Divorce

When I was a kid, I hoped and prayed that my parents would split. There was only peace in the house when my father was at work, and when he was home there were either rows or long periods of silence where we either left the house or were too afraid to speak. In those days people did marry in haste and repent at length and divorce was very uncommon. So they stayed together, fighting and regretting until at the first opportunity My sister and I left home, and not long afterwards my younger brother die

Since then divorce has become much more straightforward and indeed common, with something in the region of half of all marriages ending within not too many years of that special day. As a result of this, many choose not to wed in the first place and now we have single parents as more of a norm than those who are married. Consequently many children have missing role models and this is having a profound effect on their behaviour and the structure of society as a whole.

So why do so many relationships break down? In my view, much of what we are and how we behave has a biological explanation. We are products of both biological and cultural evolution, and roles of men and women have developed over thousands of generations. I know that I am politically incorrect in my attitudes but I do like to speak my mind, and I have always believed that men and women are different. The failure of society at large to accept this, has led to a situation where the roles of men and women hardly exists as separate entities, and this has happened faster than we are able to cope.

Women's liberation is all very well but it has come at a cost. Women are now the achievers, the national curriculum favours girls, as do the systems of assessment. Women are routinely the subjects of positive discrimination, in the workplace and recently in Parliament, where seats are limited to those with two X chromosomes. Many women are becoming like men in their attitudes and ways of thinking and living, and putting homosexuality aside, most men don't want to live with another man. Sisters doing it for themselves is destroying the natural order of things and producing a vast number of young men, who have nothing to draw on other than their natural biological urges. Education has failed them, society has failed them and worse, women have failed them so what are they to do?

My parents stayed together until my father died. I am not saying that they made the right choice, both might have been better off apart but then, society was far more stable, one partner could provide for a family and a mother could devote her time to looking after her children. There was full employment and equality of opportunity of sorts. I suspect that people's horizons were narrower, but I also believe that people were happier.