Simmering tensions,a fling at the office party and families thrown together for weeks on end ... no wonder yesterday has become the busiest - and most lucrative - day of the year for divorce lawyers.
Even as Jackie Walker put the finishing touches to the sumptuous Christmas meal and table decorations, in her head she was making a life-changing decision. "We'd had the whole family over for Christmas dinner and I wanted everything to be perfect," says 47-year-old Jackie.
"But as I served dinner, I looked round the table of smiling faces and I felt like an outsider. I was putting on a happy face and fulfilling my roles as mummy, wife, daughter and daughterinlaw. But, God, I was miserable. As we sat down to eat, I thought about the looming New Year and felt: 'I can't do this any more.'"
And so, ten days later, as she swept up pine needles and took down the decorations, Jackie decided - like so many women in the post-Christmas period - that she wanted a divorce. "I'd been unhappy for a couple of years," admits Jackie, who has two children aged 11 and 12 with Mike, 44, a property developer.
"Mike and I had been so busy with our careers, the children and renovating our rambling 15-room house that we had no time for each other.
"There were times I'd think: 'What the hell am I doing with him when I might as well be on my own?' I didn't feel loved or adored.
"But it was only at Christmas that I realised how wrong it would be to keep up the pretence for yet another year for the sake of my children. So I sat Mike down and told him: 'This isn't working for me. Our marriage is over.'"
Mike was devastated but defiant. She recalls: "He told me: 'Jackie, I am the best husband you'll get and there will be no knight in shining armour to whisk you away, so you need to be sure of what you're saying.' But I was sure, so I filed for divorce."
Though some friends and relatives branded Jackie heartless for walking away after Christmas, it seems she is far from alone in her timing. Matrimonial experts have dubbed yesterday D-Day - or Divorce Day - because traditionally the most petitions of the year are filed on the Monday of the first full week in January.
In some years, the number is as much as 50 per cent more than in an average week. This year experts are predicting at least a 10 per cent rise on the norm.
Divorce lawyer Vanessa Lloyd Platt believes this is because the stress of playing happy families during the festivities can prove too much if a marriage is already teetering on the brink of separation.
"Only the stampede for the start of the Harrods sale is greater than the surge to file for divorce in early January," she says. "Most applications are from women reeling from the pressure of having to put on an act
over Christmas when they've been feeling unhappy in the marriage for a while.
"Often they will have approached the festive season thinking: 'I'll really make an effort at Christmas, but if things still aren't right by New Year then I'll leave.'"
This point resonates with Jackie, who now lives alone, near Edinburgh. "Christmas was magical when we first had our babies," she recalls. "But in 2000, when I turned 40, I had an overwhelming feeling that something was missing.
"I was the stereotypical middleaged, middle-class woman, with a great career as an event manager, a devoted husband, two beautiful children and a gorgeous detached home with a huge walled garden in a pretty village. But I wasn't happy and I felt terribly guilty for questioning my seemingly perfect life."
After admitting her feelings to Mike that year, the couple tried marriage counselling to salvage their relationship and for a time, Jackie says, they were happier. "Mike was hugely supportive, counselling made us refocus on each other and for two years things really were better.
"But when we moved house again in July 2002 they deteriorated dramatically. Once again, Mike and I were too busy for each other. I stuck it out, but by Christmas that year I knew things wouldn't change because my love for him had died."
A divorce ensued, during which the couple remained together in the same house for six strained months until a financial settlement was reached. When it was finalised in April 2005, the couple decided that the children would live with Mike, although Jackie sees them every week.
"I've struggled with guilt because there was no specific reason to split," Jackie says, "only that the marriage wasn't working for me.
"I reasoned that when you're married and in love you should want to spend time with that person, socialise with them and still go out together for dinners. I didn't feel like that about Mike any more. I actually didn't want to spend time with him. I knew I couldn't recapture any of those initial feelings I'd had for him."
Kerrie Mansfield, a 27-year-old business development manager from Derby, empathises. She ended her marriage at New Year in 2005, just 18 months after she wed David, 32, an electrical engineer. The couple had met on a night out when Kerrie, the daughter of an optician and a builder, was just 18 and David was 23.
Three months later, David proposed and the couple spent the next six years saving up for their £21,000 wedding at Tutbury Castle in Staffordshire in July 2004. But a year later, Kerrie's feelings had changed.
"I remember standing in a shop trying to choose a Christmas card for David and they all said things like 'To the one I love' or 'To my gorgeous husband' and I realised I didn't feel like that about him any more," she recalls.
"We'd been so in love. We'd had a dream wedding and a three-week, five-star honeymoon in Thailand. Back home we bought a new three-storey house and I splashed out on an Audi TT sports car.
"It felt as if we had everything, and on top of all the material luxuries we had a loving relationship. David idolised me and made me feel safe.
"But the cracks began to show when I got a new job as a business development manager and started to put my career first.
"When we met, David was fun and we went out all the time to bars, restaurants and clubs. But I suddenly realised he wasn't ambitious. He'd become happy just to do the nine-to-five, come home, have his dinner, then watch TV all night.
"Even at weekends he couldn't be bothered to do anything. I tried to encourage him by arranging nights out with our friends and booking tables in restaurants. But I got fed up of always having to be the one to sort things out.
"It would have been lovely if he'd made the effort and organised nights out for us sometimes. I was still so young, I wanted to have fun, see the world and further my career. I told David, but he didn't seem to understand."
Their marriage didn't improve by Christmas 2005. "Even the way he closed the front door that Christmas irritated me," says Kerrie.
"As usual, all the Christmas shopping and social arrangements were left to me. He couldn't even manage to wrap a present. As I cooked Christmas dinner for David and my mum that year, plus food for various friends who called round, I was making decisions in my head about my marriage.
"David had bought me a huge, romantic card, which made me feel very awkward because I didn't reciprocate his feelings. I think there's something very intense about the Christmas period, because it's supposed to be all about families and selfless love, and if you don't feel that about someone any more it's really brought home to you.
"If I stayed for the sake of our vows I would have been deceiving both of us. When January 1, 2006, arrived, my first thought was: 'God, it's Valentine's Day next month,. How can I face buying him a card?'
"So I sat David down and told him the marriage was over. He burst into tears, but I didn't even cry. All the emotion had been sucked out of me over Christmas. He hadn't suspected a thing and was desperate for us to stay together, but my mind was made up.
"To be fair, David was a real gentleman and moved out of our home, which was his choice. We even agreed that he would file for divorce stating my unreasonable behaviour, simply to speed up the process, because it was not contested."
Kerrie's divorce was finalised this month and she's just enjoyed her first Christmas with her new love Lee Broderick, 31, a joiner she met during the summer.
"Last year, I dated men and did the things I should have done in my early 20s instead of saving for a wedding," Kerrie says ruefully.
"This year, I met Lee and fell completely in love. He's funny, energetic and so sociable, all the things that David wasn't. Lee has so much enthusiasm for life, and hopes and dreams he wants to fulfil - just as I do. I feel alive again."
Charlotte Barton, 37, a translator, has yet to find love again after leaving husband Matthew, 39, a financial analyst, after Boxing Day last year. She lives in the family home in Horley, Surrey, with her two children, aged six and eight.
"Christmas had long been a bone of contention in our ten-year marriage," Charlotte recalls. "Despite having a wife and two children, Matthew liked to play the role of the eternal bachelor at the best of times, but especially at Christmas.
"He'd often get drunk with his friends on Christmas Eve, instead of spending it with us. On Christmas Day he'd be too hung over to play with the kids, and on Boxing Day he'd go to watch his favourite football team. I felt like he was living a bachelor life, despite having a family.
"There would be countless other all-day drinking sessions with his friends before New Year. It made me so sad. I put up with it for years, but when his behaviour carried on throughout last year my feelings for him changed.
"Up went my emotional barriers. He got promoted at work last April and there were increasing opportunities to socialise with clients and colleagues.
"I told him so many times how fed up I was of being on my own with the kids while he was out. And I was furious when Matthew was too tired or hung over at weekends from all the socialising he'd done during the week. I wanted him to devote time to me and take us out as a family. But he laughed it off and didn't take me seriously.
"When, last December, he announced he'd made all his usual social arrangements for Christmas, something snapped. I thought: 'Why am I putting up with this?'"
The couple spent Christmas Day at Matthew's parents' gome near Guildford. Charlotte describes it as a tense time, during which she could think of nothing but leaving her husband. "Even as I watched my children tear open the presents from their grandparents, I had to force a smile. Matthew sat yawning in a chair because he'd stayed out until the early hours with his friends.
"He wasn't the man I'd married or the man I wanted to grow old with. I wanted a man who would relish spending Christmas with his wife and children and make us feel special."
With Boxing Day over, Charlotte confesses she couldn't stand the pretence, and with her children staying at her mother's for a few days, she seized her chance to tell Matthew the marriage was over. "He was furious," she remembers, "and couldn't understand why I'd want to leave him.
"I was really upset, but his response made me realise I'd made the right decision.
"He moved out to stay with a friend, leaving me to explain to the children what was happening, reassuring them that Daddy and I would always love them. They showed enormous maturity.
"I'm not proud I left the marriage or broke up our family,' says Charlotte sadly. 'But it was the right decision."
Thousands of women like Charlotte, Jackie and Kerrie will be talking to divorce lawyers for the first time this week, their flawed marriages finally blown apart by the intense pressures of the Christmas period. Whether they feel in a year's time that they, too, have made the right decision remains to be seen.
Source:- http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-506687/Happy-Divorce-Day-How-Christmas-women-realise-HAD-leave-husbands.html
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