It is now 20 years since I left university. Two pints in an evening and I feel groggy the next morning. My oldest child is in his last year at primary school, I regularly wake up with mysterious aches and pains, and we still have a very long way to go on our mortgage. All of which is to say that I am firmly and undeniably middle-aged. As it happens, I am rather enjoying myself at the start of my fifth decade. My midlife crisis takes one of the more benign forms: crafting a 1:76 scale model of an interwar rural branch line in the attic.
That almost half of children do not have both parents present is grim
But that is clearly not the universal experience. You can hardly open a newspaper nowadays without coming across a searing first-person account from someone who decided to blow up their life – and very often the lives of their spouse and kids – in pursuit of better sex, or more excitement, or an attempt to recapture the freedom and possibilities of youth.
From the Sunday Times to the Daily Mail, we are regularly presented with people who have decided that the routines and obligations of matrimony have become irksome, and that they need to strike out on their own once more, to recreate some semblance of the Carrie Bradshaw dream. ‘My sexless marriage drove me to an affair,’ announced one recent contributor to the Mail, adding that she didn’t regret it because she now had a child. Broadsheet front pages seem to be constantly advertising articles by women who have dumped allegedly boring and inattentive fortysomething husbands in favour of younger lovers (I should perhaps declare a class interest here, as a fortysomething husband).
I vaguely recall one from earlier this year where a woman finally decided to call in the lawyers when her husband made some minor domestic faux pas like not putting the spices back on the rack the right way. Back in December 2021 the US magazine The Atlantic ran a piece in the genre with the admirably honest title ‘How I Demolished My Life.’ Written by a woman aged 40ish, the gist of it was that her husband was a perfectly nice fellow, and her children charming, but that she missed the long brunches and cocktail nights of her carefree single life, so decided to press the nuclear button. A companion piece by the same writer barely a year later ruminated at length on how having children had made her life very difficult. I bet the kids will enjoy perusing that one when they’re older.
I sympathise with the people featured in these stories, up to a point. The middle decades can be difficult. Children become teenagers, parents enter old age, professional and civic responsibilities accumulate. Energy levels decline, youthful idealism fades, and the day-to-day requirements of a busy family household are undeniably tedious. It is only human to look back a little wistfully at a time when life was simpler and easier. I am happily married and like my life very much, yet even so I have fond memories of living in London in my mid-twenties, young and fit, with no real responsibilities, and a reasonable amount of money for the first time in my life. If I wanted to grab a last-minute theatre ticket after work, or go to the pub or the cinema, or even go away for the weekend, I could please myself, more or less. Shortly before Christmas 2005, for example, I decided on the spur of the moment to drive to Cumbria for a weekend of solo winter mountaineering (and almost got myself killed on a snow cornice at the summit of Helvellyn, but that’s another story).
Nevertheless, there is a clear danger in the soft-focus reframing of divorce and adultery as liberation, not least because it is often accompanied by implausible descriptions of post-split parenting arrangements. Nesting – the ‘co-parenting strategy’ where separated parents take turns living in the family home – is very trendy at the moment, and it does indeed sound very sensible and grown-up. I’m sure it works reasonably well for plenty of conscientious folks, at least for a while, although it is notable that the glowing tributes paid to its effectiveness often seem to come from the adults involved, rather than their children.
Ah yes, the children. A culture that valorises individual feelings over self-denial, service to others, and oath-keeping will necessarily have serious problems. And sure enough, according to data from the Marriage Foundation, 46 per cent of British children are not living with both natural parents by age 14. Even the most amicable of parental separations can wrench apart a child’s psychology, destroying their sense of security and creating disorder in their lives. Of course, marriages do fail, and there are a non-trivial number of cases where women must leave relationships because of domestic abuse. Nevertheless, that almost half of children do not have both parents present is grim. By way of comparison, for the cohort of children born in 1958, 91 per cent were still living with both biological parents by the time they were 16.
It would be unfair to say that the ‘Why I burned down my life’ features are purely hymns of praise to self-fulfilment with no consideration of others’ feelings. Many of the authors describe wrestling with the impact of their decisions on partners or children. All the same, to adapt a line from C.S. Lewis, a long face is not a moral disinfectant. However we might justify our decisions, however uneasy we might claim to be about their downsides, we are responsible for them, and for their consequences. All the therapeutic jargon in the world, and endless inches of newsprint about the war against stigma, cannot hide that fact.
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