Zoe* was on a night out with her friends during her first year of university, when her mother phoned her at 2am in deep distress. She said she needed to talk to Zoe immediately, and was driving from the family home in Liverpool to Zoe’s halls of residence in Manchester. When she arrived at the halls, she explained that she’d just found out her husband – Zoe’s father – had had an affair. “It was a complete and utter shock,” says Zoe. “I had had a happy childhood and everything had seemed hunky dory. I had put my parents’ relationship on a pedestal, they seemed to have the perfect marriage, and never really used to argue. Then, when I went off to uni, the whole family unit broke down.”
Zoe’s parents – in their mid-forties at the time of the affair – had been married for over 20 years and together since they were 16. She and her brother had both moved out of home.
The marriage did not survive the infidelity. Zoe’s father went on to marry the colleague he had the affair with, and have a child with her. “I was always much closer to my dad than my mum,” says Zoe, who is now 45, and is married with her own children. “He was around more, a very hands-on, amazing father to me. But our relationship changed dramatically when my parents separated, and I’m now much much closer to my mum. It really impacted my relationship with my dad, and my mum was in a terrible emotional state for a long time.”
New data from the Office for National Statistics show more than a quarter of all divorces between opposite-sex couples now happen after two decades – or longer – of marriage. Experts point to couples staying together, despite being unhappy, for the sake of their children as a major reason. So many marriages end when the children move out that the phenomenon has been called “the A-level divorce”.
Sital Fontenelle is a family lawyer at Kingsley Napley. “Divorce is happening more in one’s forties and beyond, after decades of marriage,” she says, “because women tend to have greater financial independence than they used to, so they have more choice. There’s less stigma around older women getting divorced, we’re all living longer, and what tends to happen is that couples reassess their priorities once the children begin to get older or leave home. They may look at each other and say, ‘We’ve got potentially 30 more years together. Can we endure that?'”
The impact of divorce on children has been long discussed by lawyers and psychologists – so is it harder or easier if it happens when they grow up? “Sometimes, I think it can be harder for 20-year-olds,” says Fontenelle, “because you don’t have the life experience, but you’re treated like an adult. You may also be a part of adult conversations and not necessarily protected from the conflict in the same way you would be if you’re a seven or eight-year-old. At a younger age, you may also be in bed when the difficult conversations happen, and although children pick up on tension easily, depending on how the parents are handling things, a child might not really know what’s going on, or what an affair is.”
Recently, TV presenters Tess Daly and Vernon Kay announced their separation after 22 years of marriage (their eldest child is 22 years old), actor Hugh Bonneville and Lulu Williams split in 2023 after 25 years, Colin Firth and Livia Giuggioli after 22 years, and in 2017, The Great British Bake Off‘s Paul Hollywood and his wife Alex got a divorce after exactly 20 years of marriage, after which Hollywood married his new wife Melissa Spalding in 2023. His 21-year-old son from his first marriage did not attend the wedding.
Fontenelle regularly sees her older clients face conflict with their grown-up children during divorce proceedings. “I had a client recently who had a really difficult day in court with her former husband, but then they both had to go to a celebratory dinner for her older child and sit there together. The adult children said they didn’t want to hear about the court proceedings, and so for my client, who was used to talking to her daughter about everything, she found this huge turmoil in her life was off limits.”
Then, there’s the issue of whether an adult child feels compelled to take a side. “When you’re older, you’ll likely hear two competing versions,” says Fontenelle. “You might even be called to give advice, or be a shoulder to cry on.” A situation she often comes across is a stay-at-home mother who might have given up her career to bring up the children, and isn’t fully aware of the household finances, because that wasn’t her domain. “She’s left in a vulnerable situation,” says Fontenelle, “where she’s really reliant on the adult kids, and then the adult children can’t maintain a relationship with the father because they feel their mother has been so badly treated”.
Zoe feels that her family, which had seemed so harmonious and loving all her childhood, became complicated – and remains so, over 20 years on from the divorce. Does she think that her and her brother leaving home was the catalyst for the breakdown of her parents’ marriage? “While it seemed to me as a child they had the perfect relationship,” says Zoe, “it became clear after their separation that there were a lot of flaws in their marriage, we’d been shielded from as children. But I do also wonder if when we left, my dad felt lost because he didn’t have his kids at home anymore, and he was so involved in raising me and my brother, that this element of his life had gone. Perhaps that’s why he went and did it all again with someone new.”
As well as impacting her relationship with her father, the divorce caused Zoe to question the very idea of a romantic partnership. “I began to think, ‘Well, how do you know that that person is the one? How do you know if that’s someone you want to spend the rest of your life with? It was a big shift because I’d always thought as a child that the idea of marriage was so idyllic.”
When the children are grown-up, custody won’t be an issue in the divorce, but they can still be impacted by what the court decides about money and property. Subecca Sheikh, a solicitor at Stowe Family Law, says that parents may be forced to sell the family home to allow them to have their own property. “This is something that can impact older children,” says Sheikh, “because they no longer have that childhood home to come back to from uni, or their house-share in another city. You’re adults, but you don’t have that security, and family home base to go back to.”
For all the difficulty and damage that divorce can do, Sheikh says every family she works with is so different. “Many adult children want to overall simply support their parents, and their happiness, and see that being apart is better for everyone.”
For Lara*, a 36-year-old secondary school teacher in Bristol, her parents’ splitting up when she was 23 was tough, but also a relief. “They hadn’t seemed to be in love for a long time,” she says. “There was a strange tension at home during my teenage years, so much unsaid. My sister and I were both living away from home by the time they split, and honestly, once the dust settled, it made our life easier as we could visit them separately.”
Over time, Lara’s parents became friends.
“They now live within half an hour’s walk of each other. I think it helps that there was no third party involved in the split – they just weren’t suited to each other, but once they had kids they felt they should stick it out. We all have Christmases together some years, which is lovely for my kids. My dad’s new wife gets on fine with my mum, and it’s all surprisingly ok. I wish I could have had happily married parents, but that wasn’t the reality, and in some ways I wish they’d broken up when we were younger, as maybe the atmosphere at home would have been nicer, and less tense. But I also understand, now I have my own kids, how painful it could be after a divorce not to see your children every day, to worry about the instability you might create.” Lara also suspects her parents thought they hid their unhappiness better than they did. “Kids are clever,” she says. “They pick up on so much more than adults realise.”
Divorce can be tough on a child, or adult, of any age, and experts tend to agree that the real damage occurs in high-conflict situations. “Whether a child is 20 or four,” says Fontenelle, “humans are pretty resilient, and a bit of turmoil in a divorce over house moves, and seeing a few arguments isn’t great, but they’ll likely be ok. It’s actually the conflict that does damage, and you can be living together under one household, and children can be exposed to conflict and damage that way, or the child could be exposed to considerable damage and conflict after a separation. Divorce is not easy, but it’s not about divorce itself – it’s about minimising conflict and acrimony, whether or not you’re ‘staying together for the kids.'”
*Names have been changed