Your hypothesis that painful divorce – as opposed to all divorce – is made more likely by income inequality looks plausible and testable. With greater equality, you would expect more divorces, as the women have more options and less need to stay in bad relationships, but fewer nasty ones – at least over money: I would guess that child custody rows are driven by non-economic needs. Any reader feel like checking this out?

“Just my two-cents worth.” Please, please, never apologise for your opinions. If you think they they are worth a public airing – and FWIW I think they clearly are – stand up for them. As the Edinburgh professor apocryphically told his first-year medical students, “never apologise, never explain.”

A good place to start might be to stop raising children from day-one to expect to find ONE partner they will love and cherish for their entire lives. Sure, it happens. But in my experience, it is not the norm. Prepare people to expect, if you will, serial monogamy. Change marriage vows, i.e., drop, “Til death do us part,” to reflect more realistic expectations. This might help people adjust so they’re not so bitter and vindictive when their relationships change. (Note: I did not say, “fail.”)

Second, it is incumbent to guarantee women and men’s social standing and, importantly, pay. As it is now, the living standards of most women and the children who reside with them decline greatly when they separate from a male partner. This creates hardship, understandable fear and anxiety on the part of many women, and can lead to anger, bitterness and a desire to avenge the perceived unfairness of the situation by prolonging legal battles. Crack down on fathers who evade child-support. Moreover, as a society we need to stop shaming single mothers.

Just my two-cents worth.

As further evidence of the naturalness of rites of passage, the citizenship ceremony for immigrants, introduced in the UK in 2004 as a New Labour sop to the nativist right, has recently developed into a celebration.

John Casey: my phrase isn’t very good, but it does try to capture the fact that the moral obligations of parents continue beyond the expiry of legal ones. And even the latter boundary is fuzzy: do divorce settlements today totally ignore the expectation of college costs for adult children? I’m not suggesting the law should enforce these obligations, unlike those to minors, but it seems right to recognize their existence in any formal civil rite.

I find it difficult to take the sabotage objection (several commenters) seriously. By my construction, the ceremony excludes non-consent, cruelty and desertion divorces, which will continue to be handled only in the courts (at a penalty). So the hypothesis must be that one spouse pretends to consent to the decree in order to sabotage the ceremony and humiliate the other spouse. The registrar halts the proceedings, and the issue goes back to the court, where the judge can jail the yahoo for contempt or add another €/$/£100,000 to the payment (or remove it if it’s the payee acting up). It isn’t hard to devise strong incentives to prevent abuse.

Say what?

You might be right in some cases, but my impression is that most other countries simply don’t have the wackjobs that one sometimes sees getting divorced in the US. For those who use the divorce proceedings as a way to manipulate/control their ex-spouse to be and children, the requirement of shared attendance at a ceremony would be a godsend. Flaking out on attendance would postpone the imposition of final terms for custody, child support, division of property etc, it would prevent the other spouse from remarrying, and so forth.

Maybe I’m just vicariously paranoid; I know some divorces that have gone fine and wouldn’t have needed such a ceremony, and others where it would just have been an opportunity to add several new layers of drama.

I don’t know if you have any actual divorce ceremonies in the UK, but the concept is starting to take hold here in North America. Where it’s healthy, the couple will stand in front of family and friends and basically undo the knot. Along with that, they can pledge publicly to their kids to continue to love and cherish them, and ask their friends to continue to support them and not take sides. Note that I said: “where it’s healthy.”

In most cases, it’s not and the damage is done long before people consider how to get closure. Often, a divorce ceremony is done by a single person as a way to let go of the past and move on. In a recent CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) radio interview, a woman choosing a divorce ceremony told the reporter that the ceremony gave her the ability to flush away much of the past hurt and pain and to consider marriage again.

A ceremony that strictly deals with the legal aspect is a great start. To really be effective, it will not shy away from the emotional component that is the most painful and damaging…not just to the couple, but to everyone around them.

Part of the problem is a difference in attitudes of men and women towards divorce. The most difficult piece of paper I have ever had to sign was the divorce complaint against my ex-. Signing the actual settlement agreement was easy, and I do mean easy. I remarked on that to my attorney, who told me it was very common. Men tend to view signing the complaint as their statement, “It’s over. Let’s settle the things that must be settled and move on.” Women tend to view signing the complaint was the opening salvo of the battle/war. So they fight over the fuzzy pink toilet seat cover they both hated.

Obviously there good be sanctions for that kind of behavior, but that would just move the game-playing to another level.

It could be useful for more amicable separations, but for those there are already unofficial ceremonies (see, e.g., the divorce cake mini-industry).