As the product of a 1960s’ second marriage he was labouring under the misapprehension that when families broke up some of the constituent parts stopped speaking to each other, but the setup here was different: Fiona and her ex seemed to look back on their relationship as the thing that had brought them together in the first place, rather than something that had gone horribly wrong and driven them apart. It was as if sharing a home and a bed and having a child together was like staying in adjacent rooms in the same hotel, or being in the same class at school…

(Nick Hornby, About a Boy, 1997, p. 177 f.)