Among my group of friends, I was an early casualty in the battle of love and family life. My children's father and I separated when we were 40 and they were still at primary school, a stage when not many of us were doing divorce. It caused a bit of a stir. Yet 10 years on, as we hit 50, a second wave of marital casualties is taking place. For once the clamour and chaos of family life receded, it seems that these parents found not peace but a sadness that would not go away.
Was it worth staying together? Perhaps it's like this for every generation. Or maybe we are seeing the end of one kind of family life and the beginning of something better.
For too long we have believed that marriage is good, divorce is bad. Two parents are better than one. Single mothers are a problem.
But what if single parenting is more harmonious, more loving and more successful than the conventional model? What if two-parent families are a bit of a lie, a shop front for what is in effect single parenting? What if it's wiser not to wait for Mr Right, but to have a child on your own?
I was an English teacher in London comprehensive schools for 20 years before the marking and the testing drove me out. In a Year 10 class last year, we studied an article about "Broken Britain", which described the damaging effects of divorce and single parenthood on the children in this country. The students were angry. They objected to the tone of the article and its references to "poverty", "low attainment", "criminality" and "despair".
I was quite surprised. I asked everyone who lived in a single-parent household to stand up. Out of 25 teenagers, only two were left seated. I asked each person standing to say one thing that would counter the article's litany of gloom about single parents. A sea of hands rose. "My mum is my role model - she works, she looks after us, she takes us to the cinema"; "My dad makes me really proud. He cooks and everything and helps with my homework"; "It's easier since my parents separated. There's less tension and aggression"; "My mum is my friend. I can tell her anything"; "Before, it was them and us. Now it doesn't feel like that. I feel promoted."
Far from considering themselves damaged and deprived by life with a single parent, these young people suggested a kind of family life, and in particular, a kind of relationship with their parent, about which most commentators and politicians seem unaware. They told of the renewal that divorce can bring, of positive parenting behaviours where there is closeness, listening, availability and support. What if, with the dissolution of the nuclear family structure, greater equality, intimacy and companionship develops between parent and children? Could it be that once freed of the spousal system, fathers and mothers become better parents?
Many married couples I knew watched appalled, from a safe distance, while my ex and I separated, and it has to be said that at times the process was quite a spectacle. No doubt many were thinking, "There but for the grace of God go I." Now the dust has settled, I'm often asked by these people, "And how are the children?" Perhaps I'm paranoid but I sometimes think I detect in that tilt of the head and the searchlight sweep of the eyes, an insatiable desire for lurid tales of adolescent meltdown - eating disorders, drug abuse or under-age sex. While not wanting to deny the sadness and pain my children felt, and sometimes still feel, about their parents' separation, my 17- and 15-year-old happen to be two of the sanest and most positive people I know. They are funny, sensitive, passionate and clever. They don't swear at me or at strangers, they don't underachieve at school, they don't assume that others will cook and clean up after them, and they don't truant or make a habit of staggering home at three in the morning - all of which is behaviour, I note, that other parents and the media seem to consider normal in teenagers. What if it isn't normal behaviour? What if it is the acting out of pathologies within the family unit, the manifestation of unresolved conflicts between the parents - or just poor parenting?
While the pain of divorce and separation is often discussed and fictionalised, quantifying the pain and damage of staying together for the children is rarely examined. In my 50s, it doesn't gladden me to witness a second wave of divorce among my married friends. Sadly, for many of those parents who stayed together through those challenging child-rearing years, doing so seems to have only delayed the inevitable. The children may be grown up and almost gone but does that really make it a better time to call the whole thing off? Some might observe that the pain of separation for the adults at such a point is even more acute than when the engine and love of family life - the nits, the book bags, the visits to the park - consumes all one's energy and attention. The staying-together-for-the-children scenario is more desperate if one of the parents has put their career and earning power on hold in order to raise the children, only to find that in their 50s they are unemployed and alone in an empty house. We hear a great deal, correctly, about the needs and rights of children. We should remember that parents are people too.
Raising children alone is tough, without a doubt, but what if it's not as tough as raising them in a two-parent-household? And anyway, what is a two-parent household? Look closely at one and you may notice that the majority of two-parent households are to all intents and purposes a single-parent operation being run on archaic lines. Child-rearing and the time-consuming tedium of running a home is left to one adult while the earning power, career advancement and opportunity to live an alternative life - and get out when the going gets tough - is the preserve of the other.
Yet I feel very lucky. I'm of that generation of women who may not have got our marriages right, but we did at least get pregnant fairly thoughtlessly (like the teenage mothers we all get so exercised about) while under the spell and mania of Eros and while we were still relatively fertile. Even though the chances of staying with the father turned out to be compromised by conflicting expectations of domestic labour and careers, I thank God that I had my children when I did; they are the very best of both of us, and a love that will endure. I meet women in their 30s and 40s who ask, "Should I go it alone? Should I give up waiting for a man and have a child?" I look at them and want to say, "Do it. You will never know love like it." And, economically, they could. Many of the children in this country are raised in single-parent households and we have a government that is far-sighted and compassionate enough to understand and act on this fact with its Sure Start, family tax credit and nursery provision.
I want to say to these women, "Why not have a child alone? The chances are you'll be raising that child single-handedly whether you stay with the father or not. Just don't give up the day job." I want to say all that, yet something stops me. And it's the same thing that's stopping them. We are all hostage to the romance of the family.
I am an idealist, and a romantic at heart. I was raised that way in the 60s and 70s by parents for whom divorce was taboo. For my generation, who had children in the 80s and 90s, the odds were perhaps stacked against us. In the 60s and 70s, our mothers fought and won for us women's rights so that we would not have to endure the sexual, emotional and occupational desert depicted in Mad Men. But I have a feeling it has taken the men a lot longer to catch on to what that meant. While women had high expectations of how life might be at home, in love and at work, men had signed up to no similar vision.
It was so nearly impossible to be a working mother during those decades that women who did it were known as "Superwoman". Women aspired to "having it all". I remember the shock, when I was pregnant with my first child in 1991, when I understood that not only would I have to return to work when she was 12 weeks old to keep my job and pay the mortgage, but that I was expected to find, manage and pay for 50 hours of childcare a week without any help from the state. After a few months of struggle, it became obvious that it wasn't worth it. Financially, we would have been better off if I worked less. And so I went part-time. In many ways, those years were a precious gift of love and pleasure. It's only now, looking at my much depleted teacher's pension, halved because of those years, that I realise the gift was far from free.
The government should be much prouder and much louder about the advances it has made with maternity leave, paternity leave, childcare, benefits and preschool education. It is making an incredible difference to the lives of children and their parents. I would go as far as to say that it is helping parents stay together. I feel hopeful for my children. I have a feeling that by the time they have children of their own, there will be real parity between the sexes, not only at work but at home. There are visible signs on the streets in the last five years - more men pushing buggies, men shopping with babies in slings, men on paternity leave and men working part-time. The other day I saw a man, laptop over one shoulder, nappy bag over the other, struggling on to the rush-hour tube with a baby in a buggy. Perhaps my daughters and their partners really will have it all - love, work and children. Now that would be something worth signing up to.