Marriage is dead. Again. Secularism and overwork may have made it squirm, but the fatal blow comes from a footballer's wife. Karen Parlour's divorce settlement will, in the view of gloomy pundits, mean the end of matrimony, at least for the loaded. Ms Parlour, an unconventional member of her caste, is not a shopping locust stripping bare the racks of Versace. Her habitat is Romford High Street, her luxury is getting her nails done for 26 and her mum comes round to do the cleaning.  Despite her homely credentials, Ms Parlour has terrified rich men, who will allegedly now be staying single or relying on pre-nuptial agreements drafted along the lines and length of the European Communities (Finance) Act. The panic follows the appeal court's decision to award Ms Parlour, who already has two homes worth 1 million, the sum of 440,000 a year, with the requirement that she should save an annual 294,000 as a nest egg. No wonder footballers fearful of claims on their future earnings are trembling over their Krug, or Highland Spring in the case of the abstemious Mr Parlour.   Ex-wives have not, however, established a claim to 50 per cent of future income or to indefinite maintenance. The Parlour settlement, subject to revision in four years, allows for a clean break. But, if the ruling is not all bad for men, then neither is it as good as it looks for women. Once again, the notion is implanted that divorcing wives are cashing in, when the reverse is true. Three-quarters of single mothers live on less than 299 a week, before housing costs, compared with 16 per cent of couples.   The Parlour judgment has nothing to do, though, with ordinary people. It deals instead with those who are rolling in surplus lucre. Obviously, Ms Parlour should be treated fairly, but it seems odd that there is no question of her getting a job, as other single mothers are always being urged to.   There is no need for her to return to her previous occupation, as an optician's assistant. Specsavers would be too mundane for a woman capable of saving English football. If she were to set herself up as a lifestyle coach, managers would flock to seek the wisdom that weaned Ray off drink and loutishness and persuaded Lord Justice Thorpe that she deserved her money.   If Ms Parlour's methods were replicated, the Priory would close for lack of business, Chinawhite's would serve beetroot juice, tracts of arable England would be given over to cultivating rocket for salads, and dubious women trawling foreign hotels to prey on legless soccer stars would have to take up cribbage.   Even if you acknowledge her reformist genius, there is something arcane in a ruling that rewarded Ms Parlour, explicitly, for good wifeliness. If she had been a loving mother who left it to a strict manager, Arsne Wenger, to discipline her husband, would she have been given less? What if she had been more independent? If the Beckham marriage ever shudders to a halt, the appeal court's logic suggests that Posh will be awarded fourpence and instructed by some kindly judge to be sure and save it for a rainy day.   The Parlour case, an illustration of what happens when imploded love meets the precision of the law, is a prelude to another messy showdown. The argument about who gets the money is over and we are moving on to who gets the kids. The government, having dusted the flour-bombers' purple residue off its lapels, hopes to launch a green paper on relationship breakdown before the summer recess, while the Tories, equally mindful of furious fathers, are holding their family summit tomorrow.   Michael Howard will be saying that 'the best parents are both parents'. That truism, with its implicit nod towards crusading dads, echoes the views of campaigners elsewhere. In Wisconsin, advocates of 'equal shares parenting' say that a 50/50 split of marital property has reduced to almost zero the 80 per cent of divorces that went to court. Split children in two by law and the same result will follow.   Here, Bob Geldof has argued for the presumption that youngsters will live with the father 50 per cent of the time. Mr Howard should be wary. Fathers often get an unfair deal, but the Geldof view is a charter for the selfish. Time-share children must have a ruling say in their own future. To most parents, it is obvious that friendships, routines and habits do not fit a legal straitjacket, and that children, conscious of adult jealousies, are willing to endure misery rather than causing any pain.   Such unhappiness risks being disregarded, as pro-father feelings begin to echo through the courts. When a senior family judge urged earlier this year that mothers who defy access orders should be jailed, he was articulating a more general drift towards compulsion.   In a major study to be published soon, Professor Carol Smart, of Leeds University, revisited 60 children of divorced parents who shared their care. Some young teenagers had been unhappy for years. One boy said his father barricaded him in the house and that he was desperate to run away.   The happy children interviewed by Smart were invariably those whose parents sought their views and let them be flexible. Rigid arrangements for young people growing into adolescence could cause grave problems, she concludes.   So what should fathers do? It is heartbreaking for men who have been involved more closely than any other generation with their children suddenly to be sidelined or excluded. But the answer, as the green paper will say, does not lie in edict. If the one in 10 divorcing couples in serious dispute cannot reach agreement, in private or with outside help, then the courts will rarely ordain peace for them or secure a good life for their children.   The government will be hazy on what can be done. Information and conciliation are not great buzzwords for despairing fathers. But at least the green paper may acknowledge that children should not be parcelled out on adult whim and that their best interests, unfiltered through an adult prism, will be the guiding principle. With luck, there will be no mention of equal shares.   In the divorce courts, an even split is a necessary illusion. Because it is impossible to weigh up the value of Ms Parlour's anti-drinking homilies against her husband's ability to take a penalty, the appeal court has ascribed a similar value to both. Since Mr Parlour is rich, the case sidesteps the misery that follows when dependent women, and men, ruin their former partners' lives by avarice. The Parlour result, in short, has no great consequences, unless soccer stars start suing their wives for failing to stop them trashing nightclubs.   The real danger is that equality and fairness, the twin mantras of divorce law, risk being applied too rigidly to the offspring as well as the chattels of a marriage. A Shylock strategy of carving up children with no blood spilt would be a disastrous way of demonstrating that equality is often very far from fair.