So you still get on with your ex-partners but is it wise to invite

Inviting all your exes along to the greatest event in a girl's life would seems to be the final push to knock the whole shebang over the edge with a resounding crash. Why would you want individuals who have betrayed you, whom you've betrayed, who have seen you throw up in or be stuck on the loo, squeeze spots, wax your bikini line, all gathered round you on the very day you're trying to convince everyone you're actually a beaut-iful fairy princess swathed in white?

According to Jane Moore - who is soon to publish her second novel, The Ex-Files, about a couple who invite their ex-partners to their glamorous wedding in the south of France - inviting former beaus to your nuptials is becoming increasingly common.

"The idea came to me from a piece I'd read in Nigel Dempster's column," Moore says. "It was about the actress Natasha McElhone, who had just got married in the south of France that weekend, and there were four of her ex-boyfriends in attendance. I just thought - brave woman! And what a good basis for a book."

A week before Fay heads off for her wedding, she meets a handsome- but-not-quite-so-dull man in a bar, takes him home for some fun but throws him out before she does anything too naughty with him. Then, when she is introduced to her fiance's brother for the first time in France, whaddya know - it's the guy in the bar. Huge relationship crises follow as the various exes whirl around, causing mayhem and making a bad situation worse. It's a perfect comic template but Moore has a serious point to make, too.

"I think we tend to look on exes these days very much as unfinished business," she says. "We think of marriage as the final thing, the final declaration, and that makes a lot of people panic about whether they're making the right decision, that maybe it should have been so-and-so, what if, and so on. We tend to live in a very soundbite society."

She continues: "You know, if a TV programme doesn't get the ratings then it's off. It's a very pressured, hothouse kind of society and that tendency has been repeated in relationships - if it's not working, we knock it on the head.

"Then we end up taking bits out of lots of different relationships, not giving any one relationship the time to let it develop into something more. So nothing reaches its natural conclusion and you wonder if you should have given something in the past more time than you did."

It's a tendency that writer Tim Lott, author of The Separation, a painful account of the breakdown of his marriage, calls a "consumer culture" aspect to relationships. "You trade in one when you have used it up and get a new one," he says. The result is that the current generation of twenty and thirtysomethings has the highest proportion of exes than any other.

When the BBC series Coupling was bought by American network NBC last summer, its executive producer, Beryl Vertue, who based the series on her daughter and son-in-law and their group of friends, said: "It's about them looking at themselves and seeing how, although they became a new couple, they still had all these friends around. There were a lot of exes in the congregation and yet they were all really, really good friends."

Novels, too, have flourished under this theme. In addition to Moore and Lott, Hanif Kureishi and Kathryn Flett have told stories about their exes and Maggie O'Farrell published a novel last year called My Lover's Lover, about a woman haunted by the ghostly presence of her boyfriend's ex-girlfriend. It conjures up images of those famous literary ex-wives in Jane Eyre and Rebecca.

Those published tales however have largely been about the "bad" exes - and we all know about those. From the avenging woman who damages her husband's car, chops up his clothes, stalks the new woman in his life, to the wronged wives who bare all, as Margaret Cook did when husband Robin left her or the ex-girlfriends who can't resist a dig at their replacement, like Gwyneth Paltrow who said that ex- lover Ben Affleck's new fiancee Jennifer Lopez wasn't in his league.

You have to feel for Gwynnie - she was also maid of honour at Madonna's wedding, where her ex, Brad Pitt, was in attendance with new wife Jennifer Aniston - now, I wonder what the seating arrangements were at that do.

Women aren't alone in this, however - men can be just as bad. Carl Friedan, ex-husband of Betty, author of the feminist bible The Feminine Mystique, publicly called her "violent" with a "streak of lunacy" on the internet, and the Friends Reunited website has had problems with men and women posting details of their philandering partners' behaviour, along with other private information, online. The Friends Reunited phenomenon of putting people back in touch with former childhood sweethearts who then leave their married partners has been such that a West End play starring Gillian Anderson devoted itself to the subject.

But these are the bad ex stories. And for every bad ex, there's a good one. Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew. Mick and Jerry. Liz and Hugh.

"You've got Hugh Grant as the perfect ex," says Moore. "He's nice, friendly, dependable, reliable. Then you've got James Hewitt, the nightmare ex, making money out of your relationship. The thing about exes is you never know how they're going to behave until they become one."

With a good ex, you get the kind of couples who have somehow managed to stay friends through it all, through the divorces and the betrayals and the petty bitterness, prompting what commentator Shane Watson calls "a sexy ex revival."

These are relationships we find appealing because we're "seduced by [their] illicitness," Watson argues. While the former lovers retain an air of not being able to move on, which isn't so good, there is a "suggestion of blurred boundaries, of shared intimacies despite their public separation".

Are Liz and Hugh just enjoying an innocent, friendly skiing holiday, or is there something else going on? Will Sarah and Andy ever get back together? And how often do Mick and Jerry nip through the door joining their two homes for a little "time alone"?

There is a pleasing confusion right now about exactly where we place exes in our lives, as Moore's latest novel demonstrates. Those "blurred boundaries" mean that the door is never quite shut - in Moore's novel female protagonist Fay gets briefly entangled with ex- lover Nat just before her wedding, for instance - and that people can't control things the way they want to.

"I didn't want to write a kind of they-got-married-and-lived- happily-ever-after kind of book," Moore says. "I wanted to reflect how difficult modern relationships could be, and how complex."

So there you have it. The must-have accessory for all fashionable folk about to walk up the aisle: the ex. Or perhaps not.

I ask Moore one last question - when she got married in May last year, did she and her husband-to-be also invite their exes to the wedding?

"There were no exes at my wedding at all," she laughs. "If we'd invited all his exes there'd have been no room for any other guests!"

The Ex-Files by Jane Moore is published by Orion Books on February 6 at (pounds) 9.99

WEDDINGS have always struck me as events teetering on the brink of disaster. Being super-careful not to seat Auntie May next to Auntie Sue because one nicked the other's boyfriend 50 years ago and they're still not speaking to each other; finding out too late that the best man once had a drunken, illicit fling with the matron of honour while she was dating her present husband and that's why she doesn't want to have the first dance with him; agonising for months beforehand that the best man's speech might be too truthful or revelatory. Even the United Nations would balk at matrimony.

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