A lavish wedding, a couple in love; romance was in the air, as it should be when two people are getting married. But on the top table, the mothers of the happy pair were bonding over their imminent plans for … divorce.

That story was told to me by the mother of the bride. The wedding in question was two summers ago: she is now divorced, and the bridegroom’s parents are separated. “We couldn’t but be aware of the crushing irony of the situation,” said my friend. “There we were, celebrating our children’s marriage, while plotting our own escapes from relationships that had long ago gone sour, and had probably been held together by our children. Now they were off to start their lives together, we could be off, too – on our own, or in search of new partners.”

It’s bittersweet, this clash of romantic hope and lived experience. I am living it now, yo-yo-ing between the wedding plans of my daughter and son, both in their 20s, and the fragility and disappointment of my own long marriage. My days seem to be divided between excited chat about embryonic relationships that are absolutely perfect, and definitely going to last for ever, and remote and cold exchanges with a husband who has disentangled himself emotionally from me, and shows no signs of wanting to reconnect (I have suggested Relate many times; he is simply not interested).

To some extent, this juxtaposition of young love and old cynicism was ever thus: throughout time, weddings have featured, centre-stage, a loved-up duo who believe their devotion to one another will last for ever, while observing from the wings are two couples 30, 35 or more years down the line, battle-scarred by experience, and entirely devoid of rose-tinted spectacles – the parents of the bride and groom. And in the generation of “silver splitters”, these sixtysomethings are more likely than ever to be in the process of uncoupling, at the precise moment when their offspring are embracing the dream of lifelong partnership.

So how do we reconcile our cynicism – or, at best, our scepticism – for marriage and long-term love, with our offsprings’ enthusiasm to tie the knot, and embark on a life of seeming marital bliss? On one level, the phenomenon is heartwarming. It is testament, you could argue, to the resilience of the human spirit: however difficult our own marriages turned out to be, we war veterans look at our kids staring into each other’s eyes, and we melt inside. Yes, we think to ourselves, we made mistakes; we took paths that turned out to be wrong. Even, we think, we made fundamentally bad choices: we married the wrong men.

As a result, love was seriously skewed for us: but in the next generation – we nod our heads vigorously to this, while cheerily agreeing to a no-holds-barred expensive wedding – things will be different. True love will be theirs; the fairytale that eluded us will work for them, at last.

What hokum. As the survivor of a difficult marriage, this much I know: the biggest burden is the disappointment. And it is a disappointment born on my own wedding day in 1985: more than three decades later, the hopes of that morning still glint from the shadows. The expectations heaped on us, including by my in-laws whose own miserable marriage still had another two decades left to torture them, are the ghosts around the sad embers of our once-glowing fire.

So what can we do differently? Here’s the truth of it, as a wise friend said to me recently: in the 21st century, in a world in which women as well as men have choices and independence and long lives (all good), it will be increasingly difficult for one individual to answer the emotional, spiritual and physical needs of another, across many decades. Life is different now: we have bigger imaginations, we have higher expectations, we have more opportunities and, crucially, those opportunities continue well on into our 50s, 60s and 70s – and for all I know, into our 80s and 90s too. Even more significantly, we women have these opportunities: for men, they are less of a novelty. But their more widespread existence is the agent of seismic change in intimate relationships. We no longer need to put up with misery; we can alter the way we live.

I suggest that we, the parental generation, take a subtle lead in being honest with our twenty- and thirtysomethings about the realities of relationships, and love, and longevity, and choices. That we stop buying into the burgeoning and ever-more-elaborate wedding industry, a giant luxury liner that sails full-steam ahead, oblivious to the lifeboats and shipwrecks all around it in the water. At least begin to ask questions of the commercial interest that operates that liner, of its intentions and its fallout (not to mention its profits). There is more than coincidence, surely, in the way we seem to invest more and more resources in marriages that are less and less likely to survive.

How we introduce these notes of caution into our children’s lives is a much more difficult task. As parents, we want nothing more than happiness for our offspring: none of us wants to burst their bubble, at the precise moment it is so expanded.

As so often with parenting, though, we have to take the longer view. Sometimes I think that, even though my children may not understand or welcome some of the messages they get from me now, with me in my mid-50s and them in their mid-20s, there may be moments in the future when what I said, or how I behaved, suddenly makes sense. Parenting means filling your children’s backpack with supplies, and some of the supplies down the bottom of the bag may not be needed for many years to come.

One important factor in all this was raised by Sylvia Brownrigg in these pages earlier this year, and it is this: children are not interested in their parents’ relationships. They’re not interested in their parents’ marriage (beyond hoping that it is incident-free, and as calm as possible) and they are certainly not interested in their parents’ other relationships, if those happen or are ongoing. So we cannot weigh them down with the detail of why our marriages are failing, or unhappy, or disappointing – and yet, we must somehow signal to them that life is a long journey, and that it may be a mistake to invest too much in one central relationship on into the far distant future.

We are pioneers, us fifty- and sixtysomething mothers; we are walking a tightrope, and it is difficult to get the balance right. Sometimes we wobble; sometimes we fall right off. But the fact that we are walking the tightrope at all is the important bit. We are trying to be authentic, to our burnt-out marriages and to ourselves, as well as to our children and the realities of their future.

And choices cut both ways, too. Remember those mothers at the wedding party? My friend, as I say, is now divorced; but the bridegroom’s parents are having counselling, and have not ruled out the possibility of sharing their lives again.

Being more ambitious for ourselves doesn’t mean our marriages can’t survive, but it does mean a bad marriage can only survive if it can change. And that surely is the message, and the hope, we want to give our children, as they taste the realities of long-term love, or long-term what-was-once-love, and what just possibly might be love once again.