METHINKS I WAS ENAMOURED OF AN ASS

Marriages, they say, are made in heaven, though if this is the case there is an awful lot of twiddling with the raw materials that goes on here on earth, much of which, it has to be said, is unsuccessful.

I should at this point trot out one or two of statistics produced by those estimable people at the National Statistics Office for the benefit of columnists, bloggers and political parties. But being not so much lazy as short of time I think we can all take the point as read.

Simply put it is this: that a very large number of marriages fail and those failures cost us dearly, whether we are talking about emotional loss, financial loss, loss to the stability of society, loss to a child’s self-esteem and education, health, happiness and so on . Show me a broken marriage and, in most cases, I’ll show you an expensive tragedy.

Yet despite the vast scale - something like 40 per cent of first marriages end in divorce - we take little or no action to improve this state of affairs. In many cases love seems literally to be blind and unions are entered into that are manifestly unsuitable. When love departs, as love is wont to do, there is nothing left to hold the matrimonial edifice together.

Like one of those Shakespearean farces where the juice of something sprinkled in someone’s eyes is enough to make them keel over at the appearance of the most bestial of characters, so far too many people seem to marry whoever is closest at hand when the hitching time comes.

‘Methinks I was enamoured of an ass’ says Titania when she wakes. Alas, too many girls wake from the dreamy longings of ‘when, when, when?’ to find themselves married to arses and spending the rest of the time before the divorce asking themselves, ‘why, why, why?’

I should perhaps at this point exclude myself, my friends and my family most of whom have been freakishly successful in finding enduring relationships. But as my father had three wives and and my mother two husbands, I feel that a generation of matrimonial permanence is required.

Maybe I have been lucky, but my parents weren’t and nor are so many of the young lovelies that we see sweeping through the streets on a Saturday afternoon, dressed in improbable meringue in the back seat of some bizarre and unsuitable means of locomotion. Still most of us have been there: Elder Daughter arrived at her wedding in a boat.

I had the notion once that so great must be the cost of broken marriages to the National Health Service that the Government should institute a free computer dating service in every surgery, backed up with psychological profiling and parental checks.

In the old days, both boys and girls had suitors lined up for them by parents interested in forming financial or social liaisons with other parents. The young were pawns in such arrangements, but whether the heartbreak was any greater then than now, I doubt very much.

Then there is that famous painting of a young woman faced by a comfortably off but obviously dull young man of the Reverend Collins variety while through the window behind her we see an impoverished, but no doubt interesting bohemian character vacating the premises. The painting carries the explanatory title ‘Torn’ and the sub-title - for those of duller intelligence - ‘What Should She Do?'

I suppose it rather depends on the number of years she expects to live. If she is consumptive then she should elope with the gypsy. If she has the constitution of an ox, then she should marry Mr Collins and make the best of it. After all, the world is not exactly populated with sage, wise and beautiful Mr D’Arcy’s.

Indeed one could make an interesting story by bringing together Lizzie and her sister in old age and comparing notes, as it were. The manipulative Collins almost certainly would have become a bishop, while the upright Mr D’Arcy, I feel, would have come to a sticky end. For all we know, Lizzie might have ended up with the gardener.

While the practice of arranging weddings may still thrive in many cultures, we modern Bennets, have given up trying to marry off our daughters teLling them to do the job themselves.

Many subsequently turn to dating agencies or those small ads to be found in every paper or magazine nowadays. My favourites are those in the London Review of Books. For instance, I love the spirit of this woman who has clearly had problems with agencies:

Getting laid through match.com isn’t as easy as the adverts make it out to be. I’m hoping for better pickings from this column. Woman 87. Box xxx

or the following extravagant example of the genre:

I’ve spent my adult life fabricating reciprocal feelings from others and I don’t intend to stop now, nor at any other London Review Bookshop event I’m summarily ejected from. Yes, once the history section had emptied and we were left alone his voice said ‘I’m not interested,’ but his eyes very clearly stated ‘please follow me home and observe me from the shrubs in the park opposite until squirrels start to burrow into your legs, believing you to be a tree,’ Woman, 43. Reading between the lines even when the lines aren’t actually there.

She ends with the stern injunction: Don’t pretend you don’t love me. Box xxx.

But for she realism I go for this waspish example:

Most partners cite the importance of having a loved one who will listen to and understand them. I’m here to debunk this theory. The more you listen to your loved one, the more you will realise they talk crap, whine a lot and make unreasonable demands regarding holidays together (since when is a car ferry better than a plane, since when is a museum tour stop better than drunken evenings talking to oiled up Italians on a beach?) I’d like to state here and now that anyone responding to this advert and winding up in an emotional (or, even better, purely sexual and frequently tawdry) relationship with me will never be listened to at all. That way we can carry on the pretence of enjoying each other’s company for many an ignorant year. No lawyers. Woman 38. Box xxx