Children have the right to grow up in a family with a father and mother capable of creating a suitable environment for the child's development and emotional maturity. Today marriage and the family are in crisis. We now live in a culture of the temporary, in which more and more people are simply giving up on marriage as a public commitment.

Marriage was contrived for ordinary people, for people who are capable of neither great love nor great friendship, which is to say, for most people, but also for those exceptionally rare ones who are capable of love as well as of friendship.

It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.

Many brief follies-that is what you call love. And your marriage puts an end to many brief follies, with a single long stupidity.

Where does the family start? It starts with a young man falling in love with a girl - no superior alternative has yet been found.

Experts on romance say for a happy marriage there has to be more than a passionate love. For a lasting union, they insist, there must be a genuine liking for each other. Which, in my book, is a good definition for friendship.