Families: Reconcilable Differences

There was a time when divorce was an ugly thing that created unremitting enmity between former spouses and severed ties between fathers and children. Times have changed. Now a spate of unusually cozy celebrity splits is drawing attention to a far different set of templates for divorce.

Five years after their marriage ended amid tabloid tales of toe sucking, Britain's Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, live with their daughters, now 12 and 11, in the same 20-room manor the Queen gave the couple as a wedding present. This winter the Yorks vacationed together in Switzerland. "The welfare and lives of the children are of paramount importance," explains David Pogson, a spokesman for the Duke of York. Two years after their marriage was annulled, Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall are once again sharing meals--though not bedrooms--in Hall's home outside London. Jagger was a lousy husband, Hall says, but he remains a great father to their four children, ages 3 to 17. After singer Melissa Etheridge and filmmaker Julie Cypher separated last year, they bought back-to-back houses in Los Angeles. The children they co-parent, ages 4 and 2, move between homes every four days--and at any time in between. "They truck through the back fence. It's very fluid," says Cypher. "We don't want a child to have to get on an airplane to see the other parent."

It's not just celebrities and folks who live in mansions. Ordinary mortals too are finding novel ways to keep their families largely intact following separation or divorce. They're sharing homes, living next door to each other, vacationing together. But why on earth would ex-spouses want to remain in each other's lives in light of the troubles that estranged them? The answer is usually a combination of pressures: financial necessity, a tight real estate market, a child-care shortage and--pre-eminently--an increased awareness of children's need for both parents. As those pressures increase, some people who work with families of divorce say they are seeing a rise in the number of ex-spouses who share many aspects of married life.

Having practiced family law for 40 years, San Francisco attorney Lowell Sucherman had heard of "birdnesting," in which children continue to reside in the family home while their parents take turns moving in and out to care for them, and "doublenesting," in which ex-spouses live in separate areas of the family home. But he had never handled such a case until four years ago. Since then, he and his law partner have helped six couples set up such households. Says Sucherman: "I don't see an end here anytime soon. The more housing prices rise, the more this will happen."