Whenever I hear someone lament that pre-nuptial agreements will "destroy the romance of marriage", I am reminded of John Lennon's response on hearing Elvis was dead. "Elvis died," he said, "the day he went into the army," writes John Waters.
By the same token, the romance of marriage died the day we introduced divorce, for then marriage lost what gave it its exhilarating sense of romance: a lifelong commitment between two people to remain together for better or worse, for richer or poorer, till death do them part.
"Pre-nups" merely add a touch of rationality to what has otherwise become a mad enterprise for any person of talent, energy or means who wishes to stay out of the workhouse or the cardiac arrest unit.
A pre-nup might have saved from becoming an indentured slave for life one Kenneth McFarlane, who earlier this year was ordered by the Law Lords to pay his ex-wife £366,000 per annum in "maintenance" for the rest of his days.
As Paul McCartney is discovering, marriage in modern societies is turning into a form of big-game hunt, driven by the objectively bizarre notion that married couples should on separation be subject to a State-enforced equalisation of resources.
The idea of a division of assets following marital breakdown is rooted in the concept of dependency, whereby a wife has been financial dependent on the husband, and the law becomes involved to prevent her becoming a burden on the State.
But we have made several exponential leaps forward from this fundamentally unexceptionable idea. Nowadays the word "maintenance" has acquired an obscene irony as the law insists on concerning itself with some alleged "right" of the "dependent" spouse to exact sums far in excess of what might be required for the maintenance of even the height of opulence.
As every other dimension of marriage becomes expendable, dispensable and disposable, the State becomes ever more insistent that one aspect shall remain permanent: the entitlement of one spouse to be kept by the other in accordance with the level of expectation engendered by the non-existent lifelong commitment of the marriage.
And this insistence persists regardless of where the blame for the break-up resides. Society offers no free lunch - unless you manage to become the dependent spouse of a rich individual, and then the State not merely suspends its generally inflexible insistence that citizens fend for themselves, but rushes to the aid of the "victim".
The real roots of this, of course, are to be found in the financial dynamics of family law. The more cake on the table, the bigger the slice the lawyers get to keep.
It is fascinating that, in the age of wall-to-wall rhetoric about "independence" and "equality", we perceive no difficulty with the idea of one human being having a lifelong entitlement to live off another regardless of the circumstances of their former relationship or the reasons for its collapse.
And isn't it remarkable how so many "strong independent women" leave their feminism at home when they get dolled up to go down to the family courts?
Often, the existence of children enables these hypocrisies to be fudged. In a moral system the issue of children would be dealt with by an even division of parenting time, rendering unnecessary and inappropriate any significant transfer of funds, which is why lawyers generally oppose joint custody. (Since the recognition of "pre-nups" would derail several of the more lucrative wagons of the family law gravy train, we can be certain that Michael McDowell's recently announced "expert group" will, after much lengthy and expensive deliberation, come down against any change.)
There is a remarkable doublethink at the heart of our concept of marriage, which retains a cultural connotation of permanence despite having turned into something quite different. In Ireland, couples nowadays stand before Catholic priests and utter words with no meaning in law. We talk about "marriage breakdown" as though it were some kind of misadventure encountered by rare, unfortunate couples, when really the idea of collapse is factored in from the start, changing utterly the meaning of the contract.
Much worse is that marriage increasingly offers a means for unscrupulous individuals to enrich themselves without recourse to talent, risk or any particular investment of energy or even time. After four years married to an ex-Beatle, Heather Mills, playing alternately (as convenient) the roles of "independent woman" and omnipotent victim, claims an entitlement to more than £100 million.
What brand of "romance" could survive the realisation that, by sticking with a relationship, however unpropitious, for a few years, a person of modest talent can acquire independent means of such magnitude? And what have things come to when one of the great artists of 20th-century popular culture is reduced to feeding a tabloid frenzy by defending his reputation against the scurrilous allegations of an individual who, had he ounces of sense to match the tons of his talent, he would not have let into his home to clean his toilet?