The first time I came face to face with a great white shark, it was dead. I had caught it in my net. And I was so happy. I thought: I can bring a fortune back to my village. I can feed my family. I’m Malagasy – I come from Andavadoaka, a small fishing village on the south-west coast of Madagascar. It is a very dry place where no crops can grow. The name of my tribe, Vezo, means people who live off the ocean, but also people who survive it. Because we rely on it.

I became a shark fisher when I was 16 years old. I dropped out of school because my parents couldn’t afford to support me any more, and followed my uncle into fishing so I could bring some money back to my family. I didn’t see a shark as a magnificent creature. My mindset was: make money, kill, make money, kill. Support my family.

I caught the great white when I was 18 years old. We were in shark territory, 15km offshore and decided to pull in our net because the weather was getting really bad. We couldn’t see what was inside because the net was too deep. Then one of my crew put on a diving mask, saw the shark and shouted.

I put my life in danger to bring that shark home. It was the most terrifying thing I have ever done. It was 4 metres (13ft) long and weighed about 400kg. My boat was 6 metres long, with a 4-metre sail.

The weather was very stormy, lots of wind and heavy rain, and the weight of the shark meant that I had to sink the boat to the surface level of the ocean to get it onboard. We had no radio, no mobile phones, no engine. It took us five hours to sail back to shore. I shared half the meat with my community, and sold the rest for $120 (£90).

For five years, I used to kill up to 50 sharks a day – although on a bad day it was more like three. What made me stop was my brother. He began working with Blue Ventures, a British conservation NGO, to educate the people in my village about sharks. He made me reflect on my work and helped me get a new job, as a shark fishing data collector for Frances Humber, a conservationist with the NGO. I didn’t make good money, but I learned English and about marine life conservation.

The more I learned about sharks and the important role they play in balancing our marine ecosystem and ensuring my own family has enough fish to eat, the more they fascinated me. So I put my life in danger again, this time to help conservationists document overfishing and expose the shark fin trade in Madagascar. I helped a US reporter, Isobel Yeung, go undercover and film a large Chinese warehouse of shark fins with a hidden camera, and more recently I myself filmed a huge industrial fishing vessel that had about 4,000 dead sharks onboard.

It was heartbreaking. My community could eat for two months from what just one of those boats catches in our waters and takes to China.

I became a conservation and wildlife film-maker and photographer because I realised that making films and documentaries is one of the key ways we can protect sharks. It allows me to raise awareness about how beautiful these creatures are – and what is happening to them in our oceans.

I had the best dive of my life recently, filming whale sharks. When I got into the water, nine of them congregated around me, feeding on small plankton. Each was large enough to kill me but they are among the most gentle animals in the ocean.

I cannot describe how happy I was that day, down there with those sharks, witnessing the thriving marine life of the ocean. When I’m 90, I will still tell my child about it. I wanted to stay in that water, for ever.

As told to Donna Ferguson

At least six people have died and 10 others are missing after heavy rain triggered flooding and landslides along a peninsula in Japan that is still recovering from a deadly earthquake at the start of the year.

Public broadcaster NHK and other outlets said on Monday that six people had been confirmed dead, while the Kyodo news agency said more than 100 communities had been cut off by blocked roads after almost two dozen rivers burst their banks.

Two of the deaths occurred near a landslide-hit tunnel in the city of Wajima, Ishikawa prefecture, which was undergoing repairs after being damaged in the New Year’s Day earthquake.

Elsewhere in Ishikawa, two people were missing after being swept away and eight others were unaccounted for, Kyodo added.

Rainfall in Wajima and the nearby city of Suzu reached twice the levels for September in an average year. Japan’s meteorological agency has downgraded its “special warnings” for the area to “warnings”, but advised residents to remain vigilant.

The prime minister, Fumio Kishida, has instructed officials to monitor the damage and cooperate with local authorities as the region was still in the process of recovering from January’s earthquake when the rain, caused by an extratropical depression, arrived.

Heavy rain pounded Ishikawa from Saturday, with more than 540 millimetres (21 inches) recorded in the city of Wajima over 72 hours, the heaviest continuous rain since comparative data became available.

The region is still reeling from a magnitude-7.5 quake at the start of the year, which toppled buildings, triggered tsunami waves and sparked a major fire.

Flood waters inundated emergency housing built for those who had lost their homes in the New Year’s Day quake, which killed at least 374 people, according to Ishikawa government figures.

On Monday, 4,000 households were left without power after the rain, according to the Hokuriku Electric Power Company.

Akemi Yamashita, a 54-year-old Wajima resident, said she had been driving on Saturday when “within only 30 minutes or so, water gushed into the street and quickly rose to half the height of my car”.

“I was talking to other residents of Wajima yesterday, and they said, ‘it’s so heart-breaking to live in this city’. I got teary when I heard that,” she said, describing the earthquake and floods as “like something from a movie”.

In Wajima on Sunday, splintered branches and a huge uprooted tree piled up at a bridge over a river where the raging brown waters almost reached ground level.

Military personnel were sent to the Ishikawa region to join rescue workers over the weekend, as tens of thousands of residents were urged to evacuate.

Scientists say human-driven climate change is intensifying the risk posed by heavy rains because a warmer atmosphere holds more water.

The areas under the emergency warning saw “heavy rain of unprecedented levels”, JMA forecaster Satoshi Sugimoto said on Saturday, adding: “It is a situation in which you have to secure your safety immediately”.

With Agence France-Presse

Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus has married his partner in a ceremony officiated by the TV presenter Sandi Toksvig.

The 79-year-old Swedish singer, who has been married twice before, met Christina Sas in Nuremberg, Germany, in 2021 in connection with the release of Abba’s latest album Voyage.

A post to his Instagram page said: “Today on the 21st of September 2024, Björn Ulvaeus married Christina Sas from Herning, Denmark. They met in Nurnberg in 2021 in connection with the release of Abba’s last album Voyage and started dating in the spring of 2022.

“The wedding took place in Copenhagen in the presence of close friends and family. Sandi Toksvig, Anne Linnet and Kaya Brüel generously performed and made the evening extra special.”

Ulvaeus posted photos from the day, one of which shows former Great British Bake Off host Toksvig dressed in a red robe. The presenter is standing next to Ulvaeus, wearing a suit, and his wife, wearing a muted green wrap dress.

Representatives for Ulvaeus confirmed to the PA news agency that Toksvig had held the ceremony.

Ulvaeus is known for being one-quarter of Swedish pop group Abba, who this year celebrated 50 years since they won the Eurovision song contest with Waterloo.

The group originally comprised two couples – Ulvaeus and Agnetha Fältskog, and Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad. Fältskog and Ulvaeus, who married in 1971, divorced in 1980, while Andersson and Lyngstad divorced in 1981 – a year before the band split.

The quartet did not reform to perform at Eurovision this year despite the event being held in Sweden after Loreen won the competition in 2023 with her hit single Tattoo. Ulvaeus was also previously married to Lena Kallersjö.

Kamala Harris laid down another challenge to Republican rival Donald Trump to meet her for a second debate before November’s presidential election, telling supporters in New York that her opponent “seems to be looking for an excuse” to avoid a second confrontation.

On Saturday, the vice-president and Democratic nominee said she had accepted an invitation from CNN to debate the former president, but Trump said it was already “too late”.

In her remarks at a New York fundraiser, Harris doubled down in her taunting of Trump over the issue, saying: “I think we should have another debate.”

“I accepted an invitation to debate in October, which my opponent seems to be looking for an excuse to avoid when he should accept,” she added. “He should accept because I feel very strongly that we owe it to the American people, to the voters, to meet once more before election day.”

The question of the US’s high stakes presidential debates has hung over the candidates since Joe Biden dropped out of the race following a disastrous performance in June. The single scheduled debate between Trump and Harris, earlier this month, was widely viewed to have gone Harris’s way and been a serious blow to Trump.

But it did not move the polls as much as the Harris campaign hoped and her campaign is still tasked with introducing her to US voters. Last week, Harris went on Oprah to help smooth the introduction along.

This week Harris is due to reveal a set of new economic policies. Polls show she is steadily gaining trust on the key issue of the economy, which often favors Trump and the Republican party.

On Sunday, Harris returned to the key themes of the message Democrats wish to underline – a threat to democracy they perceive a second Trump terms represents and the knife-edge that polls suggest the race remains balanced upon.

“This is a man who said he would be a dictator on day one … just imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails,” Harris said in New York. “This race is as close as it could be. This is a margin of error race … and I am running and we are running as the underdog.”

Harris called Trump an “unserious man”, but said the consequences of putting him back in the White House were “very serious”.

Head-to-head polls tend to show Harris with a narrow but solid lead over Trump, though the situation is more mixed in the crucial swing states that will decide the race to the White House. That is a reverse of the situation when Biden was in the race, where Trump had established a firm lead over the US president.

Russia was left badly isolated at a high-profile UN summit in New York when it made a surprise move to derail an ambitious pact designed to revive the UN – and failed.

Russia’s move to defer adoption of the agreement on the grounds that it supposedly represented western interests was rejected on Sunday by 143 votes to seven with 15 abstentions.

The Russian delegation said that if the planned vote endorsing the high-profile “pact for the future” were not deferred pending further talks, it would seek to move an amendment asserting the key issues addressed in the pact are the subject of domestic jurisdiction in which the UN should not seek to intervene.

But the overwhelming UN general assembly vote threw out Russia’s call for deferment and its amendment.

The Russian move, at the outset of the two-day “summit for the future”, looked diplomatically clumsy, if perhaps designed for domestic consumption. It angered speakers from the African Union (AU) and Mexico, underlining that Moscow had only limited support, notably from Belarus, Venezuela, Syria and Iran.

The AU, led by the Democratic Republic of Congo, called for the Russian amendment to be rejected.

The pact is seen by many in the global south as both a well-intended and necessary collective effort at UN renewal as well as a personal legacy for a relatively popular UN secretary general António Guterres.

But the controversy underlined the extent to which ideological divisions have damaged multilateral cooperation at the UN, the very issue that the pact was seeking to address.

Russia objected to 25 provisions in the draft pact, including asserting the primacy of national jurisdiction and rejecting language on universal access to sexual and reproductive health rights, as well as gender empowerment more broadly.

With the Russian move crushed, Guterres told the summit that the pact’s aim was “to bring multilateralism back from the brink at a time when the world [is] heading off the rails”. Twenty-first-century challenges – from debt in developing countries to the climate crisis – required 21st-century solutions.

Graham Gordon, head of global advocacy at Christian Aid, said of the pact: “The key point of the document, given its inherent limits, is that it does provide pointers of what should be achieved in other forums including the IMF, at Cop and at the G20. The key test will be in 12 months in assessing how much momentum this provides. It is a striking document in its admission of how multilateralism is currently failing.”

Guterres had advocated for a Summit for the Future more than two years ago as an attempt to persuade world leaders in the wake of the global Covid outbreak that cooperation and multilateralism had to be revived.

The pact, spanning 26 pages and 56 recommendations, says it is offering a new beginning for multilateralism and repeatedly asserts the primacy of international law. But the lack of new specifics has weakened its impact.

The document covers reform and expansion of the UN security council to make the body more representative of the 21st century, a UN role in governing artificial intelligence, the phasing out of fossil fuels in energy systems, reform of multilateral financial institutions, a recommitment to full nuclear disarmament and modernising UN peacekeeping so it evolves into war prevention.

Concrete ideas include a biennial UN summit on the global economy, an emergency platform for managing pandemics, food insecurity and environmental disasters, and a new UN oversight body of experts advising on the risks posed by AI for all economies.

A major sticking point was western opposition to the UN playing a role in making international financial institutions more representative. A UN-led push to include a reference to a $500bn (£375bn) stimulus to put the sustainable development goals back on track was also rejected.

At least two students at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania have been suspended from the swim team after a report that a racial slur was scratched onto a student’s body, officials said.

Officials received “a deeply concerning report of a racial slur being scratched on to a student using a plastic or ceramic tool,” officials at the liberal arts school said in a statement last week.

“This is a serious report, which is being actively assessed through the student conduct process,” the college said. “At this point, the students involved are not participating in swim team activities.”

The school declined to release further details, citing the investigation and privacy laws.

However, a family of the victim contacted the Gettysburgian last week to give more details. They said the student had the N-word cut into their chest by someone they “trusted”. The victim’s family say they consider the incident a hate crime. They also said the victim was the only person of color at the scene.

“The reprehensible act was committed by a fellow student-athlete, someone he considered his friend, someone whom he trusted. This student used a box cutter to etch the N-word across his chest,” the family told the Gettysburgian.

They added: “As we wait to discuss the decisions made by college staff, the harm continues without much relief. Media outlets (social, online, and broadcast) continue to perpetuate misinformation stemming from an act of racial animus. In the same vein, the isolation that pairs with being isolated from many in the Gettysburg College community that he had come to trust deepens the harm.

“We want to be clear that we understand that an investigation should not be rushed. We support a fair and thorough investigation. To this end, we appreciate the standardized procedures and protocols that are in place. We know that they are meant to ensure that the rights and responsibilities of all parties involved are maintained and protected.”

Gettysburg College president Robert Iuliano said he felt “profound distress about what happened” and the impact on the implications “for a community continuing its evolving efforts to create a truly inclusive environment.”

“No matter the relationship, and no matter the motivation, there is no place on this campus for words or actions that demean, degrade, or marginalize based on one’s identity and history,” he said in a statement that also cautioned against speculation “based on fragments of information that may or may not be accurate.”

The city’s police chief, Robert Glenny Jr, said he contacted the college after hearing news reports and was told the victim chose to handle the matter through the college’s internal process, despite college officials encouraging the person to take the matter to police, WGAL-TV reported.

Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, called Donald Trump “just deranged” on Sunday after he said women would no longer be thinking about abortion if he is elected as president in November.

“This guy just doesn’t understand what the average woman is confronting in her life in this country, and how could he? He’s not lived a normal life,” Whitmer said in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.

Whitmer also reaffirmed her support for Kamala Harris, describing her as a person “who has worked hourly jobs, who knows how important it is that women have healthcare and access to the medical care that they need”.

Whitmer was asked to comment about a speech the former president delivered on Saturday, saying women “will be happy, healthy, confident, and free” if he is elected president.

“He’s just deranged,” the governor of Michigan said.

On Friday, Trump made similar comments about women on his Truth Social platform.

“WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO … AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO!” Trump said.

Harris is a staunch supporter of abortion rights. The vice-president delivered two speeches on Friday, first in Georgia and then Wisconsin, highlighting the case of Amber Thurman, who died in Georgia due to a strict abortion ban.

Whitmer’s comments on Sunday come a week after participating in an online campaign event with TV host, producer and author Oprah Winfrey, which was livestreamed nationally from Michigan.

The Michigan governor was previously named as a possible candidate for the Democratic nomination for president before ruling herself out in July. Michigan is a must-win prize for candidates, a state that has voted for the presidential winner in the last four national elections.

Joe Biden took Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020. Two years later, Whitmer defeated a Trump-backed candidate and Democrats took full control for the first time in 45 years.

Four people have died and more than 20 were wounded in a shooting in a nightlife area in Birmingham, Alabama, according to police and news reports.

The violence is just the latest shocking incident that highlights the epidemic of gun violence and killings that continues to plague the US and yet prompts little to no political action.

Police said say multiple victims in the mass killing were caught in crossfire and offered an reward for information leading to the arrest of those involved.

There were multiple people shot on 20th Street near Magnolia Avenue in the Five Points South area, the Birmingham police department said in a social media post.

The shooting happened shortly after 11pm on Saturday in the city’s Five Points South entertainment district, the officer Truman Fitzgerald said in an email.

Officers arriving at the scene found two men and a woman on a sidewalk with gunshot wounds, and they were pronounced dead there. An additional male gunshot victim was pronounced dead at a hospital, Fitzgerald said.

A preliminary investigation showed that “multiple suspects fired upon a large group of people who were outside in a public area”, Fitzgerald said.

“Detectives believe the shooting was not random and stemmed from an isolated incident where multiple victims were caught in the crossfire,” Fitzgerald said.

Injured people began showing up at hospitals, Fitzgerald said. By early Sunday, police had identified 18 other victims with injuries, some of them life-threatening.

Some victims were transported to hospitals in private vehicles, police told WBMA.

The Five Points South area of Birmingham has numerous entertainment venues, restaurants and bars and often is crowded on Saturday nights.

Police said there were no immediate arrests.

“We will do everything we possibly can to make sure we uncover, identify and hunt down whoever is responsible for preying on our people this morning,” Fitzgerald told WBMA.

The US has a high rate of mass shootings, which frequently prompts public calls for more substantial gun control. But the US federal government has generally been unwilling or unable to heed those calls.

The gun rights lobby remains strong in the US and its power over politicians who try to enforce tighter gun laws is formidable.

In June the conservative-dominated supreme court struck down a federal ban on “bump stocks”, accessories which can allow a semiautomatic gun to fire as fast as a machine gun. Following the 6-3 decision Joe Biden condemned the ruling, saying it “strikes down an important gun safety regulation”.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

Society tells us that love stories should be linear, that marriage is until death us do part. We’ve learned, though, that things are often a little more complicated. The average adult may have five relationships and fall in love with three people (bad news for two of the five, then). Divorce has recently neared the 50% rate in the UK, a percentage that is now falling, mostly because fewer can afford it. Despite these statistics, we are still fed the idea that the ultimate goal is to find “the one”. Is it any wonder then, that divorce is often viewed as a failure?

We see the “success stories” of life in long love and we wince at messy divorces – what we see less is the grey area in between. A large number of couples separate and then reunify, and a surprising amount also divorce and then remarry. The term “divorce regret” has been circulating recently after golfer Rory McIlroy called his marriage off and then back on. There are the notable couples who married, then did it all over again; Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Elon Musk and his ex, British actor Talulah Riley, walked down the aisle twice, too.

There’s also Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, who were engaged in 2002, separated for nearly two decades, then finally married in June 2022, 20 years after their initial engagement. This August, after two years of marriage, they divorced.

Yet the drama of the double wedding is not only for the rich and famous. Divorce followed by reunification is relatively common, with between 10 and 15% of couples reconciling after they separate and about 6% of couples marrying each other once again. One in 10 people who divorce say they regret it at some point. On Mumsnet, a user shares that she is thinking about divorcing her husband but is terrified she’ll regret it. Many share their own regret in response (except one, who writes: “Regret yeah… Regret not doing it 10 years earlier.”)

The couples remarrying after divorce offer the idea that it is possible to come through pain, anger and mourning to reach another outcome. Take Karen and Louis Beardsworth, who met in their early 20s, had been married for more than 20 years and had two daughters by the time they divorced in 2015. After five years apart and a lot of therapy, they walked down the aisle for a second time.

“At the first wedding we had about 40 guests, at a register office in the town I grew up in. I wore a three-quarter-length cream dress,” remembers Karen. “The second time around we married in South Africa with no one there except us. The venue was a bit strange – like one of those chapels in Las Vegas. We got the giggles because they had all these soppy, romantic placards up on the walls.”

Their laughter may have acknowledged the irony that this was “take two”, but could there be something even more romantic about that fact? For their second wedding, they chose the same date as the first time around. “We thought it would be easier to remember the anniversary,” says Karen, smiling, but there was also a kind of poetry to choosing the same day, she adds, like things had come full circle. “After time apart, it felt as if we were marrying more as the people we actually are, rather than the people we thought we should be,” says Louis.

If 42% of marriages end in divorce, there is the question of why we do it to begin with, beyond the legal benefits and tax breaks. As a sex and relationships therapist with the charity Relate, Ammanda Major has spent much of her career working with relationship struggles, helping people find a way out, or through. “We get married because, mostly, it feels like the right thing to do, whether that’s due to romantic, cultural, idealised thinking or just seeking evidence of that attachment that so many of us seek,” she reflects. “Hope reigns eternal that our partner will love us always. As human beings that is a seriously compelling reason to get hitched.” The majority of people getting married believe it’s for keeps. “That’s because by then we’ve already become fully invested in the person we are marrying and hopefully them with us.”

The problems, says Major, often arise when the person we are marrying, or the marriage itself, does not meet our expectations. “Sometimes expectations of being married are so high they can’t possibly be met and so disappointment and resentment soon make themselves apparent, which then negatively impacts on the ability to work on problems effectively together.”

This was the case for Karen and Louis: “Getting married should be about two people, but it turns into a theatre – and then there are expectations that come with that,” says Louis. The marriage broke down after Louis, working as a pilot and travelling a great deal, had an affair. “I was emotionally dysfunctional, under a lot of pressure and compartmentalising my family to have relationships outside my marriage. It was a toxic cocktail,” he admits now. When she found out, Karen decided to divorce Louis, in part to send a signal to her daughters that she – and all women – deserved better.

Yet, when a marriage buckles under the weight of expectation, the script of how things should be, regret is a natural response, says Major. “People quite often have regrets about separation or experience a sense of failure, shame, sadness, a lot of ‘if only’,” she says. “We can regret a situation even though we knew it was the right one.” Regret isn’t always a bad thing, she adds. It can prompt an opportunity to look at how our needs might have changed, what could be new in our lives, or give us clarity about the past. “The challenge is sorting through these complex emotions and questions to understand whether to close a door or attempt to ease it open once more.”

When Major began her work, therapy was not as prevalent as it is today. The popular US TV show Couples Therapy airs couples’ problems – literally – as does celebrity relationship therapist Esther Perel on her hugely popular podcast. Then there’s the burgeoning industry of self-help gurus promising to help individuals rekindle with their ex (at a price). As well as the financial cost of divorce, according to Major, the rising awareness and uptake in therapy may be contributing to a fall in divorce rates.

For Karen and Louis, who accessed therapy together and then separately, talking things through with an independent party saved the relationship. In therapy, Karen established she needed independence and space to think about what she really wanted her future to look like. Louis, meanwhile, embarked on 18 months of psychotherapy. “I learned that I was not a happy person, for a bunch of reasons.” As someone raised in a very conventional background, with emotionally distant parents, Louis says he was inhibited about discussing his feelings in a way that was bad for relationships. In therapy, Karen and Louis had revelations about who they were as people, both separately and together.

In her book, Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic and the Domestic, Perel suggests that “love rests on two pillars: surrender and autonomy”. The cliché of “us against the world” may not always serve us. Growing as individuals is just as important as growing as a couple, while distance – both physical and psychological – can foster attraction to our partner when it is waning. Perel has also built her multimillion-dollar business, and credibility, by addressing the thorny issue of expectations versus reality. “Today, we turn to one person to provide what an entire village once did: a sense of grounding, meaning, and continuity,” she writes. “At the same time, we expect our committed relationships to be romantic as well as emotionally and sexually fulfilling. Is it any wonder that so many relationships crumble under the weight of it all?”

Perel’s quote resonates with Ebele, who married, divorced and then remarried her lifelong love, Rich. The couple met at a summer camp in the US as teenagers in the early 90s, and started dating. However, because Rich was younger, they decided to remain friends. When the millennium was approaching, Rich started sending gifts to Ebele, who was by then living in London. The coy courtship worked; one night, they unexpectedly slept together, moving in together that same week, and marrying just two years later. “We agreed on what marriage meant to us: not gazing into one another’s eyes all the time, but wanting our lives to be a shared adventure.”

The couple honoured these intentions as best they could; they lived separately for periods and travelled extensively before having children. Yet, starting a family complicated things: “Having kids is a joy, a blessing and a privilege, but it’s also really hard, especially the way it’s done in the west, where you’re not so much in communities with parents and aunts and uncles around.” Ebele remembers how, after she had each kid, their sex life would shut down for a time. In 2020, after 16 years as husband and wife, she felt that she and Rich had become more like friends. Their divorce was amicable. “We had a better divorce than most marriages, we lived in walking distance, were dating other people and coparenting smoothly.”

Ebele jokes that there is a “chaos phase” after divorce, something like a second youth. Then, you reach a point where you can sit with your feelings for long enough to understand them. Two realisations hit her. “A friend who is an artist said that if you have a creative gift and don’t use it or suppress it, it can eat you up inside. I remember thinking, ‘This is Rich, he was an artist, but he was always trying to do the adult thing, he wasn’t fully himself.’” Ebele was also able to recognise that the grief of her brother’s death in a racially motivated police shooting in 2018 had impacted the marriage. “Another friend said one thing that happens in grief is creating distance from the person you’re most scared of losing. No one had ever said that to me. There was a way I felt at the end of the marriage, like I’m not fighting for this, which I now recognise was about me creating distance.” Distance allowed Ebele and Rich the perspective to see that they were better off together, life had just come in the way.

Throughout the process of separation, and also reunification, Ebele noticed that, while marriage can feel insular, the people in your life always have opinions on it. Friends’ feelings were mixed. “When we divorced, people took it badly, they were devastated, said, ‘But you guys are like Black love incarnate.’ When we told them we were getting together again there was joy, some said, ‘You owe us a party’ and others said, ‘Everything about this is very you guys: slightly off,” she laughs. Karen experienced a stronger sense of judgment. “I lost two good long-term girlfriends, because I got back together with Louis. They were very judgmental. They felt I hadn’t taken their advice.”

Judgment from others piles on top of the judgments we place on ourselves when it comes to marriage and divorce. Stay together for the kids, try harder, don’t walk away. Fear of being alone also leaves people trapped in relationships, says Major, and can spur a sense of regret if we do leave. “But no matter the situation, the first bit of the problem-solving is what may have gone wrong,” the therapist explains. “People fantasise about what life would be like if they got back together again, but without understanding what didn’t work, people may find they go back into those relationships and the same problems emerge.” Bar a situation of domestic violence or abuse, where there is one person responsible, she says, usually we each have a part to play in relationship dissatisfaction.

For those experiencing divorce regret, Major offers advice on how to sort out what is missing someone, loneliness, or a genuine mistake. She believes self-reflection and, if possible, therapy can be instrumental in finding answers to these questions. “We’re social human beings – we seek connection and to be left or abandoned can have a profound toll on some people’s mental health or wellbeing.” Sitting with that, letting it settle, and also rebuilding self-worth can help people have a happy relationship going forward, she says, whoever it might be with.

While for many cheating is the final straw, for Karen, understanding the weight of expectation that marriage can bring helped her see things differently. “We label people who have affairs as terrible, but it’s an extraordinary thing to be expected to spend your life with one person. I think what I’ve learned is that people need to be honest and open about where they are at, because you look at people who are unhappy in their relationships and you think: why aren’t you changing anything?” For younger generations, she adds, there seems to be more openness and also equality. “Society has changed so much. Women are far more likely to think of themselves first and more hesitant to jump into relationships because that is what they are ‘supposed’ to do.”

Things are indeed changing, albeit slowly, agrees Major. At Relate, she and other therapists have adopted the term “multi-partner relationship therapy” to encompass the many constellations relationships can take. “People choose to live their lives now unmarried or with more than one partner, so it’s important to have a narrative that reflects how we live.”

At the Labour party conference last October Emily Thornberry committed to reforming the law on cohabiting couples to provide better protection (the outcome remains to be seen). Recently the law around divorce changed, too, points out lawyer David Allison. Since April 2023, couples can file for “no-fault” divorce, stating that their marriage simply broke down. “That has really changed things,” he comments, “because the requirement to state fault stirred up anger and resentment, resulting in a blame game.”

The change in law may provide yet another reason why couples are getting back together. Allison is familiar with the concept of divorce regret. Over his two-decades-long career, he has seen countless couples reunite. “It’s not uncommon for our clients to get back together, which is surprising when they’ve been slugging things out in court,” he explains. “But I suppose sometimes the cause of unhappiness in a relationship goes away precisely because of the divorce.” He gives an example: a female client who had felt she lacked financial independence in her marriage. “They divorced, reached a settlement, and then she started seeing her ex-husband again.” Similarly, he has seen people move in on their own and start dating their ex, enjoying a sense of novelty of this arrangement. Love is space, as the saying goes.

Karen and Louis lived apart for a while before moving back in together. “It took a long time to rebuild trust and prove I wasn’t the person I used to be,” says Louis, who brought up the idea to remarry: “I wanted it for a number of reasons, but mostly because it is a very clear commitment.” Now, happily married again since 2020, the couple say their kids like to tease them: “So which anniversary is this, your 36th or your 4th?” But what have they ultimately learned from loving – and then loving one another again? It’s that you must love yourself before you can love someone else. “I look at friends who have gone through divorce and are on their second and third marriages, but if you don’t reflect on yourself, you may end up confronting the same issues with someone else,” says Karen. “Personally, I needed to grow up and work out what I wanted rather than being the wife and the mother of the children. I was forced into that situation, which was actually great.”

Ebele and Karen look back on their separation as a positive thing. As well as an opportunity to establish independence, Ebele believes her marriage is different the second time around: “There’s more room for experimentation, for us figuring out even further what we want out of marriage, it feels even more like adventure. The first time we thought it was forever, but now it really does feel that way… Especially as no one has any patience for us to do this again.”