One has to be able to withdraw honourably from a relationship, as jacqui has done; yet there has also to be a bias towards trying to make a relationship work, where this is doable. The question for me is: Where should this bias come from?

In the past this came from the law, or from the church, or from (local) societal mores. All three of the above when applied absolutely can have terrible extremes, once broken: Excommunication, a reduced legal/financial status, or ostracism from society. So a strong external bias towards staying together can lead to tragedy, suppression of feelings and infidelity has therefore to be covert.

So to avoid such extremes it would appear that the bias needs to come from somewhere else. From within, perhaps? A strong personal sense of moral responsibility towards the partner/family could do it, but how do you instil such sense of responsibility without using external threat of punishment? Today there is nothing that even attempts to teach that, except for a few isolated cases of parents here and there, in pitifully small numbers. And perhaps it was always so, people depended on church or law or society as the external threat, and few taught their children morality "in absolute", as it were.

If we all had that inner sense of moral responsibility, infidelity would all but disappear, I believe. Instead there would be an inner struggle between responsibility and interest, one or the other would win, and you either stay together or choose an honourable dissolution.

And pigs will fly. Because the world we live in does not promote such morality - indeed, quite the opposite. It's not just the effects of Thatcherism, me-first, I'm-all-right-Jack, this has always been so. Few of us can rise above self-interest, eating-the-pie-and-having-it-whole, when cornered by such inner conflicts.

And so, the best we can hope for in such an imperfect world is that we can find someone to love who has enough honesty and that this honesty will not be tested too vigorously by circumstances.