Curiously, despite their respective choices to initiate divorce, both Adele and Honor Jones were insecure about their decisions. “I’m still not fully over it — of me choosing to dismantle my child’s life for my own. It makes me very uncomfortable,” Adele told Oprah. “By breaking up our family,” writes Jones, “I’d taken something from my kids that they were never going to get back. Naturally, I thought about this a lot.” Still, Adele consoled herself with the thought that her son, Angelo, as an adult, “would be livid” with her for not putting her own happiness before his. Jones also looks for a silver lining: “There was nothing I could give them” — her children – “to make up for it, except, maybe, a way of being in the world: of being open to it, and open in it.”

Not every divorcée is so optimistic. Rod Liddle, a columnist for The Spectator, writes that the consequence of normalizing divorce is that we have much more of it, “with all the anguish, bitterness and economic deprivation which almost always follows, not to mention the huge damage inflicted on the children.” This damage is proven by longitudinal social studies, which demonstrate much poorer outcomes for children raised by single parents.