Guy and Heather: a lot to answer for

Before breakfast today, will you be devoting any time to developing your sexual expressiveness? No? How about working to enrich your wife's emotional and spiritual well-being? Not on your list? But surely you'll be resolving any conflicts in a constructive way? And focusing on remembering never to shout at your wife, but instead to look her in the eye and state calmly: "I understand that my actions have upset you. Please work with me to resolve this"? No, no and no? Well, never mind. It turns out that all of this didn't work for Madonna and Guy in the end, so perhaps it might be just as well to give it a miss.

Once upon a time, a couple who married entered into a solemn promise to love, cherish and, for the bride, to obey. Well, times are changing and, according to the latest leaks from the Ritchie camp, Madonna's demands were rather more specific than that. In a "marriage contract" drawn up two years ago, when they sought counselling, and pinned to a wall in their New York home, Guy vowed to "set aside time to read Kabbalah texts with his wife" and the couple swore "never to use sex as a stick to beat each other with". Some might say that the chance would have been a fine thing, with their being in different continents so much of the time. But we must conclude that using sex as a stick to beat each other with is not supposed to be better than never using it at all.

According to the latest dispatches from the marital front line, Madonna and Guy did well to make it as far as they did. They struggled through more than seven years of Reading Kabbalah, Being Understanding and Not Shouting. A survey by the research group OnePoll found most people seem to give up much sooner than that. The honeymoon period is officially over, they discovered, after two years, six months and 25 days: men leave the seat up, bogard the remote and leave dirty socks wherever they happen to drop them; women stop wearing make-up and never bother about trying to look nice. No wonder 83 per cent of couples don't even celebrate their third and subsequent wedding anniversaries at all.

But in one respect, bog-standard British relationships are emulating the whirlwind celebrity love affairs we're so obviously in awe of – and it's not that we've all started buying the pubs we roll home drunk from. The family law firm Seddons has revealed that the number of people inquiring about pre-nuptial agreements has risen by 50 per cent in the past 12 months. Guy Ritchie and Heather Mills really do have a lot to answer for.

If pre-nuptial agreements can "reduce the financial and emotional costs of a divorce", and mid-marital contracts can help a union limp on a few more years, perhaps they could be combined to suit these turbulent times. We would promise to love and cherish, in sickness and in health, in the gym and out of it, forsaking all African orphans, however adorable, until a handsome basketball player do us part. And never to leave socks on the floor. Even after two and a half years.