Dita De Boni: An un-marriage of expedience

Illustration / Anna Crichton

Selling the house or ending a marriage, uncoupling can be healthy — can't it?

I share a birth year with Gwyneth Paltrow — but, needless to say, little else. Yet this year we are both uncoupling. She is consciously uncoupling a marriage. I am unconsciously uncoupling a house.

When I say "unconsciously", you will of course understand that I do not mean I am leaving the house while heavily sedated, or sleeping through the entire process. If only.

Regrettably, I am very much awake, through the hernia-inducing shuffling of boxes and furniture, the homicide-provoking process of trying to get your house reinsured for the right amount, and the inevitable domestic sniping that occurs when one partner would prefer to check his Twitter account rather than listen as his wife rattles off yet another list of duties that must be completed before month's end.

But part of it really is unconscious; the part, surfacing intermittently, which is buried in your soul — the memory of days and weeks and months of daily mundanity and its occasional thrills.

As I was muttering darkly about thousand-piece Lego sets that spill underfoot, and Furbies that provoke parental migraines, I had to stop and have a sob, remembering this was the room in which my wonderful mother so proudly sat and held her first grandchild. She died a year later, and I could never again be so physically close to that memory, and the sadness of it overwhelmed me.

Conscious uncoupling, of the sort Gwyneth and her soon-to-be-ex husband Chris Martin enter into, is an even more profound experience, apparently, and one that isn't arrived at accidentally (like mine), but carried through with intent.

It is the process where, some cynics say, psychobabble is used as a substitute for "getting a divorce".

The Daily Mail, as always, helpfully clarified the issue. It quotes Andrew Wallas — billed as "Britain's only practising Conscious Uncoupling guru" — as declaring that in the US, this breaking up business is based on the idea that marriage was only ever meant to last a few decades — about as long as humans lived in the past — and is now outdated.

In Britain, on the other hand, says Wallas, it is used primarily to save the marriage, and if not, to ensure the split is a positive, nay jubilant experience for the participants, by "increasing intimacy and honesty between [the] two people". Sounds a bargain, at a cost of 600 for the first 90-minute counselling session.

Yes, it does sounds awfully decadent, but I am perplexed that so many people would rubbish the idea, when we hear constantly about how damaging badly-handled divorce is for the children involved. If Chris and Gwyn can find it in their hearts to overlook the long line of extra-marital affairs they've both been having (if the gossip mags are to be believed), then it can only be good news for little Apple and Moses Martin, which will be good news for their children too, little Tartlette and Nebuchadnezzar, perhaps, when or if they come along.

Wallas contends that the main reason marriages fail is that they become a "power struggle" — a struggle that undoubtedly becomes amplified by disputes over children and material possessions during divorce. Why wouldn't you spend money to reduce the harm this causes if you could?

And when Wallas has finished helping couples split happily, maybe he could help ease the pain of uncoupling from my house.