Kate Winslet and Sam Mendes’ celebrity divorce isn’t a symptom of a “broken society”, says Zoe Williams. Indeed, “to split is human.”

Scratching around, then, we have to first rule out financial stresses (they’re worth £30m between them), along with that showbiz catch-all that they didn’t make time for one another in their jetset lifestyles. (Winslet had only recently returned from a year off work.) Neither of them was having an affair, or maybe they both were – it’s all irrelevant because we’re asking the wrong question. It’s obvious why people would split up: habituation is its own excuse. But what makes people stay together?

Celebrities don’t immediately seem to offer any useful lessons, being so profoundly unusual, but they offer a neat insight into what people do when they aren’t stressed. When money is no issue, when work can be picked up and put down, when intellectual and/or creative fulfilment is a given, when peer disapproval doesn’t really exist because, well, you are peerless (and disapproval will rain down on you anyway, just for the shape of your teeth), how long do those relationships last? Not very long; really, six or so years is about the most of it, unless you’re Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon – and even that, at 11 years, felt a lot longer than it actually was, though of course I can’t speak for the people in it. We should look at stars not as aberrant wantons with too many attractive associates, but rather as humanity in laboratory conditions, all confounding factors removed. What, in their chamber of purity, do famous couples do? Why, they split up, of course.

Meanwhile, outside the laboratory, politicians everywhere wheel out their wives as badges of righteousness. The idea of the everlasting couple is at the centre of every conversation about society. Certainly where children are involved, the one point on which every party would agree is how to shore up the parental partnership. Tories insist that it can be done with marriage. Their favourite statistic is that one in three unmarried couples who are parents will split up before their child’s third birthday. I always think that sounds about right. Most relationships in one’s twenties – relationships that aren’t the Big Relationship – last about three years. The only difference between these “problem” broken families and the supposedly upstanding middle classes, who deferred the gratification of children for university, is we spent our twenties getting drunk. It’s hardly a moral position.

No account is taken, in this almost logical deduction, of the fact that married people are a self-selecting sample of people who are very serious about staying together. So there’s no point harrying or bribing people into it, it’s like giving up smoking: it only works if you wanted to do it in the first place.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/17/splitting-up-marriage-broken-society