Category Archives: Intimacy and commitment

Kvinde, glem din krop

Mette Rodgers interviewed me about feminism and the ‘gender wars’ for the Danish newspaper Weekendavisen:

Feminism has a woman problem

As the gender-identity wars reached fever-pitch, Rosie Duffield, Labour MP for Canterbury, accused her party of having ‘a woman problem’. Ever since Duffield first tentatively raised her head above the parapet to suggest that the common noun for ‘individuals with a cervix’ is, in fact, ‘women’, she has been subjected to outright hostility and ostracism. The […]

Another cancelled Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day. The one day in the year dedicated to thanking the millions of women who have dedicated their bodies, hearts and souls to raising a new generation. It’s a bloody, smelly and often thankless task, which is (of course) intensely emotionally fulfilling, but frankly knackering. A ritual show of appreciation on one day a […]

Divorcing marriage from morality

‘It is like a hydra: you cut off one head and get rid of a boring partner but inherit 26 new problems, your new partner’s children, family and so on.’ In such graphically grim terms did Sir Paul Coleridge, a senior High Court judge, launch a new campaign to promote marriage. Sir Paul told The Times (London) that he […]

Are we addicted to love?

Theories of intimate relationships in the modern world view passionate love as a problem to be managed. How did people meet each other before the world got online? A survey by the dating service Parship.co.uk at the beginning of 2006 claimed that two-thirds of the single people using a dating service in 2005 turned to […]

Reader, I disparaged him

What are women like? One minute they are voting for the predictable romantic hero Mr Darcy as their dream date, in a publicity poll for the women-only award, the Orange Prize for Fiction. The next, they are producing books about practical marriage management, arguing that the secret of a professional woman’s successful marriage is to […]

An anti-independence culture

Okay, I love my mum’s Sunday dinners. But that never seemed like a reason not to learn to cook my own. The nice thing about adulthood is that you no longer have to wait for your parents to dole out treats. Or maybe I’m just weird. Two headline-grabbing surveys reported on 21 March 2002 painted […]

Gay is the new straight

Two gay couples came as close as they could to getting married in the UK this week, by signing the London Partnerships Register. The register is the latest initiative taken by London mayor Ken Livingstone, and while it does not have the same legal status as marriage, it effectively gives the state’s blessing to homosexual […]

Why do we love Big Brother?

Fifty-two years on from the publication of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘Big Brother’ is best known as a cult TV programme in which a group of volunteers have their every move and word broadcast to the nation 24 hours a day. We do not live in a police state – far from it. People are not […]

Forever – or a day?

‘Love and marriage, love and marriage/Go together like a horse and carriage’…. Not any more they don’t. The numbers of people getting married keeps on falling. In 1999, there were 263,515 marriages, and over half as many divorces (144,241) (1). The UK Office for Statistics’ 2000 edition of Social Trends reveals that approximately 25 percent of unmarried […]