In our world of rampant individualisation, relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other.

Now people are worried not about the prospects of buying new things, but about how to pay for the things they bought yesterday, a year ago or years before. It is, as Americans like to say, "a wholly different kind of ball-game".

In our world of rampant individualisation, relationships are mixed blessings. They vacillate between a sweet dream and a nightmare, and there is no telling when one turns into the other.

We already have - thanks to technology, development, skills, the efficiency of our work - enough resources to satisfy all human needs. But we don't have enough resources, and we are unlikely ever to have, to satisfy human greed.

The art of walking on quicksand is still beyond me. What I learned is only how difficult this art is to master and how hard people need to struggle to learn it.

Once upon a time, when I was young, people saw a wedding as an event that determined the rest of their life. For a rising number of people today, it is quite normal to "try and err", marry, divorce, marry again.

Human attention tends to be focused on the satisfactions relationships are hoped to bring, precisely because somehow they have not been truly satisfactory. And if they do satisfy, the price of this satisfaction has often been found to be unacceptable.