Our Surrey Consultant Solicitor, Lewis Hulatt of Major Family Law, the niche specialist divorce and family law solicitors, says:
You will not be surprised to hear that I saw Jethro Tull perform “Living in the Past”: after all, if I was “too old to rock n roll, too young to die(t)” it almost goes without saying. The ‘t’ came later. As a guy who saw Lindisfarne, back with Alan Hull, you might expect me to be a bit ‘retro’ were it not that I am a consultant for Major Family Law. The past is what the present was after it stopped being the future.
Which brings me to this week’s thought.
How much do couples live in the present? Obviously, ‘100%’ is the technical answer, but I can remember being somewhat outraged when my wife and I sat in a restaurant and seemed the only people either interested in either the food or having a conversation with each other. It is not that I am a luddite – during that trip I had an email from the Pope confirming that I could visit the Vatican Museum – you may doubt that, but ‘Frankie’ seems truly humble and who is to say that he did not press ‘send’ when I emailed seeking tickets using hotel wi-fi that evening? Does he seem too proud to have been putting in a shift dealing with museum tickets? I don’t think so! Anyhow, possessed of Papal-blessed e-tickets or not, I really felt for the chef. He was new and working hard to impress the diners, yet looking round the room almost nobody was paying attention to the food – they were all engrossed in their phones, tablets and laptops. When I saw couples exclusively attending to their electronica rather than each other, I was disappointed.
Divorces have moved on from having their roots in the dormant baggage that ‘Friends Reunited’ enabled them to unzip, to having problems on Facebook, but that is not the limit of the damage that can be caused by undisciplined IT use. It does not need somebody to be ‘sexting’ for IT to be a problem – a couple of years ago, I did a divorce where the main problem had been that the guy cared more about ‘levelling up’ in his game than his wife moving on to giving another guy unscreened ‘face-time’. They remained buddies, just not…
At MFL, we understand if the wife is an ‘Angry Bird’ or the husband merely a ‘Max Payne’.