Your divorce may be ranked weekly

**Support (Kayleigh):** Good news, your separation is currently ranked 11th in the East Region, up four places since Monday. Is there anything else I can help you with today? **Customer:** I asked how to stop him getting the leaderboard notifications while the children are in the car.

Gamification, meaning points, streaks and leaderboards, has spread from fitness and language apps into workplaces, banking, education and healthcare. Divorce itself has moved substantially online in many countries, with digital filing, mediation platforms and co-parenting apps that log every message and produce records that can be shown to a court. Some of those co-parenting tools already check the tone of a message and warn the sender before it goes out. Family courts facing long backlogs increasingly steer couples toward amicable, no-fault routes, and time-stamped app records are more and more often accepted as evidence in disputes over handovers and communication.

That is the transcript one user of one of the larger online divorce platforms would submit, under the scenario, to a consumer ombudsman, along with a screenshot of her former husband's position on the same table. He would be one place above her, on account of a faster average reply time. The platform would later confirm that the notification settings could not be separated by party, since the household, for ranking purposes, is a single account. The ombudsman would note that the household had been dissolved fourteen months earlier by mutual consent. The platform would note that it had not yet been dissolved by the app.

Under the scheme, the platform's Amicable Separation Index would score each divorcing pair weekly on three measures: message tone, as read by a model that deducts points for sarcasm, capital letters and the word “fine”; punctuality at child handovers, verified by the app's location check-in; and asset velocity, the number of days taken to agree who keeps what. Pairs in the top ten of each region would be offered a court slot within six weeks rather than the standard fourteen months. Pairs in the bottom tenth would be offered a webinar.

Gareth Ounsworth, a plumber from a mid-sized market town, would describe climbing from 40th to 3rd in three weeks. “We agreed the sofa in one message. We agreed the dog in one message. Then she asked if I wanted to do the car quickly, for the points, and I said yes, and now I don't have a car.” His former partner, Lena, would confirm the account in a separate message, sent within the four-minute window the app rewards, and add that the car had never really been his.

The platform would reject the suggestion that a leaderboard encourages competition, pointing out that only the top fifty pairs in each region are shown by name and the rest by an anonymised household reference. It would be the same household reference that appears on both parties' phones, on their solicitors' dashboards and, under a proposed integration, on the children's school portal, in a panel headed Family Status, next to a small green arrow. The arrow would point up or down. Nobody would be able to explain to the children what it measured, and by the second week nobody would need to.

A regional family court pilot would consider accepting the index as evidence of constructive engagement. A judge sitting in the pilot could be shown a couple's ranking history, including a note that one party fell nine places during a week the app logged as silence. Mediators would begin coaching clients in tone hygiene: reply within four minutes, open every message with the other party's first name, never mention the mother-in-law, whom the model would classify as a hostile third party. “I have watched a man agree to sell his own boat to protect a streak,” one mediator, Tomasz Bielak, would say. “It was a good boat.”

Some pairs would reconcile, or something like it. Priya and Marcus Feld, ranked first in the South West for six consecutive weeks, would tell the platform's community forum that they had decided to remain married for the time being, since a completed divorce would remove them from the table. The platform would respond within a fortnight by introducing a Hall of Fame. A spokesperson would say it “recognises excellence in separation regardless of outcome”. The Felds would remain on it, legally married, sharing a house and a mortgage, listed under a small gold badge that reads Best Ever Separation.

Asked by the ombudsman what the platform recommends to a customer whose former husband is ahead of her on the table, Kayleigh would give the scripted answer: reply faster, keep it warm, avoid the word “fine”. The customer would reply, within the four-minute window, that this was fine. The app would deduct two points and the notification would arrive in the car, where the children would read it out. Her former husband would move up to ninth. The children would ask whether that was good. Under the scheme, it would be.