From Holy Matrimony to Unholy Acrimony.

What happens after is no honeymoon.

Apr 01, 2026

The Bride and Gloom — a bride stands alone in an empty church. Image for The Almighty Gob article: From Holy Matrimony to Unholy Acrimony.

[From Holy Matrimony to Unholy Acrimony — The Almighty Gob]

As I look back over my life, by now, I would’ve had more wives than Henry the Eighth — and whilst it was never my ambition to appear in the Guinness Book of Records, that particular category is probably where I would have ended up. At least Henry had the decency to meet his. I never met a Catherine. Never met an Anne. Never got as far as a Jane. Which, all things considered, may have saved a considerable amount of paperwork — and possibly a few heads. Although, having since been given a diagnosis of ADHD, I realise now that the only person who would have lost their head was me. Because with ADHD, I’m never really satisfied with anything. Even when it comes to writing — it has to be as near perfect as possible. Or it doesn’t get published.

I always thought there was something ritualistic about marriage that put me off entirely. Having been brought up in a Roman Catholic family, anything with a whiff of religion attached to it became a firm no. The church was out before it was ever in.

The law was written for a society that no longer exists.

Which brought me, reluctantly, to marriage itself — and the whole circus that surrounds it. The ceremony. The reception. The rings. The banns, should the ecclesiastical route appeal — and I wouldn’t bet on the Church having made anything simpler. The hoops I would have had to jump through before getting anywhere near the altar. All of it adding up to a sum that would’ve bought a decent car. And at least with a car, if it didn’t work out, you could sell it.

They say marriage is an institution. If that’s the case, I’d have been in one long before now.

Somewhere in England, a woman is sitting at a kitchen table that isn’t legally hers.

She’s been sitting at it for seventeen years. She helped pay for it. She raised children around it. She built a life at it — the kind of life that looks, from the outside, exactly like a marriage. Same house. Same finances. Same everything.

Except the piece of paper. She never signed the piece of paper.

And when it ended, she discovered that without that piece of paper, the law had never really noticed her.

Here is a fact that should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country, and isn’t.

For the first time in recorded history, married people are a minority of the adult population in England and Wales. As of 2024, only 49.5% of adults over 16 are married or in a civil partnership. It fell below half somewhere between last Tuesday and the one before, and almost nobody mentioned it.

The law noticed none of this.

The Matrimonial Causes Act was written in 1973. The year Slade were in the charts. The year the UK joined the EEC. The year roughly seven in ten adults were married, because that was simply what adults did. Two years later, Billy Connolly took D.I.V.O.R.C.E. to number one. The country, it seems, had already worked out where this was heading.

Fifty-three years later, the statute hasn’t meaningfully changed. The society it was written for has been demolished and replaced, and nobody told the lawyers.

Marriage used to be an obligation. You got married because that was what happened — what your parents did, what your community expected, what your religion required. The wedding wasn’t really a choice. It was a rite of passage you passed through whether it suited you or not.

The result was a lot of marriages. It was also a lot of people trapped.

Then the obligation dissolved. Cohabitation became accepted. Children outside marriage lost their stigma. The religious framework that had underwritten the whole institution receded to the point where it now features in barely one in seven weddings. Civil ceremonies account for 85% of marriages in England and Wales today.

Marriage became a choice. And when something becomes a choice, people start choosing not to do it.

The result is roughly 265,000 marriages a year — half the 1972 peak — and 3.5 million cohabiting couples, a figure that has more than doubled in twenty years. People building lives together, buying houses, having children, making every practical commitment a marriage makes — without signing the form.

The law has not kept up with any of this.

In England and Wales, unmarried partners have no automatic right to each other’s property when they separate. No financial remedy claim. No equivalent of the protections a divorcing spouse can seek. A cohabiting partner of twenty years, whose name isn’t on the mortgage, can walk away with nothing. Or be the one left with nothing.

The mythical “common law marriage” — the idea that living together long enough confers legal rights — does not exist in English law. It never did. A 2019 survey found that 46% of the British public still believed it did.

Half the country is operating on a legal fiction. Scotland reformed its cohabitation law in 2006. England and Wales have not. The government announced a consultation on cohabitation reform for Spring 2026. A consultation is not a law. The 3.5 million people living without protection cannot wait for the outcome.

Cohabiting couples can draw up a cohabitation agreement — a legal contract that would protect the woman at the kitchen table. The legal profession knows this. Most of the people who need one have never heard the term. Almost nobody has one.

There is a parallel story among people who do get married. Around one in five marriages in the UK now involves a prenup — up from one in twelve in the 1990s. Four in five still don’t. A survey by Handelsbanken Wealth and Asset Management found that 89% of married couples aged 35 to 54 had no prenuptial agreement. The most common reason given was that they saw no risk of separation.

Prenups, like seatbelts, are for accidents you haven’t had yet.

The law offers no safety net when optimism turns out to have been misplaced.

Now consider the people who did sign the form.

There are currently somewhere in the region of 50,000 financial remedy cases — the process by which divorcing couples divide their assets — waiting to be heard in the courts of England and Wales. The average wait from first appointment to final hearing is over seventeen months and rising. At least it keeps Relate in business.

In September 2025, Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division, confirmed that sitting days in the Financial Remedies Court would be cut in 2026. Not increased to meet demand. Cut. The Ministry of Justice, faced with a justice system running on fumes, decided to redistribute what little it had elsewhere.

Hearings adjourned at the last minute. Courtrooms double-booked. Legal costs mounting while nothing moves. People in financial and emotional limbo, unable to close the door on a chapter of their life that ended long ago.

The law didn’t just fail to keep up. It is actively retreating.

If you can afford a barrister to take your case to private arbitration, you bypass the queue entirely. Quick, efficient, and — as one firm described it — entirely unrecognisable from the experience of everyone else. Justice, in the Financial Remedies Court of 2026, comes with a price tag most people cannot meet.

If you can’t — if you are ordinary, which is to say if you are most people — you wait.

The cause is not mysterious.

The introduction of no-fault divorce in 2022 simplified the process of ending a marriage. It did nothing to address what happens to the finances afterward.

Legal aid was gutted in 2013. Before that, people met solicitors who could assess whether going to court made sense — and sometimes talk them out of it. After 2013, those conversations stopped. Litigants in person flooded the courts. Cases that might have settled in a day took three. Resolution, the leading family law organisation, has documented the consequences in detail.

Sir Andrew McFarlane said it plainly before parliament: the volume of cases went up because legal aid was removed, not despite it.

The government cut the service that kept people out of court. Then underfunded the court. Then cut its sitting days. Then expressed concern about the backlog. A small policy decision in 2013 cascaded into a system that now cannot hear its own cases.

The Matrimonial Causes Act 1973 governs all of it. The core framework — how assets are divided between separating couples — has not meaningfully changed in over fifty years. The Law Commission published a scoping report in December 2024 concluding the law lacks certainty and delivers neither fair nor consistent outcomes. Reform, they suggested, was unlikely before 2026.

It is now 2026.

It is worth asking what the state actually wants from us.

It wants children. Urgently. The fertility rate hit a record low of 1.41 births per woman in 2024 — the lowest since records began in 1938, falling for the third consecutive year. Well below the 2.1 replacement rate. Fewer babies today means fewer taxpayers in thirty years.

So the state builds scaffolding around family formation. Child benefit. Free childcare. Maternity pay. Tax credits. An entire architecture of incentive.

It is considerably less interested in what happens when the family falls apart.

The same government that subsidises fertility has allowed the legal framework around family breakdown to calcify for fifty years. Stripped out the legal aid. Underfunded the courts. Cut the sitting days. Watched the backlog grow with the composure of an institution that has decided this is someone else’s problem.

These are not two separate policy failures. They are one incoherence — two arms of the same state that have never been made to face each other across a table.

The incentive is real. The safety net is a polite fiction.

So here is where we are.

The woman at the kitchen table has no claim. The divorcing couple have a claim but nowhere to exercise it in any reasonable timeframe. The person who can afford private arbitration is already done. And the law governing all of it was written when Slade were in the charts.

The state legislated for the ideal version of how people live. The 1970s version. The married, churched, two-point-four-children version. And when the actual population quietly, stubbornly became something else — cohabiting, secular, complicated — the law didn’t follow them.

It left them outside. Not with malice. With indifference.

The people nobody counted are not a minority. They are most people. They are the cohabiting couple who assumed they were protected. The divorcing couple who assumed the courts would be there. The parent who assumed the state that subsidised their family had also thought about what happened when it broke.

From holy matrimony to unholy acrimony. What happens after was never going to be a honeymoon. It still isn’t.

The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication covering politics, power, and institutional accountability. With over 500 published pieces, 88 Bristol investigations built from FOI requests, and a nine-platform distribution network, The Almighty Gob has established itself as a primary source on UK civic accountability and institutional failure.

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