The only thing my husband and I have always agreed on is this: we’ll never get divorced. Just writing it down seems to be tempting fate, I know, but it’s (for the moment) true. So as we all view the latest antics of Katie Price, who is throwing something called a “divorce party” in Ibiza (a dignified-sounding social occasion, complete with gusset-flashing on table tops in bars and sessions in an “adults-only party hotel”), I can’t help coming over all old-fashioned and high-lace-collar Victorian about love and marriage. Don’t do it, Katie, or Jordan, or whatever your name is. Hightail it back to Peter and beg him to have you back, or you have him back, or whatever.

There are lots of reasons for wanting this. Ms Price is a huge celebrity and has three young children. I’m sure she is a loving and devoted mother but the facts on the ground in the Balearics suggest that for the moment, reassuring Harvey (who is blind and has a learning disability), Junior and Princess Tiaamii that their wellbeing is her priority does not seem to be uppermost in her mind. “I’m over Pete,” she yelled as she posed for a calendar photo shoot on a beach, while her ex looked after the children in Cyprus on his own. “I can snog whoever I want.”

Now, sad though this is to report, Katie/Jordan is a prominent role model for young girls. And the signal she is semaphoring is, if it doesn’t work out, pull the ripcord and bale out right away. If you’re tired of your husband or boyfriend, or you’re having what relationship specialists call “issues around intimacy” (which, roughly translated, means that you’re both in the bonk desert), or you fancy someone else, well, then you owe it to yourself to — y’know — follow your heart. You’ve got only one life. And the kids? Well, the kids will just have to sort their own heads out, won’t they?

As Katie and Peter were both abroad last week they probably missed the one intervention in the messy arena of personal relationships that might, just, have caused them to think again. Sir Paul Coleridge, a judge in the family division of the High Court, did not mince his words in a speech about “family breakdown”. The targets of his address were not childless couples who part ways, nor long-suffering pensioner couples who decide that they simply can’t bear seeing the same head on the pillow for 30 more years now the children are grown up and gone. No, he was out to bang together the heads of the Katies and Peters of this world, and to hold them up for judicial review.

He spelt out, in grim detail, the legacy of our self-pleasuring society, which he described as an anarchic place where being true to oneself and one’s needs was the only yardstick for controlling behaviour (I know, it sounds like Ibiza, but His Honour was referring to the UK).

He argued, from his long experience of the family courts — bursting with “damaged, miserable or disturbed children” — that break-up in a parental relationship was not a personal matter. It was a public matter because it affected children, schools, hospitals and wider society, and cost a fortune. So there had to be an urgent reaffirmation of marriage as the gold standard for relationships, and — golly — a renewed stigma applied to divorce.

Which is brave. For the past 50 years or so the divorce rate has been rising. The reality is that divorce, like love, is all around, and there is no such thing as a normal, nuclear family any more. The idea of staying “unhappily married” for form’s sake lost traction years ago: Relate, the relationship-counselling agency, and Kelly Musick, the co-author of the study Are Both Parents Always Better Than One?, are agreed — staying together just for the sake of the children when you can’t stand the sight of the other isn’t invariably the right thing to do. For lots of people (my parents, for example) divorce was, is and will continue to be the best option available.

So, I have to confess, a small part of me wonders if Sir Paul — the judge who presided over the divorce of Sir Paul and Lady Mucca — is suffering from a loss of perspective. Could it be that as a result of his work (which includes divvying up the assets of the super-rich, and continuous exposure to wretchedly warring couples) he has developed a rather jaundiced view of marriage, of grown-ups playing “pass the partner” and musical beds and breaking society as they go?

And the answer is that I don’t think he is. He is simply telling it as he sees it. For when Sir Paul invited the BBC into the family courts, it turns out the corporation’s hacks were stunned by the panorama of human misery that lay before them. The resulting two-part documentary on family breakdown in Britain has been deemed too “dark” for peak-time viewing, and will be shoved into an 11.20pm slot instead.

Even if Coleridge had a palate-cleansing few months as a commercial lawyer, or libel judge, he’d still feel the same and I’d still agree with him: divorce has its place, but it also efficiently cascades misery down the generations, and marriage should be restored as the gold standard of relationships.

Look at Denis and Edna Healey, and the Queen and her consort. We admire them for their long years of devotion and duty. We sneakily think the Prince and Princess of Wales let the side down, and in our hearts we hope Katie and Peter will patch it up. Marriage is bloody hard. Harder than work or children. Harder than swapping husband A for husband B or C (when compared with the ups and downs of decades of wedlock, the latter is a teddy bears’ picnic).

It’s hard because we get married for love and ourselves, but we stay married for others too. And that’s as it should be.

It's definitely time for the end of maybes

So many of the difficulties of life are down to commitment-phobia. David Miliband just isn’t that into the cabinet. The housing market is in stasis because no one dares to sell or buy, women can’t have babies because men aren’t “ready yet” — and I haven’t even got on to the endemic lack of social commitment.

Failing to RSVP, for example. I’m always hearing hostesses wailing that their supposedly dearest friends can’t be bothered to do them the courtesy of responding to invitations or follow-up e-mails/texts politely inquiring as to whether the invitee is going to grace the occasion with their presence.

I hate this sort of sloppy behaviour. It’s too like Facebook for my liking. On Facebook, when you invite people to something, “friends” can answer yes, no or maybe. I’m not making this up. Maybe? How does that work? We all need to (expletive redacted) or get off the pot.

rachel.johnson@sunday-times.co.uk

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