Divorce, actually

So: what should not have happened, has. My marriage, made 'till death us do part', is ending after 29 years. Why? I genuinely don't know. 'How can I guess at the moods that rule the mind of a woman?' asks Valmont of Mme de Tourvel in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, still an eminently wise book.

'That woman devastates me. I don't understand her. I have a hundred proofs of her love. At the same time, she sends me a thousand of her aversion.' So does my wife, whom at some helpless level I still love and who, in the tumult of her soul, may still love me. But her life has moved on and left me behind.

I am, aha, over 50. Welcome to the brittle, brilliant world of being single again! Welcome to Ladies Day at Ascot, to the War and Peace Ball, to nights danced away, to dazzling summer flirtations, to a thousand heated hours in bed! Hello to Cosmo life in the fast lane and to the glamorous excitements of being single, goodbye to boring, stay-at-home, fuddy-duddy, married non-existence. Hello, above all, to the dizzying possibility of true love again, to that blinding, head-spinning glance of chance across a room or down a train - in which regard would the blonde with the shoulder-length hair on the Piccadilly Line to Earls Court, 8.15pm on Tuesday 16 March, white scarf, grey suit, unexpected green shoes and haunting, soulful gaze, please urgently get in touch for early dinner with the man (me) with the dog, c/o the editor of ES?

But I forget. The point of being single, as Cosmo now proclaims it, is to stay that way.

Last time I was single, in the early Seventies, men thought naively that the joy of life was to meet their Juliet or Laura and spend 50 years in her arms. But no. I read, mostly from women who have spent the past two decades fighting men rather than relating to them, that singledom is superior. Marriage is for mugs, or certainly for bores. It is for mugs not just because the Chancellor of the Exchequer has made it so, and even more the vengeful, greedy and emotionally crippled lawyers who spit and trample on true feeling in the London Divorce Court in High Holborn, the shamefully named 'Family Division' - abandon all hope, you who enter! Marriage is for mugs because the propaganda says it is. It is, shouts Cosmo and the mags, life-denying and impossibly monogamous for men. It is slavery for women. It is (we're told) an absurd middle-class fantasy for both sexes, based on delusions of roses round the cottage door and 'Oh darling,' he choked, 'I love you more than anything on earth. Will you marry me?'

Germaine Greer fancies she has proved for her sex that the roles of wife and mother are at the expense of being a woman, not its fulfilment. She has proved that women are victims in a marriage and that marriage is not security, but surrender. Something that forces women to 'serve, love and obey' as Kate proclaims in The Taming of the Shrew, as she finally caves in to Petruchio.

Greer and feminists far less articulate than she have plunged a generation into cynicism. 'If independence is necessary [for] freedom, women must not marry,' she orders. To be single, in short, is to be truly free. Yet I'm afraid I believe very little of this singles stuff.

I want to marry again. Not because I am a slavemaster, though it hurts that I have come a cropper with the lady of my life. (And it is a problem that the women I most desire are already married themselves.) I want to remarry because I am certain that the joys of life, shared in an ideal partnership, are doubled or trebled.

I believe in the mingling of bodies and the mingling of souls, as Victorians called it. I believe in the blessings of children and the structure of families (for all the dud examples).

Love, at its best, is passion. I am convinced that deep and intense feeling is life's highest reward in our brief inexplicable passage through this world. Marriage presents intense feeling in all forms: from passion at its outset through long and mature companionship (with children) in the middle, to resolution at the end. Far better to do all that with someone with whom one feels alike and feels deeply than to do it alone.

Though passion can and does flourish outside marriage, I believe that it is best kept and deepened inside the commitment of marriage.

Sceptics will howl that there goes another fool in love with love, that all this is romantic claptrap and, worse than that, a classic error. The error is to believe that 'love' can even start to bear the burdens of hope and expectation that the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries have piled high upon it.

The romantic heaven in which swoon Posh and Becks is the dreamland built around Werther and Charlotte 200 years ago. Since then, epic love has been credited by Hollywood and the tabloids to Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Juan and Eva Peron, John Lennon and Yoko Ono and (this is interesting) to Margaret and Denis Thatcher and among 1,000 more. These loves were allegedly pure, deep and long - not just heartstopping passion but 'so long as ye both shall live'. Small surprise then, given the way The Sun and Hollywood treats them, that so few believe that 'lurv' and marriage can deliver the goods.

I was married for 29 years. How was it for me? Simply, my wife made my life larger. She was everything that I was not. No accident. When lovers 'admire' the other person, they admire what they themselves lack. When Chekhov's Uncle Vanya raves about Elena's grace and beauty, it is because he is a drunken ugly clod.

Many theories exist about marriage, starting from the narcissistic thought that we merely marry ourselves in the other sex. But the one that works for me is that my wife added a fourth and fifth dimension to my life. Not just that, we felt and thought intensely and in many ways were one.

Strange, really. She came to me as one of life's great chances. A chum saw her in Berkeley Square and said: 'You're Ann from California, aren't you?

When I then met her at a dinner, I arrived late on a high tide of champagne and strawberries from Wimbledon, behaved brutishly and aroused a combination of love and hate that has probably never gone away.

But, we were so good for each other, or as good as humanity allows.

Above all, we shared, in a way which singles can never know. We shared music, writing (we both love history), travel and favourite places from Venice and Vienna to our house on Sanibel Island, Florida. We even shared the summer sports my wife did not overcare for, such as tennis, swimming and cricket.

And we shared fortune and misfortune. If she was depressed or suffered pain, as too often, it surely eased with husband, son and dog around, however inadequate to the task we were. Can it possibly be so rich outside a marriage?

These Victorian values, though, are not those of Cosmo and its like. Women have been freed from the imprisonment of marriage, they scream, to enjoy corporate success and climb the giddy ladder, to buy fine clothes and take lavish holidays. Passion - in so far as the word ever appears - is something to be grafted on to the liberated life via Saturday night, shopping, the nightclub, the restaurants of Chelsea and Tate Modern. This is the 'complete life', the ideology of female 'liberation', the best to be had from our 70-year blink in the eternal darkness.

For me, I want all that. But I want much more. As I see it, if one thing is proved in the 33 years since Germaine Greer wrote The Female Eunuch, it is that a life dedicated to corporate success - especially one kept single to achieve it - is life with a very definite ceiling to experience. Worse than that, the relentless all-hours pressure of the company and the career has proved too often to destroy love in women and men and to create stress, depression, self-absorption and thus misery.

Somebody has to be right here, someone wrong. The truth seems to me to be this. Marriage is a difficult state - especially if launched on infatuation and then shipwrecked on hopeless romantic dreams. But so, even more so, is singledom.

Singledom isn't brilliant. Those who shout it from the mags seem to me to parade the very real difference between confidence and bravura.

Turn back the clock, give me a choice between reliving the first bright flush of youth and the best years of marriage? Marriage was far, far better. My divorcing wife may write in to disagree, but I hope not; she stayed with me nearly three decades. Yes, there's fun unlimited now that I'm that statistical rarity, a single man over 50, the alleged key to successful dinners, a wanted chap on weekends. But thanks: I'm looking for a wife.