When you first break with tradition, it often comes accompanied by a soundtrack similar to a herd of elephants in a china store. I’m thinking of things like, oh, little black girls attending a white school in America’s south, the investiture of a gay Bishop, the end of Apartheid, or even the first sounds of Elvis’ form of Rock n’ Roll.

And so it is, in a country heaped in tradition when it comes to making and breaking marriage vows (both done with impunity), that the very public divorce...