As if the emotional pain is not enough, most modern divorces dissolve into dreadful fights about money and possessions. A recent study revealed that British divorce courts are now dealing with couples so petty they even squabble over Air Miles and Tesco Clubcard points. Here, seven divorced writers reveal which treasured mementoes they salvaged from their broken marriages...
A box of battered love songs
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown married Shiraz, an academic, in London in 1972 and they divorced in 1990. She lives in London with her second husband, Colin.
We were both young exiles from Uganda when we wed. Imagine that - having to settle into a new land and new marriage. It made us intensely close and completely reliant on each other.
Then after 20 years it was over. He was in such a hurry to leave and to move in with his lover that he left behind our precious vinyl collection. Really, it was the soundtrack to our marriage - sweet moments, small tragedies, the birth of our boy.
I listen to the records sometimes, now bumpy and scratched, and remember how he taught me to carefully wipe each before putting it on the turntable. He bought me all the Fleetwood Mac LPs. On one of the covers he drew a heart and a question mark - a Valentine’s Day present. When I was pregnant, the girl’s name we chose was”Rhiannon”, the title of a song by Stevie Nicks, one of the lead vocalists in the band. I had a bonnie son for whom we had no pop song name. Luckily for him.
The break-up and betrayal was agonising, the divorce bitter, and we have not spoken for years. I remarried a tender, handsome Englishman, had a daughter, rebuilt my life. But I will never forget my first husband and father of my firstborn.
You can’t erase old love, it squats in the heart. My 18-year-old daughter now listens to Fleetwood Mac and sometimes I sing along and my eyes still well up.
Two very posh decanters
Journalist and author Liz Hodgkinson, 67, married journalist Neville in Cambridge in 1965 and divorced in 1989. Liz is now single and lives in Oxfordshire.
It was the decanters, really, that brought us together. When I first visited my new boyfriend in his incredibly grotty student flat in the early Sixties, there they were, gleaming, incongruous, and expensive.
They were lead crystal, and accompanied by 12 delicate port and sherry glasses.
Whatever were they doing in this dismal bedsit? The 18-year-old lad explained that he had won them in a golf match, beating far older, more experienced players.
There’s more to this boy than meets the eye, I thought, and, before long, we (and the decanters) were an item. At the age of 21 we married, and none of our wedding presents even came close to matching the glamour of the decanter set.
They graced our first dingy home and, as we moved up the property ladder and progressed from young Bohemianism to respectable middle age, the decanters held pride of place.
They always seemed to symbolise some kind of unattainable grandeur, and we struggled to find homes and decor worthy of them.
Over the years, the glasses gradually broke, but nothing, it seemed, could destroy the decanters. They remained together on our various sideboards, far more solid and permanent, as it turned out, than the marriage, which fell apart in the Eighties.
When we decided to divorce, I said I would like the decanters, even though they were not actually mine. Surprisingly, my husband agreed.
Homes, relationships, children, pets, jobs, have come and gone, but for nearly 50 years now I’ve been wedded to the decanters, the only constants in my adult life.
My broken heart
Arts critic Cosmo Landesman, 57, married Maxine in 2002 in London. They divorced in 2006. Cosmo is in a relationship and lives in London.
In 2002 I met a beautiful, funny girl and fell in love with her. We got married that year, and I thought I was the luckiest man in the world. Then when we weren’t looking, our love died and in 2006 we got a divorce.
Most couples have at least one thing they bicker over when they break up: an old record, a rare book, a silly sentimental thing that means a lot to one or the other.
The only thing I wanted to keep was the one thing I couldn’t have: her. So I let her have the furniture, the books, the records, the photographs and the wedding videos.
The only thing I managed to salvage from the wreckage of our marriage was my broken heart.
And that’s fine with me. Things aren’t worth fighting over, but love is. My fight wasn’t with my ex, but myself.
I had to fight my own anger. I needed to keep the poison of divorce from entering my heart and killing my happy memories and most important of all my potential for love.
Divorce can make you so hard and cynical that you tell yourself you’ll never fall in love again or get married. Not me. I refused to let my belief in true love die with the death of my marriage.
A year ago I gave that old heart of mine to someone else. It’s a bit battered and a touch bruised, but now that I’ve found love again it beats louder than ever before.
Sweetie the cat
Journalist Liz Jones, 52, married writer Nirpal in Somerset in 2003. They divorced in 2007. She’s in a relationship and lives alone in Somerset.
My husband moved out while I was on holiday. When I got back, he had taken his sportswear, my Talvin Singh CD, which I’m still cross about, and most of his books, leaving yawning gaps on the shelves. He left a lot of philosophy, economics and poetry books, which ensures guests assume I’m cleverer than I really am.
But what I was most relieved about is that he left Sweetie behind.
A few Christmases ago, I spent the holidays cleaning out cages in a cat home. Celia Hammond, who runs the place, kept telling me about a kitten who had been knocked about by her owners, who’d broken her tooth.
I told Celia I already had three cats, and couldn’t cope with a fourth as my marriage was rocky.”But she’s so special,” Celia said.
Being the matchmaker she is, Celia phoned my husband. He went to see the kitten, fell in love, and brought her home. So from then on she was his cat.
She didn’t really like being his cat, as he kept cradling her like a baby, while I believe picking cats up abuses their civil rights. I think the abuse affected her brain, as she’s very clumsy. Once, she fell in our pond, sank to the bottom, and smelt fishy for two weeks. Her favourite thing is to collect a moth, hold it carefully in her teeth, and release it into my hair.
My husband loved her more than he loved me, and so it must have been hard to leave her. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to fight me for custody, as he knows what my animals mean to me. So every time I look at Sweetie, and stroke her tail to make her chirrup, she reminds me of his soft heart, and how she glued us together for a while.
A wise old wooden Buddha
Author Wendy Leigh, 56, married sales executive Steve in 1985 in California. They divorced in 2000. Wendy lives alone in London.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was high noon for my passionate, romantic second marriage to an American close to my age and as in love with me as I was with him. We were living in London when we saw the Buddha, gracing the window of an antique shop in Walton Street, Chelsea, and knew that he was ours, no matter what the price.
So we took him home to our elegant flat, where he presided over our idyllic life of long-drawn-out dinner parties, lingering Sunday lunches, and blissful evenings when we would luxuriate in our grand amour, our exquisitely happy marriage.
I was writing a book at the time, a biography of Arnold Schwarzenegger, and my husband was working with me, chaperoning me to seedy gyms where I interviewed people about Arnold.
Along the way, I received death threats from people not far removed from Arnold. We took security advice, were constantly on our guard, yet always felt safe and protected because our Buddha was watching over us.
He was with us when we moved back to America, to Palm Beach, then to Miami. And as our marriage downward-spiralled, he remained part of our lives. After our divorce, he became mine. Today, he is with me, in London, watching over my life still, with wisdom, serenity and a shard of nostalgia for what was, and what might have been.
A pine dresser full of memories
Journalist Rachel Royce, 49, married Rod Liddle in 2004 in Malaysia. They had two sons and then divorced in 2007. Rachel is single and lives in East Finchley, London.
My husband was so desperate to get away, he walked out of the door with just the clothes he was standing up in. But over the years he gradually reclaimed his chattels until very little that reminds me of him remained.
There is really only one item that we bought together that is still in my possession. It is an old pine dresser - rather tatty, but sweet.
I vividly remember the day we bought it. We had just purchased our first and only home together - an old townhouse in Wiltshire. Our second baby was a month old. We contemplated a trip to Ikea in Bristol to buy some furniture, but felt we couldn’t cope - it was a long way, a very busy road, and the last time I’d been to Ikea I went into labour. So we decided to buy what we needed from the second hand stores in Frome, Somerset.
What a magical afternoon we spent, pottering around the steep cobbled streets, darting in and out of cluttered shops, haggling over prices, until we found just what we wanted. It sat in our sunny garden room next to the kitchen, where we ate our family meals for the next four years.
Now I live with our two sons in London in a dingy rented flat. Most of my furniture from Wiltshire is gone but I still have the little dresser we chose that day.
It’s a reminder of a different era of my life, a reminder of domesticity and family life with my husband and a lovely day out when it seemed like we were happy and life was going well.
The ugliest clock in the world
Former actress, now property developer Fiona Fullerton, 54, was married to actor Simon MacCorkindale in 1976 when she was just 19. They divorced after five years and in 1994 she wed Neil Shackell, a computer marketing executive, with whom she has a daughter, Lucy, 15.
Put simply, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to keep any memento from a marriage where one has been dumped for another woman.
He was, admittedly, quite generous on the jewellery front - but when I discovered that emeralds were supposed to bring you bad luck, I took everything down to Bond Street and flogged the lot.
Being of the out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of woman, it made it easier for me to erase all evidence of my knight errant, except for the porcelain clock we bought in Dresden. It sat there, staring at me, not telling me the time, because the silly twiddly key that I had to poke into its face every week to wind it up wouldn’t twiddle any more.
An over-the-top rococo clock, in Burgundy porcelain with lots of gold curly bits, standing proudly on four little legs, is exactly what a girl wants as a memento of a marriage that went quickly pear-shaped. It stubbornly refused to leave the mantelpiece where he had placed it and was often, to my chagrin, commented on favourably by visitors to my inner sanctum. Every time I dusted it I felt the bile rising in my throat - but I couldn’t let it go.
It followed me up the property ladder, stuck at ten to two until suddenly, 13 years later, inexplicably, I took it outside into the courtyard and with enormous force smashed it to smithereens. The following week I met Mr Wonderful and we have been married for 17 years. - Daily Mail