If I were American, I would say that I need to share this with you – but being Maltese, I will just tell you that this is something I came across when reading a text published in the 1960s, and it struck me as being particularly apposite. So I am going to quote it, and perhaps you will have something to think about for a few minutes.

“Many girls will admit that they want to get married because they do not want to work any longer. They harbour dreams of being taken care of for the rest of their lives without worry, with just enough furnishing, to do little housework, interesting downtown shopping trips, happy children, and nice neighbours. The dream of a husband seems somehow less important but in the fantasies of girls about marriage, it usually concerns a man who has the strength of an indestructible, reliable, powerful father, and the gentleness, givingness, and self-sacrificing love of a good mother. Young men give as their reason for wanting to marry very often the desire to have a motherly woman in the house, and regular sex just for the asking without trouble and bother … In fact, what is supposed to secure maturity and independence is in reality a concealed hope to secure dependency, to prolong the child-parent relationship with the privileges of being a child, and with as little as possible of its limitations.”

– Oscar Sternbach, Sex Without Love and Marriage Without Responsibility – an address presented at the 38th Annual Conference of The Child Study Association of America, 12 March 1962, New York City

It seems to me that this brief paragraph describes well the immaturity with which so many people – women far more than men – make the decision to marry. It is not so much the Peter Pan syndrome, as the Wendy syndrome. Forty years after that was written, the availability of sex to single men is somewhat different; it practically comes knocking on their door, and it is the married men who do not have it on tap.

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Men on the whole have a better awareness of the fact that it is necessary to be a full human being before taking the momentous decision to marry, and this makes them far more picky in their search for the ‘right woman’. Women interpret this as fear of commitment, but they should have noticed by now that independent women with a life of their own view their relationships with men in the same way.

Whether you are a man or a woman, when your choice of life-partner is not shaped, however subconsciously, by your desire for a meal-ticket for life, you tend to be more wary. I respect this caution, and see it as wisdom. If there were fewer women driven by the wish for a big white wedding, a real-life dolls’ house and babies, there would be fewer marital catastrophes.

I am not one who thinks that men fear commitment – individual men or men in general. After all, I have noticed that when these ‘men who fear commitment’ fall in love, they really fall in love, and they make the decision to marry that ‘right one’, when they finally find her, and if they ever do, in a snap instant.

Of course, it is hurtful to the woman who has spent the preceding five years with him moaning about his unwillingness ‘to commit’. But an intelligent woman, and moreover one who is not blinded by her need for a husband to save her from the business of living, should be able to realise that the man who ‘doesn’t commit’ is just a man who is marking time until he falls in love – not with her, but with ‘the one’.

Selfish? No, just clever. That is why you get so many long-term bachelors, and so many men who have been non-committal in drearily prolonged relationships, surprising everyone by meeting and marrying somebody unknown and unexpected within a few short months.

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Women continued to be raised to find ‘someone to look after them’ for the next couple of generations after Dr Sternbach delivered that address. There are those who continue to claim that it is human nature for women to want to be taken care of, but it is not. Everyone wants to be taken care of to a certain extent, men and women, because it is a lot easier than taking on responsibility for your own life. But this temptation to take the easy way out, even when it is possible, is in conflict with the fundamental human drive towards growth, freedom and development of the self.

In other places and other times, women did not expect men to look after them. They knew they had to look after themselves. Indeed, the ones who were born into independent financial means more often than not cherished their independence so fiercely that they rightly saw marriage as being detrimental to their freedom in making their own decisions. Women who were independently wealthy in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries lost, not gained, through marriage.

Despite the changes that have taken place over the last 100 years, and the possibilities that have been thrown wide open to women to manage their own lives, many of them are encouraged still by society and by their mothers to find someone who will look after them because it is seen as the easier option, a cop-out, and a lucky break.

I have noticed that men rarely encourage their daughters in the direction of clinging dependency on husbands, perhaps because they resent the dependency of their own wives, and do not want their loved daughter to be the object of such resentment from her husband, or even because what they see as suitable treatment for their wives (living on pocket-money, having to ask permission for everything), they could never bear to have their daughter endure.

The women who seem to be in so much of a hurry to see their girls married off and ‘settled down’, who take an almost prurient interest in their adolescent relationships and act as if a teenage flirtation of a few months is the first step to 60 years of married life, think that they are doing their child a favour. They think they are setting her up in comfort for life.

Yet so often, these women are miserably unhappy with their own lives of dependency. So why do they want the same for their daughters? Perhaps they reason that what is wrong with their life is their husband, that if they had married another man, or if their husband would change, then they would not be so unhappy and depressed.

They fail to link their unhappiness and depression with its real cause: their lack of any identity or suitable occupation; their failure to find any form of positive, productive distraction outside the four walls of the home.

They do not attribute their malaise, which has them constantly complaining about their life, to the fact that for the past 20 years or so they have focused their entire being on their husband and children, demanding that these emotionally burdened individuals be the sole source of their happiness and entertainment. The intelligent ones, though, see the situation for what it is, and they raise their daughters differently.

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Over the past few days, this subject has come up fairly frequently in conversation, mainly because of the bank advertisement that has a little girl saying: “When I grow up I want the longest veil”, while her brother states his ambition for the largest car, and their mother, infantilised in a box next to her children, begs her husband, to whom the advertisement is addressed, to provide for her future, presumably in case he pops his clogs prematurely and she – a healthy, smart woman in her 30s - will be left to starve on a street corner.

You will always find one or two people at the table, and I am afraid they are usually men over 45, who say that nobody is forcing women to want this kind of life, that it is women who actually want to be dependent on men and who dream about it constantly. Yes, I say, but you have to ask yourself: why do women dream of dependency on men, even when there are no children in the equation, when the average man regards with horror the thought of being dependent on a woman?

It is not nature – after all, I am a woman who regards with horror the idea of being dependent on a man, and like me there are many. The rewards of being able to do our own thing are too great to be abandoned for the small compensation of a life lived in a grown-up version of a play-pen. I was not brought up as a boy; I just was not brought up as a girl, and for that I will be eternally grateful.

There will be more about this hotly-debated subject in Daphne’s column next Sunday