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Monday, Oct 6, 2008
Forget losing weight. For 2000, a vast number of British couples resolved to lose something else.
Jan 21, 2000 | Forget quitting smoking. Forget losing weight. This year, a vast number of Britons at the dawn of the millennium resolved to lose something else -- their spouses.
They're calling it "clean slate syndrome."
Divorce lawyers in particular -- but marriage counselors as well -- say that they've been inundated with calls from disenchanted spouses since New Year's Day. These callers see the new millennium as the perfect time to either question, or to end, their not-quite-so-perfect relationships.
Celebrity couples, too, greeted the New Year by kissing their spouses goodbye. The former Spice Girl Melanie Brown, better known as Scary Spice, announced that her marriage to the Dutch dancer Jimmy Gulzar was ending -- 15 months after they took their vows. (In the United States, Ted Turner and Jane Fonda announced their separation on CNN's Web site this month following eight years of marriage.)
Vanessa Lloyd Platts, of matrimonial law specialists Lloyd Platts & Co., calls it "matrimonial millennium madness."
"We have a flu epidemic in Britain, but we also have a [divorce] epidemic. If people continue to call us as they are now, there won't be anyone left to get a divorce in 10 years," she said.
Since New Year's Day, her firm has received more calls than ever before -- a volume so daunting that it's been forced to turn clients away. Counseling agencies, too, have reported a flood of calls from disillusioned spouses eager to leave their mates -- and supposedly all their troubles -- behind.
Counselors at Britain's largest relationship help line, the Samaritans, said they were so swamped with calls between Christmas and New Year's that they beat last year's record of 124,000 calls during the same period. Many of this year's callers indicated that they had planned to get divorced once the holidays were over.
The consensus among counselors was that many couples put too much pressure on themselves to have a fantastically good time together on New Year's Eve. They built New Year's Eve up to be a night of revelry, unrivaled romance and -- the piece de resistance -- unbelievably great sex. But lots of couples woke up with a severe relationship hangover. Nothing had been as good as it was supposed to have been.
"Couples woke up and started to wonder whether their relationship was really a solid one," said Judy Cunnington, director of London Marriage Guidance. "Then they started to wonder whether they wanted to spend another year like the last one."
Symptoms of clean slate syndrome have been spotted in at least some parts of the United States as well.
"I couldn't get anything done this past week because people constantly have been calling or e-mailing me. These are all people who are upset that their husband or wife has just left them. They don't know what to do about it," said Diane Sollee, founder of the Washington-based Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education, who says that she normally receives only one or two calls a month from abandoned spouses.
Certainly, the number of marriages and divorces in any given country are prone to fluctuate with the seasons and the social tides. But marriage advocates argue that Britons' sudden keen interest in divorce is particularly alarming since it comes on the heels of a long-term decline in the number of weddings here. At the same time, divorces have been creeping upwards: Last year, an estimated 167,000 couples divorced in Britain, compared with 155,332 in 1994. More people divorce each year in Britain than in any other country in Europe except Belgium.
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