruins of homes that have fallen down.

The end of things makes me think about the beginnings. The decisions to get married, the choice to create order from chaotic love, and commit to the confines of a brief that’s been unchanged for centuries. Despite the knowledge that half of marriages end in divorce, people throw themselves into wedding planning with little thought of the fact they might be entering an institution that, like a Victorian mental asylum, was not built for modern life. Is it horribly cynical to suggest we’ve become institutionalised? By locking ourselves into a contract where one human is expected to provide everything for another, are we setting ourselves up to fail? And then, once you’ve shouted: “If I miscarry, it’s because you didn’t take good care of me,” before moving into the spare room, to divorce and once again be subject to the laws and morals of people we wouldn’t trust to make a decision on the firmness of our toothbrush.

It feels like a lot of problems could be solved with two changes to the way we love, the first being a ritual binning of the expectation that one person should provide a whole community in which you’ll thrive. That they will save you. Save you from loneliness, from failure, boredom, anxiety, save you from a cold bed, or too many strangers’ hot ones. Save you from your bad flat, distant family, noisy friends, next door’s cat eating your face when you die. The second being the skill to fight well, in a way that communicates your individual struggle, but without slicing open the relationship and letting it bleed out on the carpet. Is this possible? Could people learn this in school, just after the condom on banana class?

Gauke’s attempt to ensure the end of love is as humane as the beginning is admirable, but we could make it even more dignified, simply by entering with an open mind, then leaving with our hands up, arms linked.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman