The relationship was never on.
The two of them hated each other and bickered from the start.
There have been rows, bust-ups, trial separations and expensive lawyers, but they are irreconcilable.
It is time to call a halt.
The marriage of England's church and state is anything but gay.
Henry VIII's leadership of the church made sense at the time. It freed England from the religious bonds of Rome.
But 1535 is not 2012.
This week's Home Office document on gay marriage proposes that same-sex civil partnerships be called marriages, like the others.
We can ask why, at these of all times, David Cameron should want to stir this episcopal hornets' nest.
He apparently has debts to pay the gay community.
But he is adamant for change, insisting at the same time that "no religious organisation will be forced to conduct same-sex marriages".
They will be legally exempt.
If any proof were needed for church disestablishment, it is the capacity of canon lawyers to find quarrels in straws. What consenting adults do in private should be of no concern to governments, and that applies to worship as much as sex.
If grownups want to dress in Tudor costume, douse babies in water, intone over the dead and do strange things with wine and wafers, it is a free country.
But for a Christian sect to claim ownership of the legal definition of a human relationship is way out of order.
The church has a dreadful record on marriage. Rome placed chastity and celibacy as the highest state of man (and woman), while marriage was for the fallen.
As Milton said, the church regarded matrimony as a state of disgrace, "a work of the flesh, almost a defilement".
Only when medieval bishops saw where the money was did they declare marriage "so sacramental that no adultery or desertion could dissolve it".
Throughout the middle ages the church struggled to gain control of what had been an essentially secular contract between men and women.
It was not until the 13th century that weddings had to be hallowed by a priest, even if this meant little more than an exchange of vows in a porch. Churches tried to bribe couples to the altar, as by giving them sides of bacon (hence "bringing home the bacon").
Common law marriage in England was not outlawed until 1753.
The current argument over gay marriage is near incomprehensible, except in terms of Anglican conservatism.
All sexes can now be legally wed in registered premises and call themselves married.
The word has changed its usage to embrace them.
Gay people are now demanding the social status of "marrieds" and, more controversially, that the church be allowed to marry under licence.
The first demand is for lexicographers and seems harmless.
The second is a matter between gay people and the church authorities.
The government is not insisting on anything.
It is specifically providing for churches to be exempt from any requirement of access for gay people.
Yet the church seems desperate for a fight. It behaves like an elephant bitten by a gnat.
Given that only a quarter of weddings take place in Anglican churches, the number of gay couples wanting such a service must be small. Some churches already "bless" gay civil partnerships, as they do divorcees.
Yet the church's lawyers claim that any exemption "could be challenged" by some litigious and theologically apostate homosexual under the European convention on human rights.
Anything these days can be challenged, but such a case is unlikely to prevail, given the convention's defence of religious freedom. The church has long refused to marry divorcees, and a local church can deny marriage to those with no parochial connection. I am not aware of any being dragged to a European court by irate suitors.
Canon lawyers protest that, even so, exemption would create a conflict between "separate categories" of civil and religious marriage. That is a difference, not a conflict, and hardly more terrible, as "senior church figures" tell the Daily Telegraph, than "any rift since the reign of Henry VIII".
This difference arises only because the Anglican church has long enjoyed a peculiar legal privilege of being able to register weddings in its own buildings.
But such ritualising of a legal contract can now can take place in most stately homes.
The church may moan about an offence to family tradition, but given its casual readiness to marry the absurdly young, it is hardly an ideal matrimonial counsellor.
As for its complaint that gay marriage "raises the sort of problems that no one has had to address before", it should try joining the 21st century.
The church has been on the reactionary side in almost every political and social reform of the past two centuries.
It opposed popular enfranchisement, secular schooling, easier divorce and legalised homosexuality. It continues to defy the law on gender equality in respect of bishops.
This may be lovably fuddy-duddy to some, but the claim to parliamentary and legal privilege is an anachronism.
The government is proposing no more than to remove what in secular and civil terms is a terminological distinction between men and women.
If the church wants to make this a Thomas Becket issue, that is its affair.
The issue should not condition the action of government.
The Anglican church emerges from this row as absurdly pedantic. It wants to sustain an antique religious bond to a modern democratic state, with the outrageous claim that this should be a partnership of equals.
The days when bishops could deny the franchise to Irish Catholics or demand a veto over the 1944 Education Act are over.
The government has honestly tried to meet theological objections to "marrying" gay couples through exemption.
The church may fear a quarrel with the human rights lobby, but that is not the state's business.
The only alternative is to strip the church of its special licence to register weddings altogether, and have done with "by law established".
The church has kept its 16th-century status for years by ducking and weaving whenever the going gets rough.
It will presumably do so again.
The government should take at face value the bishops' claim that gay marriage "snips the thread" between church and state, and toss establishment into the bin.