I often run into young women who, seeing me as a safe confessional space, tell me about the travails of finding a 'good man.' They have really tried hard, using dating apps, social gatherings and the workplace as their go-to dating-pool environment. Which is fair enough.

But often as not, and it's usually not, they run into difficulties at the get-go. The usual complaints are not hard to guess at. The men are interested in 'only one thing', they are disrespectful, have poor conversation skills or simply talk about themselves the whole night-through, and are quite open about using pornography, recreational drugs and the like. They stare at their phones for want of anything to say.

If this seems like an odd way to go about a first date then you would have a good point. It's very strange, so strange and so obviously counter-productive that something broader, perhaps more insidious is at work.

Enter modern popular culture, allied with social media and an unfettered internet. A diet of reality TV, conspiracy theories and a crumbling values system is producing the very harvest that was predicted by some social scientists and all religious commentators.

It is hard to put the genie back in the bottle, is it not? It is worth trying, though it will probably take a disaster of one sort of another for things to be righted, even a little. No-one wishes for that, though come it may.