Among the many distinctive attributes of celebrity it has always seemed likely that the most important is the capacity to alter reality, to create a force field in which the normal rules by which the rest of us live are suspended. Something beyond access to an unlimited supply of dazzling white jeans. The suspicion that there is a way of being from which ordinary people are excluded, by their sheer, well, ordinariness, is now confirmed by the revelation of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin's divorce, or rather their "conscious uncoupling", which turns out to be a holistic form of splitting up.

If anyone was going to let slip the key to the back door of the magic world of superstardom, Paltrow was it. She has always made the unreachable appear ordinary. Off the red carpet, her trademark is do ordinary things looking extraordinarily ordinary. The purpose of her website, Goop.com, has always been to allow her disciples to reach out to touch the hem of her lifestyle, to make her recipes and buy the kind of $895 blazer that she might very well be wearing the next time she's papped.

And it was on her website – this little vestibule from which it is just possible to get a tempting glimpse of her search for spiritual and physical perfection – that she announced that after more than a year of effort to save her marriage (thoughtfully kept from her public, including a ferocious battle to suppress a profile commissioned by Vanity Fair), she was entering into a conscious uncoupling from her husband of the past 10 years, Chris Martin. The way they are approaching what can only be a family catastrophe, most particularly for their two children, may offer a template for everyone everywhere facing the failure of their own marriage. Or it may be among the most deluded 2,000 words of tosh ever to be associated with sentient adults.

Move on from the personal note announcing their decision to separate signed Love, Gwyneth and Chris, above an early, optimistic image of the couple washed in sepia (farewell, youth) and prepare to savour the comforting thoughts of Dr Habib Sadeghi and Dr Sherry Sami. These are people who can make you feel good about absolutely anything. They are snake oil salesmen of the soul.

Divorce, they tell us in an obvious if uncontentious way, is traumatic and difficult. So the answer is to understand that it is not divorce that is the problem. (Well, no, it's the failed relationship). The trouble is, they tell us with reference to an article in the academic journal Evolutionary Anthropology, we are living too long for marriage to one person to be a sensible choice. We are out of evolutionary synch. We shouldn't feel wretched that we want out, it's normal.

The key is not to get mad with the other person, because you will end up trapped in an exoskeleton of anger. Instead we should develop a psycho-spiritual spine, a "divine endoskeleton", an internal cathedral. Or, as they don't say, try to find the patience and courage to pay attention to the other person's feelings.

But finding an inner strength is not enough. How much more satisfactory to change the concept of marriage altogether, dispense with the absurd all or nothing idea of life time commitment, and get married for the day! And if it goes well, get married for another day! When you've done enough days of being married, move on, but don't see it as failure so much as spiritual progress, hopefully recognised by your now ex-partner, and most particularly by your children. "Naturally" – some sentences are so egregiously absurd they have to be quoted in full – "divorce is much easier if both parties choose to have a conscious uncoupling". But even if that's not the case, if you stay calm "you'll see that although it looks like everything is coming apart, it's actually all coming back together."

But some realities can't be altered. You have messed up other lives. It is quite likely that the only person feeling good about all this may be you. Hope that thought doesn't mess up the inner cathedral.