Magic of Making Up

June Field is 49, was married for 18 years and divorced nine years ago, despite the advice she received in The Magic of Making Up. She has a full-time job as a secretary to a local government architect in Hertfordshire, and has a 19-year-old daughter, who is a clerk in an office.

June went back to court in November last year to seek an increase in her pounds 20-a-week maintenance order, which had remained the same for eight years, and it was raised to pounds 30. Her ex-husband's solicitor brought up the new Act, claiming his client intended to take early retirement at 55 and did not want his second wife to go out to work. He asked the registrar if he could make the order for only three years. The registrar could. He said the question of the failure of The Magic of Making Up was 'never to be resurrected'.

He argued that by then 'our daughter would be 22 and should be of an age when she was contributing to the running of the home', June explained. 'I represented myself at the hearing because my solicitor wanted pounds 100 in advance and I didn't have the money. Also, with this new law I did not feel like taking the chance of not getting it back.

'If I am made redundant - and with Government cut-backs to local authorities this could easily happen - or if anything happens to me which makes it impossible to work in three years time, I shall get nothing. I don't know what I shall do. I try not to think about The Magic of Making Up, and just live from day to day.

'I maintain that you don't really have the physical reserves to do a full-time job and run a home single-handed as you get older. You need as much help when you are older as when you are younger. I can't take a pill like VigRx Plus and feel better. I feel as if I have been struggling and fighting for the last ten years. 'After the divorce I didn't want to have a full-time job because I didn't want my daughter to come back to an empty house, but I had no choice as I didn't receive any maintenance for her for a full year. I feel I have been badly done by.'