“Why are we all still getting divorce so wrong?”

The Evening Standard asks and answers this question. I agree with much of the article, but the question sounds like it is laying blame on people for going about divorce in the ‘wrong’ way.

It’s easy to say what a good and ‘right’ divorce might look like; it might be civil, amicable, reasonable and done in a cost-effective way through family mediation.

Unfortunately, circumstances and events leading up to divorce can make it very difficult for people to put these behaviours into action, especially when you throw powerful emotions into the mix, such as shame, hurt, anger and fear.

It also takes two to achieve a better divorce, so if one person is determined to make things difficult, the other person can feel forced to either fight or give in which can feel very unfair.

The best advice I can give to people is to try to deal with the emotional side of separation outside of the legal divorce process; with the help of a therapist or divorce coach. Use family mediation and family lawyers to reach the decisions that need to be made. The advantage of family mediation is there is a bit more room to discuss concerns and barriers to decisions which are not necessarily strictly legal.

Dominic West and his wife Catherine FitzGerald are reportedly focussing on rekindling their marriage, as they enjoy a luxury family trip to Kenya and 'put their troubles behind them”. Four months after the fallout of West being papped, canoodling on filming location in Rome with actress Lily James, the couple are only too aware of how messy, painful, and rancorous a divorce is likely to be.

Public as it was, their behaviour, and especially FitzGerald’s, stands in marked contrast to that of actress Alice Evans, who washed her dirty linen in the Twittersphere last week. Evans tweeted to her 28,000 followers that her 13-year marriage to fellow-actor Ioan Gruffudd was over. 'Sad news,” she wrote. 'My beloved husband/soulmate of 20 years, Ioan Gruffudd, has announced he is to leave his family, starting next week. Me and our young girls are very confused and sad. We haven’t been given a reason except that he no longer loves me. I’m so sorry.”

The couple later issued a joint statement saying: 'This is an incredibly difficult time for our family and we remain committed to our children.”