I can hardly credit it, but in the very same week two of my mates have both been ditched by their girlfriends. Dare I believe they were a rotten shag, or what?

Sometimes I wonder if women these days have forgotten 1. how important they are to us, and 2. how pathetic we are at thanking them for it ….. and no thanks to the male ego for getting way out of line during the fourth 7-year cycle beginning around age 21, methinks.

Why are women so important? Forget the shagging, I reckon it’s because they help us to become what we’re capable of becoming. As the wise man pointed out, ‘a man’s reach has to exceed his grasp’, and the fact that sometimes we reach it and hold on to it is the result of having that special female alongside.

Prior to the outbreak of ‘women’s lib’ in the 1970’s, thanks to writers like Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer (with her amazing ‘The Female Eunuch’), an unwillingness to commit to a relationship – one which in all probability would lead to marriage – was perceived as a male issue. Guys newly released from the strictures of parental control were reluctant to get ‘tied down’ with what for most of them meant mortgages, monogamous sex and the subsequent ‘patter of tiny feet’.

This fear remains in the early twenties, but what’s changed is that when the fifth 7-year cycle begins around age 28, and guys begin to see life from a different perspective, they’re now not as firmly in the driving seat as in the past. We seem to have reached a stage when the male gender is ready to commit but the females are having second thoughts.

In fact for some of them – those who married early in their late teens or early twenties – they’re now looking for a divorce and a re-think of what commitment to a male is all about.

And maybe this unwillingness to commit reflects a deeper human problem; our growing inability to handle time. Perhaps the effect of ‘women’s lib’ as a source of social change has now run its course and technology and genetics are now ‘calling the shots’ on how to live.

Most people for either gender seem to bemoan the current pace of life and the impotence they feel to ‘slow it down’. But what does this complaint actually reflect? That we’re attempting to achieve too much? That we’re afraid we’re ‘missing out’ on what we suspect might be going-on on the other side of the hill? That we don’t have the time to ‘dig deep’, at least enough to find out how others really tick below the surface? Does commitment imply taking up too much of our precious time?

And if so … where on earth do we think that we’re heading?