Commitment should be based on mutual needs rather than romantic love. Those are the views of Professor Carol Smart of Leeds University. She is right that the pendulum is swinging back for a number of reasons, but not as she describes. The truth is that despite our demand for sex-obsessed media, the British have always been rather conservative in practice, and are becoming more so.
Surveys show that most people are monogamous and most say that adultery is wrong.
But romantic love is still very much alive, and so is conventional marriage. Half of all wedding vows last a lifetime and divorce rates fell last year. These are no freak statistics. It was obvious that the steep rise in divorce rates would end - or we would all be divorced before we even got married. The graph has been flattening out for years.