Open Minds: The divorced can teach us a few things about domestic bliss

I was struck by a statement by a long-married woman with kids, posted on a mothers’ internet message board. The women were complaining that they did more than the lion’s share of the housework and childcare. “All I want,” she wrote, “is shared custody — but without the divorce.” Wow — the dirty secret: divorce and shared custody, painful though they are, also create some positive circumstances that marriage too should enjoy.

I’m all for marriages lasting a lifetime. But many newly single people find that, if that’s not how the cards were dealt, there are some startling upsides we can all learn from. Crazily, it is divorce rather than marriage in our culture that creates circumstances that support a couple’s bond.

Divorce, whatever else it brings, reintroduces conditions for full-on adult romance and conversation. Newly single people, especially if they have shared custody, are often surprised by how this eases relationships. But marriage is set up in our culture to guarantee stress on the passion and intimacy in a relationship. Our current social setup penalises married couples with children, but pampers the adults who find one another in post-divorce relationships. How many married couples think they want a new relationship, when they would actually be happy with the same relationship — set in a different, less stressed, lifestyle?

Post-divorce shared custody is painful, but it illuminates what adult men and women need to keep love strong: time alone. Do you want to spend all day in bed? Done. Make love spontaneously? Party on. No darling little feet will be scampering in. Crave nights at the theatre? No guilt. The kids are with a devoted other parent, not a distracted sitter. So unfair to marriage: everything conspires to keep a post-marriage spark alive.

The great exhauster of Eros in married life with kids is not marriage itself but the pressures our culture directs against it: dual-career pressures, or that of one tired breadwinner, met by an exhausted at-home parent. Add the feminist expectation, necessary as it is, that housework be shared equally, which studies show almost never happens. The most loving married couple faces a minefield.

With shared custody? As the message-board mum intuited, done. The lawyers accomplish for the relationship what feminism generally can’t.

Then there’s money pressure. Our laws, archaically, decree all money made after the wedding to be joint property — so many financial decisions become struggles. After divorce, you make your own financial decisions: your romantic focus is not on financial issues.

Finally, there’s our expectation that kids be the continual centre of parental attention. Studies show that today’s parents spend more time with their kids each week than a generation ago, but no more time with one another. Hyper “togetherness” takes a toll. We have created marital arrangements that are actually anti-marriage.

So how do we create conditions for married love as good as those that support love post-divorce?

First, we need hotels for kids. Seriously. How many marriages would perk up with somewhere fabulous nearby for the kids to go for a day or two so mum and dad could have some steamy time alone, or even just a quiet talk and a nap? What if it provided well-vetted, fun young people, video-monitoring, proper bedtimes, and got kids to school in the morning? In the second world war, both UK and US governments set up just such “nurseries” so mums could do war work. Kids and mothers adored them — and the war effort succeeded.

Let’s also get the state out of the marriage union. In spite of the dress and the flowers, marriage is a business contract. Women, generally, don’t understand this, until it hits them over the head upon divorce. Let’s take a lead from our gay and lesbian friends, who, without state marriage, often create domestic partnerships with financial autonomy and unity spelt out. A heterosexual parallel: celebrate marriage with a religious or emotional ceremony — leave the state out of it — and create a business- or domestic-partner contract aligning the couple legally.

Finally: our absurd cultural assumption is that once you’re married, your spouse is supposed to accept you “as you are”, but when you are courting you are expected to be considerate, charming and seductive. If you’re married, I suggest you forget that, and treat your spouse as if he or she is that hot single person across the hall.