It is of course sad that Madonna and Guy Ritchie’s relationship should end in divorce after 7½ years – the couple have three children: her daughter Lourdes, 12, their son Rocco, 8, and David, 3, who was adopted from Malawi in 2006. But it also goes to show that Madonna, despite being a global superstar worth £300m, remains a perfect mirror for her female fan base – by which I mean those of us who have liked her since she sprang on the scene in the mid1980s in cheap lace and rosary beads, with a wink in one eye and a steely glint in the other.

(Quick recap for our younger readers: pre-Madonna, being a young woman who was explicit about what she wanted, and being seen to work hard to get there, was simply not done. You had to shrug and little-me and self-deprecate, preferably while wearing a scrubbed face, giant specs and some sort of hideous sackcloth. PostMadonna, no girl is embarrassed about voicing ambition, or about going haring after it with all guns blazing. Her influence and achievements are hard to overstate.)

Unusually for a celebrity, Madonna’s private life seems real, and thus provokes empathy rather than derision. This may be because it so closely echoes that of lesser mortals. She does what we do, for the reasons we do it. She did it two decades ago, by being pert and batting her eye-lashes at anything that moved, and – rather remarkably – she’s still doing it now, by getting divorced.

Unlike her male counterparts, whose entire life trajectory seems to involve going from badly behaved, priapic rock star to really old, slightly tragic badly behaved, priapic rock star, Madonna has evolved in a recognisably human and very female fashion.

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Despite the millions and the sold-out stadiums and the awards and the deification, she remains one of us, buffeted in similar ways by the vagaries of children and relationships, finding it hard to juggle work and home and ambition and wifehood despite being a squillionaire superstar.

Compare and contrast with, say, Victoria Beckham: even though Madonna is considerably older, richer, more successful and more globally famous, her tribulations are resonant in a way that Posh’s could never be.

Never mind the enduring brilliance of Madonna’s self-created “brand” or the many reinventions of her stage persona, fabulous though they are. The real appeal is in the twists her life has taken, and the way they always seem to echo the experiences of “ordinary” women.

Take this latest instal-ment. The divorce rate may be falling nationally, but the number of older people – especially women – seeking an end to their unhappy marriage is on the up. Madonna is in the same boat as many of the women who cheered her first Top of the Pops appearance in 1984.

The soon-to-be-former Mrs Ritchie remains the zeitgeist queen, a one-woman barometer of where women are at. To mix metaphors, it’s as if she’s the digital image and we’re the pixels.

We may not prance around on stage aged 50, looking freakishly toned and wearing tiny leotards, but, like Madonna, many of us were bad girls in our twenties, good girls (and mothers) in our thirties and divorced at some point in the following decade or two.

Madonna did all of this with knobs on, as befitted her status. She was thrillingly bad, like when she took off all her clothes and hung out in lesbian leather bars for her brilliantly subversive book Sex – brilliant because, having made a career out of cheerfully inclusive, equal-opportunities sluttishness, so that every lardy middle American thought he was in with a chance, she suddenly revealed herself to be so comprehensively and terrifyingly sexually knowing that every male commentator in the US and Europe felt she’d “gone too far”.

Really, all she’d done was show her enormous fan base what a woman in control of her sexuality looked like, and shocked them to the core by suggesting it perhaps wasn’t quite as cute as Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman – a heroic act for which we should all be thankful, and which is still a welcome corrective to the hundreds of little wan-nabe starlets writhing on a TV screen near you in a depressing, male-scripted parody of sexiness.

Having scared men into anxious detumescence for a little while, Madonna then became reassuringly “normal”. She had her first child, Lourdes, by a man with whom she didn’t stay, Carlos Leon, adding single motherhood to her bow (though she and Leon remained on good terms). Eventually she got married, like you do.

The party was at Skibo castle, which is a pop star’s grand version of a marquee in your parents’ back garden – that is to say, traditional and old-fashioned, with stiff flower arrangements and linen napkins.

She became a devoted Anglophile, claiming to like bitter and sprinkling her speech with bits of cockney: again, she was doing what women do, especially in the first flush of a new relationship, which is to love everything about their boyfriend and adopt it as their own – see sudden newfound passions for West Ham or random bands or hiking.

She had another baby, Rocco, and took to hosting shoots and weekend house parties at her Wiltshire country house, Ashcombe, which had once belonged to Cecil Beaton. Granted, she probably had armies of staff and three nannies on call 24/7 and perhaps never knew the drudgey exhaustion that comes from caring for young children, but still. Her fans from back in the 1980s were going through similar motions, relatively new to both marriage and motherhood, not entirely comfortable yet with hanging up their clubbing clothes, feeling as though they were playing at being grown-up.

Madonna, with her wholesome, moralistic children’s books and demure little dresses, made all of us feel a bit better about domesticity: she seemed awfully keen on it, ‘‘which gave the rest of us hope.

Aside from anything else, she made it seem glamorous and satisfying.

It was comforting to us to see that just as we were asking ourselves all of those tricky questions about trading in a fun-filled youth for motherhood and fidelity and early nights, Madonna had already embraced them all. Nigella Lawson is, rightly, credited for glamorising domestic life, but Madonna has arguably played an equally large part for women of my generation.

Now, aged 50 and with little left to prove, she’s readying herself to go solo – like so many women for whom domestic bliss left a great deal to be desired, and who, postchildren, postproperty and financially secure, get the distinct feeling that marriage is overrated and that they’d be happier baling out and pottering about on their own.As is often the case, divorce at a later age, for Madonna, isn’t theimpromptu version of divorce from one’s youth: by all accounts, the Ritchies have tried hard to make their marriage work, to reach compromises and to come up with solutions that would be least damaging to their family life. However, their attempts – which are rumoured to have included mouthing “empowering”, loving words at each other, such as “macho” and “goddess” (a technique that seems so demented and juvenile that I very much hope the rumour is baseless) – have failed.

Madonna has reputedly hired the redoubtable Fiona Shackleton, who has represented the Prince of Wales and, more recently, Sir Paul McCart-ney. Friends of the couple say the split is as amicable as splits can be, and that Ritchie is expected to behave in a gentlemanly fashion: the antiHeather Mills, if you like.

The separation, long rumoured, was confirmed last Wednesday in a joint statement issued through Madonna’s spokeswoman, Liz Rosenberg. “Madonna and Guy Ritchie have agreed to divorce after 7½ years of marriage, their representatives confirmed today. They have both requested that the media maintain respect for their family at this difficult time.”

The gossip mill had been in overdrive since last summer. Guy found his wife too controlling, apparently (which is a bit like Mrs Khan suddenly noticing that Genghis had a wee aggressive streak); she was said to be keen on adopting more children, unlike him; he allegedly found it hard to deal with her continuing success while his own star had been on the wane for years; he wasn’t as devoted to Kabbalah, a bonkers-seeming celebrity offshoot of Judaism, as she was; etc etc. And he wasn’t as famous as her: he would always be Mr Madonna, which can hardly have come as a massive surprise, but which must still have rankled.

According to reports, the point at which the Ritchie marriage became irredeemably doomed was three years ago, on Madonna’s 47th birthday, when she fell off her horse and sustained serious injuries – shebroke four ribs, her collarbone, her scapula and a knuckle in her left hand, and later called the accident “the most painful event of my life”.

A “family friend” quoted last week said Madonna expected her husband to drop everything to be by her side. Ritchie, though, “approached the whole thing in what [Madonna] called ‘a very British way’: instead of smothering her with sympathy, he said, ‘Come on, darling, you’re a tough bird – you’ll be back on the horse in no time’”.

Americans aren’t good at being told to buck up at the best of times; a spoilt American pop star was never going to take well to being asked to grin and bear it.

Ritchie is British enough to cringe at the idea of making an unnecessary fuss about anything; his wife is American enough to see brisk, British admonitions about pulling oneself together as signs of monstrous cal-lousness and disengagement. Madonna was apparently so incensed by Ritchie’s apparent lack of sympathy that she told him their marriage was a mistake, and that he was not her “soulmate” after all.

Horses aside, what it boils down to, if you believe the rumours – which I do, because some of them come from close to the source – is that Madonna, and Madonna’s needs and Madonna’s desires, had an emasculating effect on her husband; that she noticed, didn’t find it especially attractive and agreed that enough was enough.

This is the story of many a modern divorce: forget infidelity or arguments over money – what kills many marriages today is the erosion of roles that had been clearly demarcated for centuries. It’s not just that Madonna is perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist when it comes to middle-aged women. It’s more that, in an Everywoman double whammy, her relationship has failed for particularly zeitgeisty and resonant reasons, which will be familiar to many “ordinary” couples.

It goes like this. Youmeet each other. You’re doing well; things are going swimmingly at work for both of you; you feel like equals (when Ritchie met Madonna, he was a hot young director, whose film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels was a worldwide success, and of whom great things were expected).

Fast forward a few years and add children, and sooner or later one of you will get to the point where they can’t shake off the feeling that their star is on the wane while their spouse’s continues to rise. (Ritchie’s subsequent movies were increasingly poorly received; Swept Away, starring Madonna as a rich, spoilt social-ite “tamed” and humiliated by a sailor, came in for particular ridicule, though Ritchie probably rather liked the plot.)

Worse, the wife knows who she is (she’s Madonna!), she’s good at her job, she knows what she wants and she’s not really in the business of playing doormats to soothe wounded male egos. Aside from anything else, she’s busy.

As the months and years pass, her husband’s lack of success – and,sure as eggs is eggs, growing self-pity – do not elicit cooing sympathy, but irritation. The more irritation she displays, the more emasculated he becomes. And the more emasculated he becomes, the more irritated she feels.

It’s an unoriginal vicious circle, one that is played out in tens of thousands of homes every day, because this whole scenario is one of the side effects of the whole working-women debate – never mind what going out to work does to children: it also does extraordinary, and underreported, things to marriages. Even if you’re Madonna.

Ritchie, meanwhile, is a geezer – an artificially created, public-school-educated geezer, but a geezer none the less, if only by osmosis. (Though I wonder what his wife thought when she first realised that he wasn’t really some East End sexy gangster type but the stepson of a baronet. She may have felt a bit swizzed.)

He is a bloke. The thing about blokes is that blokeishness is all they can do: they operate in really only one register. Their requirements arefew and not complex: respect, which is to say admiration, tops the list, not just from colleagues or the world at large, but also from the missus.

For men, respect is usually measured by professional success: lose professional success and respect becomes thin on the ground. People may really like the way you’re so sweet with your children, but in Geezer World, sweetness doesn’t really boost self-esteem.

The second requisite for blokes is feeling desirable, in every sense: a geezer is nothing if he can’t pull birds (wife included). But the wife who no longer especially respects him may find it hard to muster up urgent sexual desire, especially if he’s wandering about looking all Eeyorish and glum and exudingfailure; and, of course, if his wife is Madonna, I expect the prospect of other birds is more trouble than it’s worth.

The third necessity is food and drink – geezers are a bit like plants. The food needs to be normal, unfortunately for Ritchie, who strikes one as a cottage-pie man whose wife follows a strict macrobiotic diet. The drink needs to be plentiful, and the drinking should preferably be carried out in all-male group sessions. (Perhaps this is why Madonna and Ritchie bought their local pub, the Punchbowl, in the spring.)

As I say, simple requirements – but ones that are, for the Ritchies as for many modern couples, almost wholly incompatible with the realities of everyday life. Women no longer have the time – or the inclination, necessarily – to soothe the troubled, self-pitying male brow. It sounds a callous thing to say, but for working women there isn’t much incentive: it’s not as if you want them to chuck you a tenner or take you out for a slap-up dinner or buy you a pretty dress, because you can do all of those things for yourself.

As love fades, the realisation that it might be an awful lot easier to do it for yourself becomes overwhelming; the gloomy, slightly broken husband becomes surplus to requirements. And then you call your lawyer.

Women equate sexiness with success, unless they are especially charitable. The lure of the alpha male is still strong: marrying an alpha, packed to the gills with confidence and self-belief as Ritchie used to be, and watching him turn into a beta, and then a gamma, and then go plummeting towards omega-hood, is more than many women can take.

Madonna’s marriage has gone wrong for all the modern reasons, which is apt, because she is all the aspects of modern womanhood rolled into one. You do slightly get the feeling that there is no hope for modern marriage, because if she, with all her determination and resourcefulness and loathing of failure, can’t manage to make hers work, then there is little hope for the rest of us.

But then perhaps modern marriage is old-fashioned already and needs reinventing. Celebrity divorces certainly do, and I have opti-mistically high hopes about the Ritchies on this front: they seem real enough, human enough, to understand that the three-ring circus, with incredible flying insults and paparazzi dangling from trapezes, is not especially edifying or indeed healthy.

It would be nice if, as has been suggested, the dissolution of the Ritchie union didn’t make it to court and a settlement was privately agreed. Neither Madonna nor Ritchie seems a hysterical type, and they must both have mourned the demise of their marriage over the past few months: the wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth part is presumably over already.

All that remains is for them to go forward, in as elegant a fashion as possible, and for Madonna to begin to incarnate the mantra by which so many women now live: I have children, I have a house, I have work and I am free. She’s going to be a great ambassadress.

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