Realising that we are rather flawed, and our partner is too, is of huge benefit to a couple in increasing the amount of tolerance and generosity in circulation.

People, we feel, only turn to practical considerations when all else has failed (‘I couldn’t find love, I had to settle for convenience’)

There have perhaps always been – when you start adding incidents up – rather a lot of things about you that your partner seems keen to change.

It’s very touching that we live in a world where we have learned to be so kind to children: it would be even nicer if we learned to be a little more generous towards the childlike parts of one another.

We should learn from the art of diplomacy, the discipline of not necessarily always spelling out what one thinks and not doing what one wants, in the service of greater, more strategic ends. We should keep in mind the contradictory, sentimental and hormonal forces which constantly pull us in a hundred crazed and inconclusive directions.

Irrational blame is at heart just a symptom of an intensity of investment in another person. We attack because we have richly entangled our deepest dreams and anxieties with our lover. It is because we are so very close to them that they draw us into very private zones of turbulence and distress – from which absolutely everyone else is excluded.

Our strongest cultural voices have – to our huge cost – set us up with the wrong expectations. They’ve highlighted emotions that don’t tell us very much that is useful about how to make relationships work, while drawing attention away from others that offer more constructive guidance.

The idea of being ‘post-Romantic’ shouldn’t imply cynicism, that one has abandoned the hope of relationships ever working out well. The post-Romantic attitude is just as ambitious about good relationships, but it has a very different sense of how to honour the hopes.

is: ‘Deep inside, I remain an infant, and right now I need you to be my parent. I need you correctly to guess what is truly ailing me, as people did when I was a baby, when my ideas of love were first formed.’