The fortunes of marriage go up and down, not just from era to era, but at different stages in people’s lives. Teenage children are dead against it they have seen their bickering parents. In their twenties they are still anti-marriage but rather like living together, while those left on the shelf in their middle thirties are often desperate to get married and when they make it they go to the altar as starry-eyed as Barbara Cartland heroes and heroines.

Dr Dominian’s book Marriage, Faith and Love is an analysis of the modern condition of marriage. He divides it into three phases – the first years, usually childless, running from the wedding to the late twenties or early thirties; a middle phase from thirty to fifty; and a third from